Ser Fiscal Years & Quarters by Company or by System Settings

Short answer

• There is no way today in core Workfront to define different fiscal years/quarters by Company.
• You can define a single set of custom quarters at the system (instance) level via Setup.
• Anything more granular (per Company, per business unit, alternate period schemes) has to be modeled with custom fields and/or Fusion logic, not a native “fiscal calendar” setting.

What Workfront supports natively

1. System‑wide custom quarters

Workfront has a built‑in “Custom Quarters” feature:

• Location: Setup → Project Preferences → Projects → Timelines → Enable Custom Quarters
• There you can:
  • Turn on Enable custom quarters.
  • Define quarter name + start and end dates (e.g. “FY25 Q1”, 2024‑12‑01 → 2025‑02‑28).
  • For Workfront‑only customers: up to 8 custom quarters.
  • For Workfront + Planning customers: up to 100 custom quarters that also show up in Planning timeline views.
    Enable Custom Quarters

Key constraints:

• This setting is global for the whole Workfront instance, not scoped to Company.
  Workfront explicitly treats custom quarters as a system preference, configured only by system admins and not unlockable at group level.
  Configure System‑Wide Project Preferences
• Once enabled, filters like “This Quarter/Next Quarter” and Planning timeline quarters follow that one custom quarter definition.
• System UI “quarters” (e.g. Gantt, some built‑ins) still fundamentally use a single quarter definition; they can’t differ per Company and some areas still assume standard calendar quarters or ignore custom quarters for usage metrics.
  View report usage
  Conversation from #adotcom-workfront-support

2. No per‑Company fiscal calendar

There is no configuration like:

• “Company A fiscal year starts in April, Company B starts in July”
• “Use Company fiscal calendar for this project’s quarters”

All of that is currently out of scope for native settings. Multiple customers (including Adobe internal) handle this through calculated fields instead of core quarter definitions:
Conversation from #genstudio-community
Conversation from #fieldsupport

What you can do with custom fields + reporting

For a customer with a non‑standard fiscal year who can’t change the whole instance to that calendar (e.g. shared instance across business units), the pattern we usually recommend is:

1. Create calculated custom fields like:

   • Fiscal Year
   • Fiscal Quarter
   • Optional: Company Fiscal Year, Company Fiscal Quarter

2. Base those on whatever date matters for the reporting use case:

   • Project: plannedCompletionDate or actualCompletionDate
   • Task: plannedCompletionDate / actualCompletionDate
   • Hours: entryDate
   • Requests: entryDate or actualCompletionDate

3. Use nested IF logic to map date ranges → fiscal quarter/year labels (per your fiscal calendar). This is what’s already widely done to emulate Adobe’s fiscal quarters in shared orgs:
   Conversation from #support-questions (custom quarter example)

4. Then in reports:

   • Group by those calculated fields (e.g. Fiscal Year, Fiscal Quarter).
   • Filter by them instead of “This Quarter / This Year”.

This approach can be made per Company by:

• Either:
  • Creating Company‑specific forms/fields (e.g. Company A Fiscal Quarter).
• Or:
  • Including IF({company}.{name}="X" …) logic inside a single calc field so the same field returns different FY/FQ values depending on which Company the record belongs to.

It’s not as clean as a first‑class fiscal calendar object, but it is fully supported and heavily used internally.

Where Fusion can help

Fusion won’t change the fact that there is only one system‑wide “Custom Quarters” definition, but it does help you simulate per‑Company fiscal calendars more robustly:

Typical pattern:

1. Define a fiscal calendar model for each Company:

   • Either as:
     • A data store / table in Fusion (Company, period start, period end, FY, FQ).
     • Or a simple JSON structure in a variable.

2. Build a Fusion scenario that:

   • Watches for new/updated objects (projects/tasks/hours/etc.).
   • Looks up the object’s companyID.
   • Uses its relevant date (e.g. plannedCompletionDate or entryDate) + the Company’s calendar definition to compute:
     • Fiscal Year
     • Fiscal Quarter
     • Any other custom period codes (4‑4‑5, 13 periods, etc.).
   • Writes these values into custom fields on the object.

3. Report only off those Fusion‑maintained fields, not Workfront’s built‑in quarter constructs.

This gives you:

• Per‑Company fiscal calendars (driven by logic in Fusion, not Workfront core).
• The ability to model non‑quarter period schemes (12 periods, 4‑4‑5, retail weeks, etc.), which Custom Quarters can’t handle at scale and which are limited to 8/100 entries anyway Conversation from #fieldsupport.
• Centralised logic you can tweak without touching lots of text‑mode or calculated fields in the UI.

Fusion functions & date utilities for this are documented here:
Fusion Modules, Functions, Formulas