Future Period Buckets Are Typed Assignment Units, Not a Curve

What a planner means

Future period bucket planning is typing the planned resource or role allocation per assignment in the timescale unit you choose. Oracle: days, weeks, months, quarters, years, or financial periods. Use it when even spread or a named resource curve does not match when the work will actually happen.

Oracle example: 28-day activity, 80 planned hours, weekly buckets 10h / 30h / 15h / 25h instead of 20h each week.

Where you type it:

• Professional: Budgeted or Planned Units and Remaining (Early) Units in the Resource Usage Spreadsheet (Resource Assignments or Activities; Activities must show Open Projects Only).
• EPPM: Planned Units and Remaining Early Units in Spreadsheet View on the Assignments page.

Labor, nonlabor, material, and role assignments. Privilege: Edit Future Periods (EPPM also: Add/Edit Activities Except Relationships). White cells are editable; gray cells are not.

Oracle will not let you type buckets when:

• Duration type is Fixed Units or Fixed Units/Time (only Fixed Duration & Units or Fixed Duration and Units/Time).
• The activity is a milestone.
• The resource or role has no valid worktime in that period (task-dependent and all role assignments use the activity calendar; resource-dependent uses the resource calendar).
• The displayed timescale is smaller than User Preferences → Resource Analysis → Interval for time-distributed resource calculations.

This is not a 21-point resource curve (RSRCCURV). Oracle: you can start from a named curve, then edit buckets; the curve becomes Manual and the named curve is removed. Re-apply a named curve and the typed buckets are lost. See Resource Curves (Not MSP Work Contours).

This is not FINDATES (those are the named financial-period calendar). You may set the timescale to Financial Period and type into those date ranges; the calendar itself is still FINDATES. See Financial Periods Are Named Buckets, Not the Data Date.

This is not Store Period Performance. TASKFIN / TRSRCFIN are posted past actuals. Oracle: after you store period performance you can compare the planned future-period distribution to past-period actuals. See Store Period Performance Posts This Period, Then Zeros It.

Oracle on zeros: a blank bucket is the same as zero. A leading zero is treated as lag and shortens duration (and disappears on refresh). A mid zero is part of the shape. A trailing zero is not stored (disappears on refresh). Negative values are valid only if that assignment’s total Planned or Remaining Early Units is negative.

Oracle: activity costs, including earned value and planned value, use the planned future-period distribution you typed. Edited values are stored in a baseline when you save the current project as a new baseline, and restored with the baseline.

XER

Oracle’s project XER data map TOC has no future-period-bucket table. Do not invent FINTMPL (or any other name) as a bucket %T. PROJECT.fintmpl_id is labeled Financial Period Calendar ID — that is the FINDATES calendar, not typed assignment buckets. See Financial Periods Are Named Buckets, Not the Data Date.

Oracle: you can import and export manual future period buckets in a P6 Professional XER. You lose existing buckets on Update Existing when all of these are true: the XER was created in P6 Professional, the XER has no manual buckets, you update activity resource assignments, and the project already has buckets. In all other XER import cases Oracle says the buckets remain intact.

P6 XML also exports edited future period values. Professional XML import keeps existing buckets only if the project’s financial-period calendar matches the file.

TASKRSRC on the cited map (already listed in XER Tables That Matter for a Viewer or Converter):

Oracle labels them that way. Oracle does not say those columns are the typed buckets. Do not invent that they are.

TASKFIN / TRSRCFIN are past-period actuals, not planned future buckets.

Microsoft Project

Desktop Project has assignment-timephased Work: work distributed over days, weeks, or months on Task Usage / Resource Usage. Work Contour (assignment field) is the contour shape. Microsoft: the assignment duration is split into 10 segments; if you edit the work contour, the setting becomes Contoured.

Oracle’s export mapping (not a Microsoft identity): manual future period buckets import to MSP as a contoured curve. WBS Summary activities export, but their edited bucket values do not — MSP spreads those totals linearly. MPX does not support time-phased data or manual future period buckets.

These are not the same object as P6 future-period buckets or as a P6 21-point curve. Do not claim MPXJ can write a real MPP.

Don't

• Treat typed future-period buckets as a named 21-point RSRCCURV.
• Treat them as FINDATES, or as TASKFIN / TRSRCFIN stored actuals.
• Invent a future-period table name on a project XER parse.
• Invent that target_crv / remain_crv / actual_crv are the typed buckets (Oracle did not say that).
• Map buckets to MSP Work Contour by name, or treat P6 buckets as Microsoft’s 10 segments.
• Drop a Manual curve and call the assignment linear.
• Claim MPX or MPXJ writes these buckets into a real MPP.