Getting started

SFH Portfolio keeps an engineering organization's budgets, spend and headcount in one place. You plan the year by setting budgets and assigning people to projects, then track what's actually spent as the year goes on.

• Organization: everything you see belongs to one organization. You can belong to several and switch between them. See Organizations and scenario branches.
• Portfolios: top-level groups of work, such as a product line or a platform. See Portfolios.
• Projects: live inside a portfolio, each with a budget, dates and a status. See Projects.
• Expenses: costs recorded against a project, as capex, opex or labor, one-time or recurring. See Expenses.
• Resources: the people on your roster. Each person's monthly cost comes from a loaded labor rate, and allocations assign a share of their time to projects. See Resources.
• Annual budgets: one top-down budget per fiscal year, which the Dashboard measures spend against. See Annual budgets.

Every figure in the app comes from two sources: the expenses you record, and the cost of your people.

• An expense counts in the month it falls in. A recurring expense counts once per occurrence.
• A person's loaded labor rate is their full monthly cost. The share of their time allocated to a project counts as that project's labor, month by month.
• Time nobody has allocated still costs money. If the person belongs to a portfolio, it shows on that portfolio as Unassigned time. If they don't, the Dashboard counts it as idle payroll.

The Dashboard, portfolio pages, project pages and the Expenses list all use the same calculation, so their totals agree with each other.

1. Create a portfolio on the Portfolios page, or type create a portfolio called Infrastructure in the command bar.
2. Add projects with the command bar, for example create project Search in Infrastructure with a $150,000 budget.
3. Record expenses from a project's page or the Expenses page.
4. On Resources, add your loaded labor rates, then your people, then allocate them to projects.
5. Set this year's budget on Annual budgets so the Dashboard can compare spend with plan.

Making changes and asking questions in the command bar, importing files and drafting allocations use AI. Each person has a daily AI allowance, with shared limits for each organization and for the whole app, and they reset at midnight UTC. When an allowance runs out, the AI features say so and everything else keeps working.