Overview
EAC Snapshot gives project managers a month-over-month history of how their project's Estimated At Completion (EAC) has evolved over time. This view is designed to surface forecasting accuracy patterns — so teams can understand not just where a project is headed, but how reliably they've been predicting it.
Forecasting is one of the hardest parts of project management. EAC numbers shift as work progresses, scope changes, and resource plans evolve — but without a historical record, it's nearly impossible to know whether your estimates are improving or consistently drifting. EAC Snapshot addresses this by preserving each month's projected end-state so you can compare it against what was originally sold and identify trends before they become problems.
What is EAC Snapshot?
EAC Snapshot is a dashboard view that displays a monthly history of your project's projected final outcome. Each month, a snapshot is taken of your EAC metrics — including hours, cost, revenue, margin, and profit — and locked in place once the month closes. This creates a timeline of forecasts you can review and compare.
Specifically, EAC Snapshot shows:
- Month-over-month EAC history: See how your projected end-state has shifted each month, and identify whether forecasts are stabilizing or continuing to move.
- Sold vs. EAC comparison: The snapshot is compared against the originally sold project expectations, making it easy to see when and by how much your forecast has deviated from the original plan.
- Forecasting accuracy trends: By reviewing how EAC has evolved, you can spot patterns — such as estimates that consistently grow in certain project phases — and use that insight to build more reliable forecasts in the future.
EAC Snapshot helps answer key user challenges:
- Difficulty knowing whether forecasts are getting more or less accurate over time.
- Lack of visibility into when and why EAC started to diverge from sold expectations.
- Inability to identify forecasting patterns that repeatedly lead to budget overruns.
How to Access EAC Snapshot
To view EAC Snapshot, access must be granted via Permissions in Parallax. To access Permissions, go to Settings > Permissions, then locate the Permission Set and click to open. Next, enable the following:
- view margin percentage
- view costs and gross profit
- budget and revenue
Enabling these permissions grants access to Project Snapshot — including the EAC view — at the project level.
How to Use EAC Snapshot
- Navigate to the Snapshot view within your project and select the EAC view.
- Review your EAC history
- Scan across months to see how your projected hours, cost, revenue, margin, and profit have changed over time.
- Look for months where EAC shifted significantly and consider what planning or scope changes drove that movement.
- Compare EAC to sold
- The dashboard shows how your current and historical EAC compares to what was originally sold.
- Use this to identify how far the project has drifted from original expectations and whether that gap is growing or shrinking.
- Identify forecasting patterns
- Look for recurring trends — do estimates tend to grow in the middle of a project? Do they stabilize closer to delivery?
- Use these patterns to inform how you approach forecasting on future projects.
Why It Matters
EAC Snapshot makes forecasting history visible. By preserving each month's projected end-state, it gives project managers a clear record of how estimates have evolved — and how accurately they've predicted the final outcome. This helps teams build more reliable forecasts, catch budget risk earlier, and have more informed conversations about project health with stakeholders.