EAC Reconciliation
A finance-owned view comparing planner EAC against budget, funding, and reserve context — with explicit freshness indicators for actuals, schedule, and cost planning.
EAC reconciliation is the moment when finance asks whether the project's Estimate at Complete fits within the available budget and funding envelope. The answer to that question depends on three things being true at the same time: the EAC reflects a credible current forecast, the actuals are current through the reporting period, and the budget and funding posture is current. When any of those is false, a reconciliation that appears to balance may actually be masking a problem.
The Freshness Problem
In most project control environments, a finance analyst performing EAC reconciliation has no reliable way to know whether the numbers they are looking at are current. The cost planner may not have updated the ETC since the last status date. Actuals may be two periods stale because the ERP export was delayed. The reconciliation happens anyway, producing a view that looks complete but reflects data from different points in time.
Freshness Indicators
ProjectXL's reconciliation surface carries explicit freshness indicators for each input category: are actuals current through the reporting period? Is the schedule fresh enough to support a meaningful view? Is the cost plan current? These indicators read from the same evidence model used by the data-state indicators in the persistent command surface. When something is stale, the reconciliation view says so and identifies what needs to be updated before the view can be trusted.
Role Separation
Finance can review EAC versus budget posture through the reconciliation surface without needing write access to the cost plan. The surface reads the planner-owned EAC and presents it against the finance-owned budget context — two separately governed records, one reconciliation view.