Workaround: Effort for future timeframes in Wrike Analyze

I'm familiar with the Analyze tool and have created dozens of custom utilization boards from scratch, so I found out the hard way about some of Wrike Analyze limitations. One of this limitations is analyzing effort for future dates/timeframes. After having numerous advanced coaching sessions with the Wrike team, we realized that it's not a quick fix, but I made sure to provide feedback to the Wrike team so they can implement this feature in the future.

To this day, I've found 2 workarounds depending on the application and the data I'm trying to access:

• The first method works perfectly for Monthly/Weekly/Quarterly forecasts only at the Project/Task level where I don't need to see the Effort breakdown into smaller timeframes (i.e. weekly or daily), because you'll be hardcoding the timeframe by creating a card as a bucket to allocate the effort, and it might be too much work to create a card for each week or day. To do this, I structure my projects in a way that I can allocate effort to cards that match the timeframe I want to analyze, then on my Pivot Table Widget, I change the Data Source to 'Wrike Core' (where all the project data is located), add a row for 'Project Name', 'Task Name', then I add a formula under Value so I can calculate the Planned Time (effort) for my hardcoded timeframe (Task Name). This is how the formula would look like:
  
  

For example, if I want to see the Planned Time for the month of August '22, I'd make sure to create a task called August 2022, and allocate Effort to it. This method has it's obvious limitations. If I need to have granularity at a daily/weekly level, I'd use the second method.

• The second method is not inside of Wrike Analyze. I use it only to produce custom reports in spreadsheets. I export the Workload Chart to pull all the Effort data for a specific timeframe, then I clean it up depending on what I want to split it by (User or Project), manipulate the data, and then create a macros/custom spreadsheet to do the cleaning automatically If I consider I'll be producing this report frequently. This method is what I use to forecast billing/revenue, track Managerial Accounting, and perform Earned Value Management down to days.

I don't mind elaborating more on this if anyone feels like any of these 2 methods might work for their business case.

Long story short, Wrike can't analyze Effort on future dates, due to limitations on the 'Effort Date' filter because it mirrors the Timelog Creation Date (only looks back, doesn't show future months/weeks/days), but I hope they add this feature soon!