Does Planner Premium do earned value management?
No, and it is worth understanding why, because this is not a missing screen. Earned value is arithmetic on money, and there is no money in the system for it to work on.
That makes it the one gap in this comparison that could not be closed by adding a feature to the interface.
First, what Planner Premium does track
This is not a tool with no sense of plan versus reality. It has a good deal of the schedule side:
- Baselines, so planned dates can be compared against actual ones
- Percent complete per task, and task history so a change to it is attributable
- A critical path and all four dependency types, so slippage propagates properly
- Custom fields you can type a budget figure into, though nothing computes with it
A baseline tells you the dates moved. Earned value tells you what that cost. Only the first of those is available, and the reason is structural.
Three inputs are absent, not three features
Earned value needs planned cost, earned cost and actual cost. Take any one away and none of the indices can be computed. All three are missing here, for the same underlying reason.
There is no actual cost, so there is no AC
Every earned value formula needs actual cost. Microsoft states that cost resources are not available natively, and there is no timesheet module either, so nothing in the product records what was actually spent. Without AC there is no cost variance, no CPI, and no estimate at completion.
There is no cost baseline, so there is no PV
Planned value is what you expected to have spent by today. A Microsoft moderator states plainly that planned versus actual cost calculations and cost rollups are not available natively. A schedule baseline is not a cost baseline: it records the dates you committed to, not the money.
There is no arithmetic, so you cannot assemble it yourself
Custom fields hold what somebody typed. There are no formulas, no rollups on a number field and no calculated values, so even a diligently maintained budget column cannot become earned value inside the product. The number would have to leave the tool to be multiplied by anything.
The cost capabilities named as unavailable are quoted from an answer by a Microsoft staff moderator on Microsoft Q&A, checked 25 August 2026. Microsoft ships Planner monthly, so check the current position before you plan around it.
The suggested workaround, and one thing to test
Microsoft's own suggestion is to capture budget figures in custom fields and report on them in Power BI. That is a reasonable lightweight answer, and it moves the calculation outside the product rather than removing the need for it.
One thing worth testing before you build a process on it. A different Microsoft staff answer states that custom fields are held as binary blobs inside the Dataverse tables rather than as individually queryable columns, which sits awkwardly next to the reporting half of that suggestion. We do not know how the two reconcile. Put a budget figure in a custom field and try to chart it before you depend on being able to.
How Onplana handles it
Earned value is computed on every plan including Free: planned value, earned value, actual cost, cost and schedule variance, CPI, SPI, budget at completion, estimate at completion and estimate to complete, with an S-curve and a written summary. Actual cost comes from costs imported with a Microsoft Project file, or from timesheets priced against rate cards.
The part worth telling you is what happens when that data is absent, because we got it wrong first. We used to fall back to an assumed hourly rate, and on one real customer project that manufactured a budget of $132 million out of nothing but estimated hours. It looked entirely plausible on the screen.
So the fallback was deleted. With no genuine cost signal every cost field returns null, the finance view renders an empty state, and the schedule index is computed from hours instead. You get the schedule half and an honest blank where the money would be, which is the same principle this entire page rests on: an invented number is worse than an absent one.
Common questions
Does Microsoft Planner Premium do earned value management?
No. There is no EVM, and more to the point there is nothing for it to compute on. Asked directly about budget capabilities, a Microsoft moderator answered that planned versus actual cost calculations, cost rollups, financial statements and cost resources are not available natively, checked 25 August 2026. Earned value is arithmetic on money, and the money is not in the system.
But Planner Premium has baselines. Is that not the same thing?
No, and the difference is the whole question. A baseline records the dates you committed to, so it can tell you the schedule moved. Earned value tells you what that movement cost and whether you are getting the value you are paying for. One is a comparison of dates and the other is a comparison of currency, and only the first is available.
Can I track budgets in custom fields instead?
You can type figures into them, and a Microsoft moderator suggests exactly that alongside Power BI. Two things to know before relying on it. Nothing computes with those figures inside the product, so every calculation happens somewhere else. And a separate Microsoft staff answer states custom fields are held as binary blobs in the Dataverse tables rather than as queryable columns, which sits awkwardly with the reporting half of that suggestion. How those two answers reconcile is not something we can tell you, so test this specific thing before you build a process on it.
Is Microsoft adding budgeting to Planner Premium?
Unknown. A Microsoft moderator said there is no single authoritative roadmap committing to budgeting features and no confirmed timeline, and nobody outside Microsoft can tell you more than that. Plan against what exists. If EVM is a reporting obligation rather than a preference, that answer is the one that matters.
What did Project Online do that this does not?
It carried a cost model: cost resources, rates, planned and actual cost, and baselines that included cost rather than only dates. That is what made earned value computable there. This is the clearest example in the whole comparison of a capability that cannot be added as a screen, because it needs a data model underneath it that is not currently present.
Does everyone need earned value?
No, and plenty of good PMOs run without it. It matters when you are accountable for spend against a plan: government and defence contracts often mandate it, capital projects rely on it, and any organisation capitalising project labour needs the actuals it rests on. If nobody has ever asked you for a CPI, this section of the comparison is not your deciding factor.
What does Onplana do here?
Earned value is computed on every plan, including Free: planned value, earned value, actual cost, cost and schedule variance, CPI, SPI, budget at completion, estimate at completion and estimate to complete, with an S-curve and a narrative summary. Actual cost comes from either costs imported with a Microsoft Project file or timesheets priced against rate cards.
What happens in Onplana when there is no cost data?
You get the schedule half and no money, deliberately. We used to fall back to an assumed hourly rate, and on one real project that produced a phantom budget of $132 million out of nothing but estimated hours. So the fallback was removed: with no genuine cost signal every cost field returns null, the finance view renders an empty state, and the schedule performance index is computed from hours instead. An invented number is worse than an absent one, which is the same principle this entire page is about.