Define your own scoring criteria — strategic alignment, financial return, operational risk, regulatory compliance, or any combination — and assign a weight to each. Costbars scores every project against these criteria consistently, producing a ranked list that reflects your organisation's priorities rather than the loudest voice in the room. Scoring models are configured in the spreadsheet and can be updated as strategic priorities evolve.

Run scoring at any point in the portfolio cycle: during initial intake to filter out weak proposals, before annual planning to rank the full pipeline, or mid-year to re-evaluate in-flight projects against new strategic direction. Because the same criteria apply to every project every time, the results are defensible in governance forums and board presentations.

Data-driven prioritisation that removes the politics.

Before committing resources to a project, run it through the Costbars feasibility assessment. Score the project across four dimensions — technical risk, political risk, size, and complexity — to generate an objective feasibility score from 0 to 100. Colour-coded risk levels and tailored recommendations surface the factors most likely to cause delivery problems before a single resource is assigned.

The assessment creates a consistent, documented basis for go/no-go decisions that is independent of who is championing the project. When two competing projects have similar strategic scores, the feasibility assessment provides the tiebreaker. And because the scores are on record, you can review them retrospectively after project delivery to calibrate the model for future assessments.

Know the real risks before you say yes.

Costbars aggregates resource demand from every project in the pipeline — active, approved, and proposed — into a single time-phased demand grid. Each row shows demand for a specific resource, role, or skill group. Each column is a time period. The grid makes it immediately visible where demand exceeds supply, and by how much.

To resolve overallocation, drag projects along the pipeline timeline to shift their start dates and smooth the demand curve. Link projects with predecessor dependencies so that sequencing constraints are respected as you reschedule. The demand grid updates in real time as you move projects, so you can see the effect of each change before committing to it. This is the workflow that turns a list of approved projects into a deliverable programme.

Turn approved projects into a programme your team can actually deliver.

The tabular view provides one row per project across the entire portfolio, with configurable columns showing cost, hours, schedule, priority score, risk level, strategic alignment, and any custom metadata field you have defined. Sort by any column, apply filters to focus on a specific portfolio segment, and export for offline review or governance reporting.

The tabular view is the right tool for working meetings where you need to step through the portfolio systematically rather than navigate a visual canvas. Filter to show only projects above budget, sort by strategic score to identify the highest-priority items, or group by strategic pillar to review balance across the portfolio. It is also the starting point for the formal scoring and selection workflow.

The right view for systematic portfolio analysis.

The Costbars spreadsheet template is the primary data entry and management tool for the portfolio. It contains pre-structured tabs for portfolios, projects, work packages, resources, risks, issues, and custom metadata. Populate or update data in bulk using the tools you already know — copy-paste, Excel formulas, pivot tables — then drag the file onto the Costbars canvas to sync the changes. No re-keying through web forms, no import wizards.

The Portfolio tab in the template can be configured to pull only the specific fields you need for a particular report or analysis, making it straightforward to produce tailored outputs for different audiences from the same underlying data. For organisations that manage project data across multiple systems, the spreadsheet is also the integration point — data can flow in from other tools through the template before being imported into Costbars.

Manage portfolio data the way your organisation already works.