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Two settings decide when things land rather than how much they cost: the spread profile that distributes a risk’s exposure across its active window, and the working calendar that decides which days count.
Both of these feed Risk Pro features. Spread profiles drive the time-phased and burn down charts, and the working calendar drives the schedule simulation; the Risk Analytics Burndown and Schedule Monte Carlo are both Pro. On Lite you can configure both, and the Spread Type field on each risk still records your choice, but nothing on the Lite pages reads it yet.See Getting Started with Risk for the full tier comparison.

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Spread profiles

Every project ships with four profiles: Linear, Front-Loaded, Back-Loaded, and Bell Curve. Most projects never need more than these, so check whether one fits before building your own. A profile stores a shape, not a schedule. Positions run from the start of a risk’s window to the end of it as proportions, so the same profile works on a six week risk and a three year one.

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Build a custom profile

1

Open the Spread Types tab

Go to Admin > Projects, click the pencil icon on the project, and select the Spread Types tab.
2

Click Add Custom Spread Profile

Enter a Profile Name and set Number of Periods, which controls how finely the shape is drawn (5 to 100, defaulting to 20). Set the period count first, because changing it clears any weights already entered.
3

Shape the distribution

Click Distribute Evenly for a flat starting point, then type a percentage under each bar in the preview. Normalize to 100% rescales what you have entered while keeping the proportions.
4

Check the total, then click Save Profile

The running total under the preview must read 100% before the profile will save.
The new profile appears in the Spread Type dropdown on the risk form immediately.
Deleting a custom profile does not check whether risks still use it, and a risk left pointing at a deleted profile will fail when the system time-phases it. Move those risks to another profile first.

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The working calendar

The calendar decides which days count as working days, which is what makes a simulated 30 day activity land where it actually lands rather than 30 calendar days out.
1

Open the Calendar tab

On the same Edit Project screen, select the Calendar tab. The project, resource file, rate file, and project dates are shown read-only at the top for reference.
2

Click Add Calendar and set the work pattern

Give it a name, confirm the Start Date and Finish Date, set Hrs/Day, and tick the Weekly Work Days. Quick Select offers Mon-Fri, Mon-Sat, and All Days.
3

Tick Set As Default

This is the step that is easy to miss, and the one that decides whether the calendar is used at all.
4

Add holidays, then click Generate Calendar

Add each holiday in the panel beside the period table, ticking Is Yearly Holiday for dates that repeat. Generate afterward, because the period table is built from the settings as they stand at that moment.
With no default calendar, the schedule simulation quietly falls back to a standard five-day work week with no holidays. This happens both when a project has no calendars and when it has calendars but none is flagged as default, so a calendar that exists but was never set as the default has no effect on results.

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Rate sets

The same period table generates the project’s Hours and FTE rate sets. Click Save Hours Rate Set or Save FTE Rate Set and give the rateset a name. Choosing an existing name deletes and recreates every rate in it, with a confirmation step first.
Running Generate Calendar again on an existing calendar rebuilds its periods and the values derived from them. Use it when you mean to rebuild, not to refresh the display.

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Next

That completes Risk setup. Hand the project over to the team and point them at: Full field reference: Spread Profiles and Project Calendar.