What is Project Accounting?

Project accounting is an overly broad term. Its most general definition is processing financial transactions by project including costs, billings, and revenue. In reality, project accounting can be much more than that. What constitutes project accounting in a company is based on several factors including company type, the number of projects and company size.

Companies which are not externally project driven may use project accounting to track internal projects such as a marketing campaign, or some type of capital improvement. For project-centric companies such as consulting firms, architect and engineering firms or software publishers, the term project accounting takes on a whole new meaning.

For those companies, project accounting is one component of several operational mechanisms used in controlling projects, maximizing project profitability, and ensuring customer satisfaction.

The functionality necessary to complete these project management processes is simply not accessible from a simple General Ledger (GL) only. Companies trying this approach end up becoming frustrated by the number of spreadsheets required to capture the information necessary to generate accurate reporting, complete project analysis and process project billings.

They find out quickly that using spreadsheets which aren’t integrated with the GL causes project information to be stored in multiple data silos, increasing the likelihood of reporting errors. This also mandates generating project reports outside of the ERP solution’s report writer. Additionally, the time needed to reconcile spreadsheets to both the GL and project reporting negatively affects productivity which in turn risks profitability.

Introducing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central + Progressus

A Total Solution for Project-Centric Organizations

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is a comprehensive, cloud-based ERP solution for small to midsized businesses, connecting sales, service, finance, and operations to work smarter, adapt faster, and perform better. It has the best ROI in the business – a recent Forrester study shows that organizations typically experience 162% ROI with Dynamics 365 Business Central over a three year period. But Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central alone doesn’t have all the functionality that project-based organizations need. Progressus is purpose-built on top of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central to provide project-based businesses with the tools they need to ensure every project is profitable.

Achieving Your Project Management Goals with Progressus

Project Accounting

Progressus Project Accounting allows project-based businesses to take control of project finances. With Project Accounting, you can:

• Automate accounting tasks specific to project management.
• Gain real-time visibility into costs.
• Effortlessly manage both billing and revenue recognition.

As the chart on the right illustrates, project accounting is used along with project management, resource management and project reporting to successfully control and execute a project.

Start by kicking off project creation with the Progressus Project Wizard. The Project Wizard seamlessly handles both a straightforward task structure and a multifaceted project increasing productivity and control.

You can ensure precise customer billing and invoicing with Advanced Billing Options. Milestone-based, percentage completion, fixed pricing and time and materials methods are all supported. Flexibility allows users to cater to diverse customer project billing requirements, thereby reducing the time associated with building manual billings, resolving billing questions and addressing other billing issues.

Mobile Time and Expense Entry allows the user to effortlessly integrate time and expense data into Outlook. Using a familiar application such as Outlook ensures not only convenience but reduces the time and expense entry learning curve, supporting comprehensive and accurate billing, as well as streamlining the invoicing process. Every aspect of your project, from project profitability to individual performance metrics is enabled by Microsoft’s Power BI.

Project Management

With Progressus Project Management, you can create detailed project plans, define project scope, objectives, tasks, and milestones. Remember, the project plan is the project’s blueprint. An ineffective project plan results in project team confusion, difficulties in aligning project resources and completing project tasks on time and in the correct order. Using a high-quality project plan helps establish a clear roadmap for project execution. Progressus Project Management allows you to:

• Easily manage any level of project detail.
• Build tasks and subtasks within projects and create task dependencies when needed.
• Accurately assign task responsibilities keeping all project resources on the same page and avoiding over-booking.

Progressus’ task tracking and task completion reporting functionality increases visibility and simplifies the entire task tracking process.

Allocating resources is key to a successful project. Use Progressus to easily allocate team members and other assets to projects. Fine tune allocations by assigning team members based on availability and skills.

There’s nothing worse than a project resource being over allocated. When this happens, the resources find themselves being expected by one or more customers at the same time. This situation results in disappointed customers and project tasks either being hastily completed or delivered outside of the project plan’s dates. Eliminating these types of problems is easy, using the visibility into resource utilization and capacity provided by Progressus reporting.

Accurate project resource time and expense capture and the correct allocation of time and expenses to projects is an important part of customer project billing. Progressus time and expense functionality tracks employee timesheets and expense reports, allowing for accurate recording of billable hours, labor costs and expenses associated with projects. Integration with Outlook allows users to complete these tasks, helping to ensure comprehensive and accurate billing.

As a part of the project sales process, the project budget is finalized and becomes a component of the contract’s Statement of Work. During the project kick-off meeting, the project plan and the project budget are reviewed. Resources are allocated to the project based on the budget. As a part of ongoing project management, the project manager monitors budget vs. actual costs on a regular basis. Progressus supports real-time project monitoring, allowing the project manager to quickly identify issues and proactively make the necessary adjustments to ensure that projects remain on track.

Resource Management

The Progressus Mixed Billing Types feature takes worrying about resource allocation off the table. The project manager can quickly find the right team members based on skills and availability. Additionally, use the feature to gain insights into team utilization and project profitability, thereby enhancing productivity and project profitability by shining a light on the most lucrative opportunities. Resource Management allows you to:

• Streamline resource allocation by adjusting project resources using real-time data insights.
• Instantly view task completion progress, staff assignments, and all project resources on an interactive resource board.
• Achieve precise project alignment by filtering the resource board based on department, skill, or essential qualifications.
• Increase project precision by assigning project resources to specific resource groups tailored by the user to your business needs.
• Utilize the Optimal Workload Balance feature’s “split assign” function to evenly distribute your team’s workload.
• Easily plan for future resource needs by utilizing the available monthly calendar view.

Providing the project team members with a personal resource board means they can view assigned tasks and prioritize them based on importance, enhancing team efficiency.

Project Reporting

Progressus Project Reporting moves beyond basic reporting and encompasses a number of project-centric reporting features and functions. Progressus Project Reporting allows you to:

• Gain instant access to actionable insights.
• Customize your personal and team member dashboards in minutes.
• Benefit from 100 pre-configured data points across 13 categories.
• Make informed decisions on the go to keep your projects on track.

You can also increase project control and performance awareness by building customized reports tailored to your company’s specific needs, and define report criteria, select data sources, and format reports according to your preferences.

Building custom reporting can be a tedious task. Progressus’ pre-built report templates allow you to quickly generate common project reports, such as project status reports, financial summaries, and resource utilization reports.

You can also use project reporting to monitor project milestone status and task completion, and analyze project progress – quickly identifying areas requiring attention using Progressus reports. You can also analyze and report on resource distribution, workload balance, and utilization, ensuring efficient team allocation and planning.

Internal project management reporting is only one part of a company’s reporting requirements. Progressus’ accounting-compliant financial analysis and reporting resources allows you to generate detailed financial breakdowns, from budgets to profitability.

Why You Should Consider Progressus

Delivering successful projects relies on intelligently distributing projects and tasks to match the skillsets, availability, and utilization capacity of your resources to achieve true resource efficiency. The reputation gained by delivering successful projects 100% of the time drives new business and positions your company to search for and close repeat business. With Progressus, your project team will have a familiar (Microsoft-look and feel), easy to use interface to plan and manage projects, and the data needed to complete projects on time and on budget.

Automating previously manual tasks with an integrated end-to-end solution meets the unique needs of every team member and simplifies their individual technology experience.

Finally, experience matters. A great product isn’t built only by using the latest technology or focusing on the latest business trends. It takes hands-on experience to build an effective solution.

Progressus was built by professional service industry experts who understand the intricate and complex requirements of a business like yours. Access exactly what you need right out of the box with a team of industry experts on your side. Unlock long-term success with a solution built by industry experts. Schedule a Progressus demo to learn more.