Do you have access to all of the information you need to make appropriate business decisions for your professional services firm?
Can you get to the information when you want it or do you have to wait for some process to complete before running reports? Do you need to drill into the detail supporting reported data?
Traditional reporting capabilities enable a point in time view of data. However, businesses run at a fast pace and project managers/executives need the ability to monitor the business as it is moving, make qualified decisions quickly, and change direction on demand. Waiting to make a decision until end of day, end of milestone or end of project may cost you an opportunity. This increases the need to look inside the business at projects in motion and refresh your view of progress frequently. Traditional reporting capabilities may not meet this requirement.
Project software needs to empower the employee to see the priority of their assignments, record time and expenses in a timely, accurate manner, analyze completed work to scheduled work, and alert project managers (and sometimes customers) when the direction of the project needs to change. Your project managers need to monitor their resources and milestones for project progress to ensure quality, on time results. Executives need to monitor all projects to ensure profitability. Enabling this type of functionality requires visibility into the data from views or queries. Parts of the data may be copied into an email or status report to support a change in project direction (to a resource) or explain why a certain piece of work was completed a certain way in response to a customer inquiry. Seldom is a long report printed and gone through with a fine tooth comb. No time for that. It’s time to run an agile services team. One that can flex and change direction quickly while keeping the project on track and on budget. This demands the ability to view filtered data and re-filter on the fly and react to what you are seeing with confidence, in the direction you and your team need to head.
Revenue Recognition - Imagine the Financial Administrator walking into your office, sitting down across from you, staring you straight in the eye, and saying “When can I recognize revenue for this project that your team completed last month? There is a note attached to the project stating ‘hold for billing next quarter.” The Financial Administrator needs to know how to handle the billing on the financial statements. What do you do?
And what about that new project you are about to close and the customer wants to be billed only twice? Once when the project is 50% complete and again when it is 100% complete. It is scheduled to take twelve months to complete? When does the revenue impact financial statements?
The ability to apply revenue recognition rules on a project by project basis, or across a group of projects, enables your firm to account for revenue at various intervals, allows incentive plans to remain credible, allows team goals to be met, and keeps resources motivated to deliver on time results. What seems like a little request affects just about everyone in your firm. If you can manage the accounting properly, everyone wins. Project software needs to provide you with a method to record your business activity in a financially sound manner and send positive results to all constituents (customer, employees, project managers, subcontractors). Relationships can easily be damaged if trust is questioned or if inaccurate billing information is sent. The customer may not consider you as their first choice for future work.
How does Beyond Software provide in-depth reporting on projects and financials?
Along with standard financial reports such as GL Trial Balance, AP and AR Aging, Balance Sheet and Income Statement, Beyond Software also offers a number of project reports. With the project reporting, hours, expenses, and billable amounts charged to a project are available for reporting as soon as they are entered. The project reporting allows information to be looked up, sorted, and filtered as desired to monitor your projects and keep projects on target.
For example, the following three screenshots show how a project executive can quickly and easily use the same console to group and report on the same data in three different ways, giving insight into profitability by project, by project manager, or by project employee:
Breakdown of cost and billings by project and task.
Breakdown of cost and billings by project manager.
Breakdown of cost and billings by resource.
The decision on which format to use for an invoice can be made at the time of printing. Should your customer need to see the data in multiple formats, the system provides alternative formats to reprint the same data thus satisfying the information needs of multiple consumers of the same information.
