One of the most difficult aspects of managing projects is integrating them into the company’s core budgets and forecasts. This is because projects are often seen as separate entities to be managed separately from the core business. However, this should not be the case, as projects can have a major impact on the overall budget and forecast for a company, and they need to be carefully considered when creating these financial documents.
There are many ways to manage budgets and many excellent software packages that enable users and teams to manage projects, this type of software can help track the progress of a project, as well as the costs associated with it, each has its own set of features.
Whatever software you choose that meets the needs of your company and your project, very few will integrate into the core financial packages that business’s use to run their business.
Consequently, Projects are either not properly integrated or have to be integrated using Excel spreadsheets with all the associated dangers, or by using a burn-down chart.
A burn-down chart shows the progress of a project over time and can be used to estimate the costs associated with the project or for multiple projects. However, this is a very crude method of integrating into a budget.
There are two aspects to projects, the financials and the time to deliver, both need to be considered and businesses need transparency so that they can be measured and recorded.
At ProForecast we are excited to announce that we have tackled these problems by creating a fully integrated budgeting and project management tool which gives users the ability to create multiple projects with daily bills of material, allowing users to accurately and simply record activities and the exact time that costs are incurred.
These values then flow directly into the company’s core budgets. Project managers can access the tool without necessarily having access to the core financials, access is controlled by permissions granted by the finance team.
The tool is so comprehensive that for activities that use subcontractors who are subject to CIS any payments are adjusted to account for the withheld tax, each activity and component will have its individual debtors and creditors’ terms and it includes the ability to model both supplier and client retentions and the release or write off. Projects can extend over any period and the bill of materials clearly shows all the activities and costs.
Additional reports include, cost burn down, time burn down, project income and cost statements, all integrated into the core budgets, users can build their own KPI reports or ask Proforecast to do so.
ProForecast is going to continue to develop this module and will be adding the ability to add files and documents to activities but want to hear from users about what features they would like to add. We will carefully review and add to our development pipeline.
If you would like to have a demonstration of our new beta Project Management tool please book a demonstration on our website, www.proforecast.com, we will be launching the application as part of our live product in mid-November 2022.