Acumatica ERP Project Accounting Tools: Project Cost Tracking

As we discussed in last week’s post, leveraging the right project accounting solution in the right situation can streamline your entire business and enable your team to deliver higher quality work in less time. In this article, which is part 1 in our 3-part Project Accounting Tools Series we’ll look at how Acumatica’s Project Cost Tracking Software can help businesses pinpoint what makes a project profitable, how workflow can be improved and how you can minimize costs.

What is Project Cost Tracking Software? 

Project cost tracking software helps businesses monitor the profitability of the projects they deliver. An effective project cost tracking software allows you to estimate the cost of different types of projects, identify the actual costs and compare the two to calculate profit. This software is extremely valuable for both your project management team and your financial team.

What Can Project Cost Tracking Software Do for My Business?  

Acumatica’s project cost tracking module gives you the total view of all costs related to a project including materials, labour, services and inventory items. With Acumatica Project Accounting, you can allocate shared costs and overhead expenses to projects based on formulas. This software is ideal for project-centric businesses, including construction, engineering, marketing, consultants, legal and many others.

Using Acumatica, your team can monitor and manage project costs, revenues and budget for profits. Further, it seamlessly integrates with Acumatica General Ledger (GL), Accounts Payable (AP), Accounts Receivable (AR), Sales Order Management, Purchase Order Management, Inventory Management modules to automatically track project costs and budget.

You can also define projects and tasks, then populate projects with employees, resources, and equipment. Acumatica allows you to manage projects of any complexity across different project types and industries and roll costs up to financial reports.

Important Features of Project Cost Tracking

• Resource management: Assign project managers, employees, machines and other resources to projects and tasks. Establish billing rules and options for each task.
• Easy to update tasks: Easily add activities using Project Accounting or through CRM. All Acumatica modules are fully integrated.
• Templates for Projects and Tasks: Create new projects from master templates. Specify people, equipment, budgets and project billing. Multiple users can work on multiple concurrent projects.
• Forecast project budget by period: Enter and modify project budget forecasts and compare these forecasts with the actual project costs and incomes for each financial period. Users can forecast original and revised budget amounts and quantities for existing project budget lines for financial periods of the master calendar. By using forecast data, users can create generic inquiries and pivot tables.
• Task definition: Define tasks globally or for individual projects. Assign billing rates by project, job role, and individual to generate expected revenues in project budgets.
• Allocate expenses: Allocate overhead and shared expenses to individual projects according to formulas you create, including billable and non-billable items.
• WIP support: Keep close track of accumulated but unbilled costs (work-in-progress) to help keep projects on-budget. Acumatica adds control for billing against schedule without losing track of actual expenditures.

Key Benefits of Acumatica’s Project Cost Tracking Module  

Total View of All Costs

• Get up to date information on all project costs, including completed work and work in process accounting.
• Track employee time, sub-contracted services, material and inventory.
• Easily compare actual project costs with original and revised budgets by period.
• Continuously track budget execution and cost vs budget.

Billable Revenue Tracking

• Track future revenues as projects progress.
• Accommodate complex pricing models with confidence in conjunction with Acumatica ERP.

Scalable for Any Type of Project

• Track all types of projects — large or small, internal or external, single or multi-currency.
• Acumatica offers mobile-friendly, fast, and convenient data entry and information access.

Available From Anywhere

• Make it easy for remote employees, installers, contractors, and others to submit work orders and timesheets from any browser-enabled device

Labour Cost Rate Flexibility

• Define costs by employee, labour item, project, project task and the rate type, simplifying time entry and improving visibility, particularly for construction prevailing wage and union requirements.
• Expand integration with payroll and HRM systems with projects, tasks, cost codes and standard and actual costs using the Contract-Based API.

Businesses that are not yet utilizing a project accounting software are likely to do more work while gaining less profit because of the time wasted on juggling little tasks. If these tasks are taken care of, you and your team will have more time to focus on core operations to complete your project.

Think Acumatica’s Project Accounting Software could be a game-changer for your business? Find out more here. 

Remember, the company you choose to implement your software dictates the success or failure of your software investment. At Aqurus, we’re passionate about providing superior ERP solutions and support.