Budget monitoring is a key aspect to successful project management. The new financials app in OneDesk allows you to easily estimate, forecast and monitor your company’s budget. Regardless of the size of your team, or how you bill your customers, the financials app offers flexibility to set costs and keep track of your company’s finances in real time.
Overview
- Forecast cost and billing
- Planned versus actual financials
- Estimate profits
- Allocate resources
- Integrate with timesheets and time tracking (billable and non-billable)
- Integrate with project management workflow
Project Planned Budget
It is important to keep track of the time taken on projects and their associated costs for any company, but this is especially true for companies who bill clients according to service projects.
Outline your Projects
Start by forecasting your project timelines, especially the planned schedules and planned work hours. The Financials app in combination with OneDesk’s other tools will easily forecast costs and billing amounts based on the rates you set and allows you to keep track of planned and actual billing amounts and costs in real time.
Set Cost Rates
To begin budgeting, start by setting the rates for your services. One common method is to set a billing rate (hourly or flat) for each individual project. Another method is to set (hourly or flat) billing rates by the project type. Setting rates by project or project type is best for teams or companies who have a set cost for services. You should also weigh costs for your projects against your billing amounts and adjust accordingly. Costs differ for every company, but may include, for instance, the labour cost of employees.
Let’s take for example a web development company. The company provides two main services: website design and website development. The company charges clients an hourly rate for service projects and also has employees working on the projects who are paid hourly.
First, let’s set the hourly rates for our employees based on their job role.
As above, we have selected the cost rate by team. So for example the pay rate of our design team is 20/hr. Therefore our costs on projects assigned to members of this team will be calculated based on this hourly rate.
Set Billing Rates
Next, using the by ‘project type’ rate allows our company to create separate estimates for projects with different categories or requirements. Therefore, we will set the billing calculation level to “Project Type.”
As seen above, the company has determined that the billing rate for ‘design type’ projects is $40 hourly. This billing amount is the amount the company charges their clients for design projects and as we will see is weighted against the costs incurred by our teams’ wages.
Our company can now plan tasks and projects as normal. Use the Tasks and Projects apps to keep on track and meet goals and deadlines, prioritize tasks, and allocate resources. (See the related posts for more on project management with OneDesk)
For instance above, I set the planned work for our ‘Wireframing’ task to be 6 hours.
Returning to the financials app, we can see below that based on my tasks planned hours and my project cost rate, my planned cost has been generated, based on 6 hours multiplied by $20/h to a total of $120.00. As well my planned billable amount is generated at $40/hr for 6 hours totalling $240.00. My project total is calculated by the amount in all the tasks in the design project.
Monitor your Actual Costs and Billing Amounts
My team’s hourly rates apply to timesheet entries, so any designer(s) assigned to the project will generate amounts for the actual cost of the project they are working on based on the team rates we set earlier. This allows the project manager to monitor in real time the team’s progress, and whether the planned amounts are on track with the work being performed.
As seen below, one of my designers has submitted a timesheet for 2 hours of work. At $20/hr for 2 hours, my actual cost is now at $40.00. As well, you can see my actual billable amount has been generated by the work performed, 2 hours at $40/hr for $80.00. Finally the profit ($40) is calculated based on the actual billable amount ($80) minus the actual costs ($40).
Now our project manager can dynamically track whether their planned cost budget is on track with actual costs. With the financials app it’s easy to dynamically estimate or reassess your billing rates.
Let’s say my task is taking longer than expected! As seen below, my designer has submitted a total of 8 hours to the Wireframing task, 2 hours more than my planned amount.
The actual billable amount has been adjusted as well and we would need to bill our client or adjust our plans accordingly. With OneDesk’s Financials app it’s easy to monitor your finances and stay on track in real time.
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