The project costing functionality of FirstBIT ERP allows the users to create projects, enter budget estimates, monitor the project progress, compare the budgets to actual revenues and costs, and view the project profits or losses.

If you need this functionality, you can turn on Project Costing as a feature on the Administration > Settings > General Settings form. Once the functionality is turned on, you will be able to link to projects any related documents.

The options available for Project Costing

For projects, you can specify how the material costs incurred for projects should be calculated. For this, you can use the Calculate Material Costs setting on the Administration > Settings > General Settings form.

You can select one of the following options:

• On Purchase: To calculate material costs when the items are received to warehouses according to Invoices Received and Advance Reports.

• On Usage: To calculate material costs only when the items are issued from warehouses according to Inventory Write Offs and Invoices.

If you selected to calculate material costs on purchase, you can use the Account for Material Costs option to indicate to the system how you want to be able to analyze the material costs:

• By Business Activity: You will need to specify a particular business activity for each cost incurred for the project.
• By Department: You will need to specify the department which is responsible for the incurred project costs.
  

Project life cycle

For each project, on its path from the initial idea to planning and then execution, you can indicate a new stage by changing the project status. Projects can have the following statuses: Proposed, Active, Completed, and Canceled.

Changes in statuses are unconditional, and you can register them by using the Project Status Change documents.

Workflow

In FirstBIT ERP, projects are created as master records. For details, see Projects. For each project, you can specify two project teams that will work for the project: from your company's side and from the customer's side.

At the stage of planning, you can enter the project's planned budget: cost and revenue estimates. You can enter estimates with different levels of details for different projects. At any time, you can edit the estimates or create a new version of estimates.

Once a project is created, any document related to the project can be linked to this project. If you need to specify multiple projects in a document—link different items to different projects—you can move the Project field from the document heading (the Main tab) to the list of items or services (the Inventory and Services tabs).

The actual costs are calculated according to the settings that are common for all projects and defined on the Administration > Settings > General Settings form.

While actual direct costs are calculated based on the documents that are linked to projects, indirect costs can be allocated by using Project Cost Allocations. To allocate the labor costs, overhead and indirect costs, you can manually select the documents and projects for allocation, specify percentages (or factors) and perform the allocation, or import an Excel spreadsheet with all the allocation data.

As the project is being executed, you can monitor the project progress by using the Diagrams tab of Projects. 

For reports, which provide you with up-to-date detailed information on projects in all statuses, refer to Project Costing: Reports.

Analysis of project costs and revenues

For more effective execution of projects, you need to be able to assess factors that affect project costs and project returns.

During a planning stage, you can create estimates of possible costs and revenues with the selected levels of details.

When creating cost estimates, you can use the following levels of details (analytics parameters): Departments, Business Activities, Cost Elements (such as labor cost associated with a particular employee, Items (such as materials, stock items, or services), and Fixed Assets (if you need to use special equipment, devices, vehicles for the project). You can provide the cost estimates for each applicable combination of these details.

If for projects, material costs are calculated on purchase, you can choose whether you want to be able to analyze the project's material costs: By Business Activity and By Department.

For revenue estimates, you can use the following levels of details (analytics parameters): Departments, Business Activities, Income Items, Items.

When the project is being executed, you will need to correctly link documents to the projects and specify the analytics parameters.

You can use the reports in the Project Costing module to analyze each project's actual costs and revenues, compare to estimated costs and revenues, review the project cash inflows and outflows. For more information, refer to Project Costing: reports.

In this chapter