Getting started with Aggregated Project Financials
In the initial stages of financial tracking, it's helpful to start by capturing a project's high-level budgeted costs and expected revenue.
With this approach, you focus on simplified, aggregated financials, where the budget is either manually set or based on the effort outlined in the work plan. AdaptiveWork handles the rest, automatically providing key financial indicators. Once you input basic project details—such as during the PID (Project Initiation Document) submission stage—the tool calculates metrics like expected margin, CPI, budget status, and more for you.
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In the early stages of financial tracking, Project Managers may want to start capturing on a high level a project’s budgeted cost and expected revenue. When setting up manually aggregated Project budget and Actual effort, there is no worry about creating work plan, estimate, and defining rates. It can be very useful to get quickly financials data when for example you are at the stages of a PID (project initiation document) submission. |
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Calculate automatically Budget and Actuals using Organizational Rates |
Project Managers can define Budget and Actuals through calculation using Organizational Billing and Cost Rates. Organizational Rates are used in Professional Services Automation (PSA) financial management to standardize cost and billing rates across projects and resources. These rates streamline budgeting, forecasting, and financial tracking by providing consistent baseline values. They’re particularly useful for organizations aiming to streamline operations and maintain financial accuracy at scale. |
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When projects are large and many resources contribute to your projects, tracking actuals directly from the Work Plan becomes cumbersome and overtime can be less accurate. As a best practice, Resources can use Timesheets and track actual minutes, hours and/or days of work on individual work items. It is recommended that data is provided as accurately and timely as possible so you can have the most accurate progress, utilization and cost metrics on your projects. Once time entries (work duration + details) are entered for a given time frame, the Timesheet can be submitted to your project manager or direct manager for approval. As soon as approval is granted, the hours are reflected in the related project and percentage complete is shown on individual work items. Actual effort is automatically updated from the approved time reported by the labor resources and actual cost and actual revenue derived automatically. Learn more about timesheets In this scenario, Project Managers created a work plan, estimates, and organizational rates were setup by your administrator. Team Members are reporting time in AdaptiveWork for the tasks they are assigned to. In addition to timesheets reporting for calculating Actual Effort, Project Managers can use Organizational Billing and Cost Rates to calculate Budgeted and Actual Cost, Actual and Expected Revenue. |
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Use Expense sheets and actuals to feed into Project actual Cost and Revenue |