Project Billing Comparison: Milestone Billing vs. Project Billing
Compare milestone billing vs. project billing to get paid faster, improve cash flow, build client relationships, and finish projects on time.
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Creating projects in Core can be simple, but populating only the required fields blocks you from some of the most useful features in the project module.
This report cheat-sheet breaks analysis down into several key areas:
General Project Review Reports
Creating projects in CORE can be simple. However, populating only the required fields does prevent you from benefiting from some of the most useful features in the project module.
We highly recommend utilizing phases level budgets, tailored billing options, project rules and assignments. You can also use project groups to help organization.
Some of the most frequently used reports to provide this clarity are:
1. Project List
The Project List report allows project managers to visualize which jobs they should have eyes on, current contract amounts, as well as project start and due dates.
Value: This report will allow your management team to have a current list of active projects/phases, as well as due dates. Consider scheduling this report by project manager.
Value: Similar to the Project List report covered earlier, this Project Status report can also be used to highlight projects over/under contract amounts in relation to the value of billable services performed. [N/A represents no contract limit]
Value: This is a “heartbeat” type of report which can highlight project completion progress, and also features a work in progress “To Be Spent” column.
Value: Not only does this report help keep your team informed for remaining tasks, managers can also easily identify where budget overages occurred.
5. Due Projects
Project Management & Time Tracking Reports
To be honest, every one of the reports on this article are technically “project management” related. The focus of this subsection is to provide guidance on setting project scope, employee schedules and then tracking actual progress made as time is logged to your projects.
You can find the GANTT chart features under the Project > Allocation & Forecasting section of CORE, and is an excellent tool to help visualize employee workloads.
It can also provide information on revenue forecasting based on expected billable value of time to be performed.
Once you have successfully configured employee tasks and dates, you can run either the Employee or Project based Allocations reports to display a list of time scheduled as well as completed vs remaining hours.
NOTE: Employees may also want to add Dashboard widgets to see assigned hours
Value: CORE’s Allocation & Forecasting features bring employee scheduling to the forefront. Your team will now be able to see pending vs completed tasks. Managers will also be able to see the billable value of the scheduled time. Use the built-in GANTT chart for visual tracking of project scope completion.
Value: This easy to read report displays the expected revenue for assigned tasks over a given period of time. Even if you bill fixed fee, your management team can now confidently compare set contract amounts vs the value of expected services.
Value: These To-Do entries may not be as detailed as allocations; however, the extra benefit here is that a completed To-Do can be automatically converted into a time entry.
Value: Save time on project review. Rather than scrolling through lists of time entries, use this graph report to display hours spent on a project by activity.
Tracking Vendor Bills & Employee Expenses
Pro Tip: You can also obtain a quick list of outstanding (unpaid) Vendor Bills by setting a filter by “payments status: unpaid” on the Payables > Vendor Bills screen.
Value: This report can be scheduled to provide a clear list of bills to pay on time
Value: The visual format of this report helps reduce the time required to review expenses, yet still provides the total costs and breaks out by expense type.
Value: This report lists out expenses in details, and automatically sorts the entries by project for easy review. The report also denotes important status flags; such as whether the expense entry is reimbursable back to the employee, if it has been paid, and/or billed.
Value: This concise report gives project managers a quick overview of billed amounts vs contract values, work remaining as well as percentage billed. Scheduling this report on a monthly basis, by project manager, can really help keep both job captains and the billing team aware of how much work is in the pipeline.
Another useful billing report is the Project Account Transaction Details report. It includes invoice details, payment date/method, as well as any retainer use.
Value: While there are many billing minded reports in CORE, this Project Account Transaction Details report is extremely useful for tracking the application of project retainers.
Note that “retainer applied” refers to income that was originally received (often in advance) as unearned income, and has now been applied to an invoice as earned income.
For example: This Therapy Center project has a fixed contract amount of $200,000 and has billed $22,876.82 to date. In addition to showing the fixed fee billing amount, this report also shows the earned value of billed services $21,770.00 which is (10.89%) of the contract value, with a total of $3,722.42 in cost to date.
Value: Project managers can review the health and profitability of a project summarized into one easy report.
Value: This easy to ready report allows you to gain a quick understanding of billed time and expense value vs cost, as well as overall project completion.
Value: This a very flexible report which can be filtered to show costs by employee, project, groups and/or date ranges. It is based directly on the burdened cost value of time and expense entered into the system, so it is critical to verify that employee rates and overhead multipliers are configured correctly.
Value: Centralizing project proposals, images, spreadsheet and other similar documents in the cloud can turn the nightmare of storage and version tracking into a breeze.
Value: The Project Notes report provides a convenient date driven list of important project information, such as changes to contract amounts, purchase orders and more.
Value: This report is a great option to use when you need to see not only estimated project progress, but also how much can be billed against a set contract.
Value: While it is certainly important to analyze projects and financials, consider using CORE’s employee level reports to gain a better understanding of employee performance, and the value of time billed with a write-up/write-down (WUD).
Value: This multifaceted report is not only great at providing a clear profit percentage, it also enables project review of earned value, unbilled time (WIP), payments and other key performance indicators. It also includes cost based review.
Compare milestone billing vs. project billing to get paid faster, improve cash flow, build client relationships, and finish projects on time.
Contract, budget, and billability analysis are three important key financial metrics used to measure your project performance.
In project management, an s-curve mathematical graph is used to track and evaluate the progress of a project, including employee hours and cost.
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