Progressive job-based businesses are achieving success in their ability to quantify all costs that are attributable towards the delivery of an outcome for a customer. Managing project costs can be time consuming, particularly when you don't have a real-time view of budgets vs. actuals, or when you can’t see job progression by invoices. Not having that level of visibility impacts project progress and profitability. For many organisations, one of the biggest critical success factors to better job and project accounting came down to the software they were using.
Many job-based businesses today are moving to a cloud-based ERP, helping them control project costs and gain accuracy of data, and improved insights.
We asked our customers what they found were the critical factors when deciding on the right finance solution to manage their job accounting. And how these factors attributed to a lot of their success.
For many businesses, there are separate systems to manage billing and purchase orders as well as payroll and inventory management. These platforms are disconnected and data is not consolidated across the systems. This may rely on multiple people inputting data into different systems, and a delay in reporting. Many businesses find this process time consuming, unreliable, and unproductive.
A key factor when considering the right platform came down to finding a solution that can manage the business in one place. With cloud ERP, your sales purchasing, accounts payable and receivables are all working out of the one system. You don’t need to have a separate accounting system and spreadsheets – it’s all in one place. Managing all these business functions in a modern ERP solution means that there is increased accuracy in the data, creating insights that lead to better decision making.
Traditional accounting software does not provide a detailed financial breakdown across projects. This is why many businesses today are looking for a solution that allows them to drill down into the data. To see how their projects are tracking based on how much you’ve invoiced, and how much percentage left you have both on job completion and from an invoicing standpoint.
But with a modern cloud ERP software like Wiise, you get up-to-date reporting, including line-by-line details of every project and job cost right down to the last detail, providing a precise view of budgets against actuals as well as automated WIP calculations. This also allows you to see all your projects by budgets and actuals, and drill down on remaining tasks required to progress the financial aspect of your job.
You can instantly see if there is overspending or underspending, enabling much more timely and better decision making, as well as avoiding nasty surprises.
Another issue with legacy systems is that WIPs often take a long time to update, which impacts visibility on project progress. For example, finance managers might have to wait until various Excel spreadsheets have been updated before they can see how things are tracking based on budgets vs actuals.
By using a cloud-based solution you get an immediate view of progress at any time. This extra clarity and confidence around numbers helps with vendor and supplier communication.
Trying to connect a legacy ERP system with a modern project management platform is frequently a nightmare. It either simply won’t work at all, or at best it’s limited and clunky, and likely requires a lot of manual work to get things from one system to the other. You may even have had to pay someone to develop middleware for you. Maintaining these integrations can be expensive and need to be custom built.
Another factor to consider when thinking about a new solution comes down to flexibility. How flexible is the platform? Does it allow for you to connect into other tools and systems easily? Our customers flagged this as critical. A modern cloud solution comes with integrations from the get-go. This enables you to connect other software and systems, including payroll, so data is seamlessly transferred and shared.
Payroll is one of most critical things when it comes to project accounting, as it’s frequently the biggest share of cost. Being able to map hours on a project accurately is vital. By managing job costs within your ERP system you can fully integrate employee timesheets with payroll. Instead of multiple people inputting in multiple systems, with the higher human error that results in, there’s less manual admin and higher accuracy. With Wiise it’s also ATO compliant so you can meet government reporting obligations and make super payments without the worry.
Security is another important factor for customers looking to find the right job accounting software. Many businesses are looking for a system that has the right data protection and security protocols – especially important in the age of cyber security risks.
Cloud vendors manage security and data privacy compliance. This is particularly important for projects with global suppliers, where complex international data regulations apply. Security and other upgrades are made automatically as part of the solution so it’s “future proof” - always with the very latest protection.
With cloud there’s also no issue of having to maintain legacy hardware and server upkeep, or pay for annual licenses you no longer need: you can simply pay for what you’re actually using, giving much more flexibility to scale up a growing business, or scale down after a major project is completed.
If you’d like to know more about how Wiise ERP can help you with project costing, get in touch or watch our webinar on Detailed Project Costing in Wiise.