Project Costing & Billing

Integrated end-to-end project management – for Businesses Living IN Change (BLINC)™

What is it?

Agresso Project enables optimal use of resources, as well as automation and tight management for all processes in a project. It covers the whole cycle: from project initiation (including estimates, budgeting, forecasts, commitments and planning); through to resourcing and costing (capturing all cost elements such as time, purchasing, expenses, payroll, contract administration, sales orders and even depreciation via Fixed Assets); all the way to billing, reporting and analysis.

Who is it for?

Agresso Project is designed to meet the needs of fast-changing organizations that manage any type or scale of jobs or projects. Project managers use it to achieve maximum profitability and optimize the cash flow of their projects, while satisfying their customers' expectations.

How can it help?

Ability to model project structures "your way"

The module's flexible design enables project structures to be modeled to suit widely varying, or even entirely unique business requirements. This is crucial, since a "project" may mean different things to each organization and to the individuals within it. Agresso Project also enables comprehensive analysis of all project elements and reporting hierarchies, empowering managers to define reporting and control mechanisms.

Full project visibility and control at any time

Out-of-the-box enquiry tools provide project managers with full project visibility. They can anticipate issues as early as possible, keep progress on track and ensure all targets are achieved. For example: cross-module enquiries to pull together time costs, budgets, purchase orders, commitments, revenue, statistical information, and so on. The module's tight process and procedural controls also deliver maximum project oversight, ensuring correct security, authorization, access and cost allocations are applied. Additionally, user-definable authorization controls and comprehensive validation of time and expenses ensure correct posting of costs to the project.

Workflow saves time, maximizes cash flow and minimizes cost recovery time

Agresso's Workflow tools allow processes to be automated, improving efficiency and information flow and ensuring that expenses relating to projects are approved and billed quickly. This speeds up the recovery of costs from customers, optimizing cash flow.

A broader integrated solution

The strengths of the Agresso Project module are multiplied, when used as a fully integrated part of the broader Agresso Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. For example:

• Core Financials - expenses and payroll, contract administration.
• HR -shared resource/personnel master file; integration with competency and training modules to ensure that appropriately qualified resources are assigned to projects; integration with absence module to ensure appropriate resource allocations and utilization.
• Planner - project estimates, budgeting and planning details.
• Sales Orders and Procurement - immediate update of project costs based on purchase information, thus ensuring accurate project costs.

What does it do?

The tools and features of Agresso Project include:

• Project definition - flexible project elements such as project structure and roll-up definition, and unlimited user-definable information capture fields.

• Exception monitoring and alerts - to highlight specific events such as unusually high timesheet bookings or projects about to come to the end of their planned life.
• Integrated document management - for project documents, correspondence, contracts, project plans, drawings, website links and so on.
• Project reporting and control - detailed time tracking, full support for project accounting, cross-module enquiries pulling together: time costs, budgets, purchase orders, commitments, revenue, statistical information, and so on.
• Pre-defined cost elements - enabling automated cost postings. This eliminates much manual effort, and increases consistency and accuracy of costs and revenues.
• Automated billing - ensuring timely and accurate control over revenue and cash flow.
• Project cost and expense capture:
  • multiple deployment methods such as web-based self-service, your corporate portal or via rich Windows-client
  • support for various timesheet entry methods with automated validation and look-up facilities (personal timesheet entry, group entry, periodic entry)
  • draft timesheets can be entered within the timesheet period and submitted when the user is ready
  • infrastructure support for external clock-card or other time-capture devices.
  

• Invoicing- to ensure relevant costs are invoiced quickly, ensuring maximum recovery, profitability and optimal cash flow, through:
  • automated billing, with optional user intervention and override: invoice proposal, maintenance and confirmation
  • support for time & materials billing, fixed price, cost plus, inter-company, phased billing and partial invoicing
  • flexible price structures, with multiple price lists: e.g. standard, customer-specific, project-specific price lists with exceptions, uplifts and discounts, handling charges, ceiling limits, and stepped prices, effective dates.
• Project estimating and tracking- the ability to define:
  • multiple budgets with multiple versions of each
  • estimates by work order, project, activity, project milestones, draft projects.
• Resource planning and deployment- to maintain accurate control of who is doing what, when, why and for how long, to ensure the best use of available resources:
• detailed resource search capabilities based on skills and availability
• allocation of resources to individual projects, department, cost codes, leaders etc.
• resource allocation rules, to ensure proper skills and availability cross-checking against work schedules
• "what-if" scenario analysis to identify optimum mix.