Take Control of Your Projects, Empower Leadership

Empower leadership to take command and control of the entire project lifecycle.

A good CFO Advisor can empower leadership to take command and control of the entire project lifecycle—scope, estimates, budgets, people, time, costs, revenue, change orders, billing, margins, forecasts and status—and then use the results across projects to make better decisions.

That’s project control.

Not simply knowing whether a project made money after it’s over.

It’s knowing what is happening, why it’s happening, where the project appears to be heading and what management can still do about it.

Don’t Wait Until the Project Is Over

Traditional financial reporting is largely historical. By the time management discovers that a project missed its expected margin, exceeded its budget or consumed substantially more resources than anticipated, the work may be finished.

The opportunity to change the outcome is gone.

Projects in Intuit Enterprise Suite can provide management with a very different view.

Budgets and estimates can establish the financial plan. Actual income, costs and activity can then be compared with that plan as work progresses. Project reporting can show estimates versus actuals, work in progress, costs, billing, project status, cost to complete and profitability.

The objective isn’t another dashboard.

It’s knowing where a project appears to be heading while you still have time to influence where it ends up.

Control Means Seeing the Whole Project

A project isn’t just revenue and expenses.

Is the scope still what you originally agreed to deliver?

Are actual costs tracking to budget?

Is labor running above estimate?

Are committed costs accounted for?

Are additional customer requests being documented and priced?

Are billable time and expenses actually being billed?

Is revenue keeping pace with the work being performed?

What is the current projected cost to complete?

And most importantly:

Is the project still headed toward its targeted margin?

Intuit Enterprise Suite brings many of these financial and operational measures together so management can see the project as an interconnected whole rather than as a collection of separate transactions and reports.

Your People Are Part of the Equation

For many project-driven and professional-service businesses, labor is one of the largest project costs—and one of the easiest to misunderstand.

An employee’s salary or hourly wage isn’t necessarily the employee’s true cost to the business.

Associating employee time and costs with individual projects can help management understand what its people are actually costing a project and how those costs compare with what was estimated.

That makes some important management questions possible:

Are we estimating enough labor? Are we assigning the appropriate resources? Are too many hours being consumed by nonbillable work? Are we pricing projects sufficiently to recover the resources they actually require?

Those aren’t bookkeeping questions.

They’re project-control decisions.

Revenue Can Fool You

Suppose one project generates $125,000 of revenue and $43,000 of gross profit.

Another generates $150,000 of revenue but only $22,000 of gross profit.

Which project do you want more of?

The larger project generated 20% more revenue—but roughly half the gross profit.

Now multiply that across 5, 10, 20, 50 or 100 projects.

The important question is no longer simply:

“Did this project make money?”

It’s:

“What are our most profitable projects doing differently?”

That answer can affect what you bid, how you price, whom you assign, which customers you pursue and where you deploy your resources and capital.

Control the Project While It’s Moving

Projects don’t stand still.

Costs change. Labor changes. Schedules change. Scope changes. Customers request additional work. Estimates that looked reasonable at the beginning may no longer reflect what is actually happening.

Change orders can formally capture changes in project scope and pricing and update estimated project cost and income after acceptance. Budgets can be compared with actual costs, and profitability can be monitored against goals.

The Project Management AI adds assistance throughout the project lifecycle—including project setup, estimates, budgets, planning, task assignment, profitability monitoring, deviation analysis, suggested corrective actions and project closeout.

That gives management the opportunity to:

PLAN. EXECUTE. MONITOR. ADJUST. PROFIT. REPEAT.

Not after the project.

While it is happening.

One Project Gives You Information. Many Projects Give You Intelligence.

This may ultimately be the most valuable part.

When projects are structured and tracked consistently, leadership can begin looking across the entire portfolio.

Which project types consistently produce the strongest margins?

Where do costs repeatedly exceed estimates?

Which jobs routinely experience scope changes?

Which customers or engagements consume disproportionate resources?

Where are estimates consistently wrong?

Which pricing assumptions are working?

Which projects tie up resources or capital without producing an adequate return?

Which work should you pursue more aggressively—and which should you stop chasing?

Multi-project reporting can expose patterns that aren’t obvious when projects are viewed individually. And when a project closes, its results can become intelligence for estimating, pricing, staffing and managing the next one.

One project tells you what happened.

Many projects can tell you what to do next.

From the Bookkeeping Desk to the Boardroom™

Technology can collect, organize, compare, forecast and analyze an extraordinary amount of project information.

But software doesn’t decide which information matters most to your business, which questions leadership should be asking, or what management should do when the answers aren’t what it expected.

That’s where CFO Advisory comes in.

At FPG-USA, we can help assess how your business currently manages project scope, estimates, budgets, people, time, costs, revenue, change orders, billing, margins and forecasts; identify what leadership isn’t seeing today; and determine whether capabilities already available through QuickBooks Online and Intuit Enterprise Suite can turn that information into something management can actually use.

You don’t need another report.

You need the ability to plan, execute, monitor and adjust your projects while there is still time to influence the outcome.

And then use what you learned to make the next project better.

People + Projects + Insights = A Stronger Tomorrow.

If you’re not getting those answers today, that’s a conversation worth having.