Every business needs to understand and control costs. Sometimes high level cost analysis is enough, but more often than not, businesses need to know true costs on specific activities or projects in order to evaluate how profitable they are or were. It is not uncommon for companies to “guess” or estimate how profitable individual jobs or projects are. Having this precise, detailed information can take the guesswork out and help you make adjustments going forward, ensuring increased profits.
Cost analysis is easy at a high level because there are common reports such as a summary profit & loss statement. If you want to analyze at a lower level, such as Division or Department, it requires more detailed data but all mid-market ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software systems easily accommodate those breakdowns.
Specific industries, such as construction and mechanical contracting have been using job cost software to analyze costs at the job level for years. Why can’t organizations in other industries take advantage of this same technology, apply it to their unique business and reap the same benefits? Whether you need to analyze costs or units (such as hours) by team, project, or activity, we believe there is a fit and the benefits are real.
Job or project costing software can be easily applied to track estimated time and cost on a defined group of activities. Unit tracking (hours, sales leads, headcount) and dollar tracking (expenses from purchasing, payroll, inventory, etc.) provide a wealth of detail for metrics, and does not clutter up the chart of accounts with detail that is difficult to extract and hard to manage.
We have been working with WennSoft Job Cost for many years and applying it in many different scenarios. When coupled with Microsoft Dynamics GP, Job Cost proves to be the best of breed for seamless integration, easy management and reporting. Projects can be copied (templates) for efficient and consistent setup, estimates can be imported or data entered, and there’s one display window that reports everything a project manager would want to know about the status such as estimate to actual, units and dollars posted to date, and what’s outstanding on purchase orders. And because it is integrated with GP, you eliminate the need for duplicate data entry for all of these things.
What do you think? I would love the opportunity to discuss this with you further, so leave a comment with your thoughts or questions!
Tags: job cost, project, project cost, tracking project data, wennsoft
