How to set up live project cost tracking

Another common question that customers/clients will come to us with, is a question around how they can set up live project cost tracking. The first thing I would always say about live project cost tracking is there needs to be a buy-in.

If it’s not a buy-in from the full company, i.e. if it’s not everyone in the company that’s bought into this, we’re gonna have someone working in a silo on a spreadsheet or we’re not connecting the action of what’s happening on the project. We’re not going to be able to achieve live project cost tracking. What we want to avoid is the ability of this idea of holding post mortems on projects where all the invoices have come in, they’ve been processed in accounts and now we’re going to actually sit down and look at the result of what happened.

It’s a dangerous way to play it, but we want to get to a point to be able to see exactly what’s happening. So once we have a buy-in or a commitment from a management or a commitment from a director to say, listen, this is the way we’re going to go, people are not going to work in silos, people are not going to be just doing things willy-nilly on the projects, we’re going connect all that data together. Which is very, very simple to do. It’s about just placing an app on every individual’s project or on silos.

Then we can create visuals. Now we can create data. So cost tracking can be complicated, but if we want to simply be able to see income V’s costs or income V’s costs as a total, across the company or at a project level, so we can also look at a project level, we can build simple dashboards, simple visuals that are gonna show us what was on the contract, what’s being claimed against the contract, what’s being spent against the contract, what’s being committed to spend against the contract, what’s left in the budget.

We can also see how we track on a daily basis, set up alerts. So, if we’ve any alerts on cost codes or any alerts on phases, we can set that up so we understand in real time exactly what’s happening or where the danger is on any of these projects.

So, if you’d like to understand how we can set up live project cost tracking for your company and your projects, please visit LiveCosts.com. Feel free to take a free trial or a product tour.