Reporting Profitability per Project

A common question for us from customers and clients would be how to achieve profitability per project or how to get a real-time view of our profitability per project.

This comes down to having simple access to the data that you need when you need it and that comes down to the project structure.

Once a project is structured within LiveCosts, we have a plan, we have expectations; it’s about the connection point between what happens in the estimating software or the quoting side of the business and where things are reported on from the end result, which is usually the accounting product.

What LiveCosts does creates a connection point between the expectations that we have on the project, i.e. quote estimate, or the result, which is basically held in the accounting software, which a lot of the time is a postmortem.

We don’t want to be holding post-mortems on projects!

We want to get that real-time view over the project and how we get to achieve that is by setting that up from day one. Connecting everybody to that project – anyone that has a financial responsibility to that project, should be connected to that project.

We can then set up the project in a way that makes sense to the reporting. So reverse engineer our thinking.

• What do we need to see here at a glance when we look in at a project?
• Where am I?
• What are any flags that I want to see in terms of things not going well?
• How do I want to see this project progress?

That’s going to structure a project, that might be cost codes, that might be structuring budget of labour materials at high-level thinking, it might be breaking that down into further divisions, etc.

We can then connect all those data points to that project and give you the comfort of understanding exactly where you stand at any given point of time from the cost breakdown.
In relation to income, we’ll pull that straight from the accounting software which is now going to show us exactly where we are in terms of what we claimed against the contract versus what we spent against the contract versus what we committed to spend, broken down by phase broken down by cost type.