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Projects, Budgets and Billing Plans

The Projects & Time console is where a project manager creates a project, breaks the work down, sets the cost budget and chooses how it will be invoiced. Approvals, billing, revenue recognition and resourcing all hang off this set-up.

Where to find it

Architect Panel → ERP - Projects & Time:

  • Projects & Time — the console
  • Work Breakdown — work breakdown items
  • Project Budgets — budget lines
  • Billing Plans — how each project is invoiced

Admin Panel → Projects & Time:

  • Projects & Time — the same console for staff who are not architects

Who can use it

ERP: Projects can do everything here. ERP: Finance can do the financial acts (billing, revenue recognition, WIP and expense posting) but not change a project's structure, budget, plan or approvals. ERP: Reporting opens it read-only. Approving needs write access to the company; invoicing and posting need post access (see Getting Started with ERP).

Where projects are kept

The ERP ships its own Projects datastore, connected through the erp.project binding, so projects can be created straight away. An ERP administrator can repoint that binding on ERP Bindings at your own project datastore. No project datastore is connected means the binding is missing or disabled.

Creating a project

  1. Pick the Company, and on the Portfolio tab click New project.
  2. Enter a Code (unique within the company) and a Name.
  3. Set Start, End and Status (Proposed, Active, On hold, Completed, Closed or Cancelled; the last three are not offered for time).
  4. Choose the Client; invoices go to it unless the billing plan says otherwise.
  5. Optionally set Project manager, Cost centre and Customer reference.
  6. Tick Internal project for research, pre-sales or overhead work: it is never invoiced and needs no client or billing plan.
  7. Click Create project. It opens on the Project tab.

The project workspace

An open project shows its key figures (cost budget, actual and committed cost, billed, to bill, margin, CPI and SPI) and six sections: Overview (health, earned value and Record progress), Work breakdown, Budget, Billing, Revenue and Team.

Work breakdown

Click Add top-level item for each phase, then Add below to break a phase into work packages, tasks and milestones. Each item has a Name, a Type, Start, End (or due, for a milestone), Planned hours and a Billable work tick. Time is booked to the lowest level. List and Schedule show the items as a table or a timeline.

Mark complete on a milestone makes its billing events due for the next billing run. Remove is refused for an item with children, booked time, a budget, allocations or billing events.

Budget

Under Add or replace a budget line, choose the Cost type and the Work package (or Whole project), enter Hours / qty, Cost and Revenue, and click Save. There is one line per cost type and work package: saving the same pair again replaces it. A milestone's revenue sets its billing amount. Budget against actual, by cost type shows budget, actual, committed and remaining.

Billing plan

On Billing, choose what the plan Bills from:

  • Time and materials: approved time and rechargeable expenses at their captured rates; Time and materials, capped never bills past the Cap.
  • Fixed price: the Fixed price in Instalments at a Frequency.
  • Milestone billing: each milestone bills its revenue budget, the fixed price split across any that has none.
  • Retainer: a Retainer per period.

Also set Contract value (what revenue recognition measures against), Payment terms (days), Invoice to, Invoice as (the sales document type), Revenue recognition and Currency, and click Create plan. For a fixed, milestone or retainer plan, Generate schedule creates the billing events. Raising the invoices is covered in Projects, WIP & Revenue Recognition.

What goes wrong

  • "No sales document type exists": create one first (see Transactional Documents).
  • The Overview says "Needs attention": it lists why, for example no billing plan, no cost budget, over 85% of the budget used, CPI below 0.9, a negative margin, or approved time unbilled for 45 days. Over budget, low CPI and negative margin mark it At risk; the rest Watch.
  • Buttons are greyed out: your role is read-only for that action.

Worked example

A consultancy wins a fixed-price implementation. The project manager creates IMP-204, adds phases Discovery, Build and Handover, each ending in a milestone, and saves a labour budget line per phase. The plan is Milestone billing at a fixed price of 60,000, recognised by percentage of completion. Generate schedule creates three billing events; when Discovery's milestone is marked complete, the next billing run invoices it.

Recommendations

  • Set a cost budget on every project, or variance and earned value cannot be measured.
  • Keep the work breakdown to about three levels.
  • Choose the billing plan before work starts; a project with no plan cannot be invoiced.
  • Mark internal projects as internal so they do not appear as loss-making client work.