Web Suite is a project-centric system that supports an unlimited number of projects. After winning a project, you need to plan and set up the scope of work to do, which can be as broad or as narrow as you want. Web Suite allows you to charge time and expenses to it and accordingly bill your client. All the billable and non-billable charges, issues and events occurring over the life of a project affects its budget, job costs, billing, profitability and utilization. The quality of project management depends on timely, complete and accurate capture and processing of time and expenses, which is why Web Suite is the best solution for your project management needs.
Web Suite provides the following solutions and benefits, enabling you to manage your projects in the most efficient way.
Descriptive IDs can communicate useful information, especially if you plan their structure well. You can sort grids and lists by activity, project, client, employee and other IDs, making it easier and faster to work. For companies offering a single category of services, Web Suite provides the option to auto-create project codes from the client profile, saving time during initial setup.
Web Suite records each project with a unique ID linked to a client, who authorizes and pays for the work. A project’s scope can be broken down into parts called phases, segments and sub-segments. In essence, Web Suite supports up to four levels in a project hierarchy. Each project record can have agreed-on contract provisions like fee, contract amount and type, manager, budget, estimate, fee schedule, employees, activities and expenses assigned to it.
In Web Suite, project contract types trigger business-processing rules. Web Suite provides different contract types or billing arrangements to track information for any of these purposes:
Billing and revenue
Marketing
Overhead
For instance, revenue-generating projects can be assigned Fixed Fee (lump sum), Hourly (time and materials), Hourly Not to Exceed, Recurring or Cost Plus contracts.
For projects that your company is trying to win, you can use ‘Marketing’ contract. Tracking of marketing time and expense can begin when a new or existing client calls. Conversations, budget and estimate preparations, meetings, planning and bid proposals—all affect a project’s profitability. After winning a project, you can carry out your plan through to the final close of the project.
Finally, you can use ‘Overhead’ contract to track internal activities and expenses like education, staff meetings and research. In any case, time and expenses flow to the project, giving you accurate billing, profitability and management information. You can set up one or more research projects for the company with the objective of improving your services and expanding your professional offerings to customers. An overhead project will require you to set up your company as a ‘client’ and then assign the overhead project to it.
Web Suite enables you to assign a project manager who is responsible for that project. This is essential for proper tracking and managing of projects. Project managers can be assigned ‘manager level’ security permissions and ‘role’ to handle their projects in Web Suite. You can give them exclusive access to managerial reports for tracking and reporting of project issues.
making billing decisions
post-project analysis as part of the company’s continuous improvement and client evaluation process
recording collections conversations
trying to get in touch with the project manager to get some answers
The To Do List feature allows you to create a list of tasks to do. It allows you to assign tasks to any employee, set priority on them, track the status of each item and get reminders, thus making project execution and management an efficient yet simple process. It supports various types of tasks and categorization with specific start-end dates.
Web Suite enables you to specify rules and preferences that affect the management of your projects. These settings can be set at the project level or global level to let you control the progress of projects, their billing and related aspects.
As you would already know, budgets are a good way to track the expected revenue or cost of a project against the actual. On the other hand, estimates can support later-stage marketing efforts with a bid to provide specified services. For many professional services firms – architects, engineers, IT consultants, surveyors, computer consultants, etc. – it is the ‘estimate’ that is sent to the clients as part of their bid proposal. When accepted, it usually becomes the foundation for the project contract or engagement letter. Some companies start with a preliminary budget and then convert it to an estimate, and can go through multiple iterations until the client signs off. After being signed off and project begins, project managers keep track of the budgeted project.
Web Suite enables you to use budgets and estimates for many purposes, including:
Compare the actual vs. budgeted items on a daily or weekly routine. This helps project managers gauge progress of a project and identify issues that need immediate management attention.
Analyze actual-to-budget results to improve operations, employee skill sets, fee structures and other aspects of profitable delivery of services to clients.
Use the total budget amount as the contract amount.
Restrict employees, expenses and activities to the budgeted ones while making time and expense entry.
Use budgets to assign employees and consultants to a project with specific tasks, hours and expenses, then use the ‘Budget by Employee’ report to track whether those employees are over or under budget for the assigned task.
Track budget line items by percentage done, provided you have assigned a budget to a project.
Create purchase orders, manual invoices and project controls from a budget.
Web Suite budgets and estimates include separate service and expense portions that can draw bill rates from fee schedules. You can use the same budget for several projects and include useful reports that compare budgeted hours and amounts to what you spent, how much remains, and whether you are over or under budget for a project.
Web Suite allows project or billing managers to set up service fee schedules and expense fee schedules containing special bill and cost rates for projects. With fee schedules, Web Suite eliminates manual entry and changing of alternative rates or setting up extra codes for special situations. After assigning a fee schedule, you can relax and watch how Web Suite determines automatically whether to apply the default or special rates to time or expense entries.
Web Suite also enables you to assign a Delayed SFS to projects to handle specific situations in which the bill rate changes based on a trigger event (for example, project retainer balance, recurring amount, unbilled hours or unbilled amount). A company can use a Delayed SFS when offering prepaid services that are used over a period. For example, an IT company can offer a discounted bill rate for purchasing a certain number of hours or dollar value of help desk, remote assistance or on-demand consulting services. Employees or vendors charge their hours to these prepaid service projects until it exceeds the trigger value. Then onwards, Web Suite automatically replaces the regular SFS with the Delayed SFS.
The Project Control feature enables the managers to limit who can charge time and expenses to a project. The net effect is that lists are significantly shorter, resulting in faster time and expense entry. It also increases data accuracy because there is less chance for error. For example, if you assign three employees to work on a construction project, only those employees will see that project in their time and expense entry lists.
Web Suite also provides employee control that works with security settings to manage what information an employee can view and use throughout Web Suite. It results in faster interaction with Web Suite because data is limited to assigned projects, activities and expenses. For example, if you assign John to work on six projects, he will see only those projects in all lists. Employee control ensures that all relevant data is available to project managers but confidential data is not accessible to all employees.
Web Suite allows you to set expectations for how long it should take to complete tasks (allocated hours) or how much expenses to incur (allocated units) on each project. This establishes a self-policing process where project managers do not need to micro-manage timekeepers and their tasks. Your staff knows what you expect from them.
Many companies conduct a post-project analysis as part of their continuous improvement strategy. Project managers need reports for many reasons and situations, including:
Tracking work-in-progress for projects
Determining whether projects are under or over-budget
Comparing the budgeted amount to the actual amount spent
Tracking the qualitative information about project progress
Reviewing time and expense entries against projects
Determining due dates of projects
Analyzing billing details of projects
Checking staff performance on projects
Web Suite allows project managers and executives to produce project reports on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Using these reports combined with qualitative information captured in the project journal and memos, managers know what went well and what did not. This helps in making your future clients more satisfied and projects more profitable.
Web Suite’s built-in workflow event tracking feature enables managers and reviewers track the entire submittal-approval process and take the desired action on events. The Workflow screen allows you to view the status of all submitted, approved or rejected time and expenses, invoices, vendor bills, etc. – all in one screen. From here, reviewers and managers can check the details of the event, action taken and status.