Project Costing and Billing

Agresso Project Costing and Billing is an integral part of the Agresso Business World solution, a fully-integrated suite of ERP solutions for companies in the professional services and public sectors. It provides far-reaching control over all the people, processes and costs that go into a successful project.

Project Costing and Billing combined with Agresso’s workflow automation capabilities can better control projects to maximize resources and ensure project success. With process automation and standardization, the overhead required to administer projects—whether they are simple internal tasks or complex, multinational contracts—can be greatly reduced. At the same time, project execution can be enhanced, full attribution of costs can be precisely assigned and invoicing and collections can become more efficient.

Agresso’s Project Costing and Billing provides the necessary control required to ensure a successful project. From project definition and cost capture to invoicing and performance monitoring, it uses powerful automation tools to streamline administrative tasks, while providing managers with in-depth information for maximum visibility and control. Because Project Costing and Billing integrates with Agresso’s Procurement Management application, its power drives greater purchasing efficiencies on projects while ensuring that accurate information is provided to all back-office processes. The result is profitable projects that finish on time, on target and on budget.

Project Costing and Billing provides a flexible structure that can be adapted to address virtually any project scenario, no matter how complex, how diverse the resources required or how long the project’s duration. Agresso Business World can easily handle projects that span multiple years. Multiple employee types, compensation rules, vendors and time-tracking methods can be defined, deployed and managed with ease.

The Project master file acts as the central repository for project information and management. In addition to accepting inputs via Agresso Business World, electronic documents can be attached, such as scanned contracts, drawings, websites or Microsoft Project files to the project record. This creates a single, coherent view of the entire project, streamlining management and analysis.

Comprehensive reporting ensures that project managers are forewarned of potential problems. At the same time, these reports provide a powerful informational tool that allows financial oversight for closely monitoring cash flow and maximizing profitability.

Costing – Time and Expenses makes it easier to capture costs, expenses and purchases and automatically apply them to the project, as well as other areas in Agresso (for example, Payroll or Invoice Management). Self-service functionality via the internet allows employees to enter their own timesheets. Timesheets can be customized to record time and costs in virtually any way needed and they include support for flextime.

In addition, Agresso can automatically track time through external devices such as time-clock cards, tracking both costs and attendance. Business processes, like purchase authorization, can be automated, with customizable business rules enforced to ensure that costs stay within budget.

The Project Invoicing module ensures that all costs are properly passed on to customers, automating many day-to-day tasks to reduce administrative demands on project managers. Not only does this ensure timely cash flow, it frees project managers to focus on delivering value on the project, enhancing customer satisfaction. Further, Agresso gives complete flexibility in invoice format and methods so the invoice can be easily delivered according to the customer’s preferences, which helps avoid exceptions and payment delays.

Resource Planning uses gap analysis to reconcile the resources that exist, the resources needed to complete the project (and future projects) and the resources already allocated to other projects. Resource Planning allows modeling of numerous “what-if” scenarios, making it easy to identify the optimum mix of people and resources. Agresso will identify if and when new employees or contractors need to be brought on board and how they should be allocated to projects.

Once project managers identify the resource demands of a project, Resource Deployment can automate many of the steps needed to activate them, such as sending hiring requirements to Human Resources or pushing tasks out to internal workers via assignment calendars.

Secure, on-line access puts all the planning, estimating and invoicing tools at the project manager’s fingertips, allowing them to securely access these functions 24/7 via the internet.

Unlike stand-alone spreadsheet applications, project managers can use this integrated module to import vital information from other areas of Agresso Business World, such as Resource Planning, to simplify project estimation. In addition, this information can then be carried directly into the budget portion of Project Costing and Billing, greatly streamlining the entire budgeting process.

Agresso’s Project Costing and Billing module integrates seamlessly with popular third-party tools such as Microsoft Project, allowing users to leverage both products effectively.

The Contract Management functionality offers the ability to define contract terms for outsourced services, products and time, and then track those outsourced resources to ensure contracted costs and invoicing adhere to the terms of the contract.