3 Reasons You Should Use Intacct For Project Accounting

If your finance and leadership teams depend on project accounting to track everything from estimates, budgets, costs, billing, and success—and everything else in between—you can appreciate the value of accurate, timely data and swift insights. You need a solid understanding of how past projects performed so you can ensure you’re on target for each current project, not to mention future projects. With so many moving parts, you could easily say that the “devil is in the details;” but why not incorporate cloud accounting into your project management process and uncover the goldmine waiting to be explored?

Here’s how Intacct Projects will take your project accounting to the next level:

1. Control

With Intacct Projects, your team will be able to proactively track and access all your financial and non-financial project time, expense, and data—around the clock and in one web-based interface. It’s built to keep you in compliance, too, because you can configure all workflows, from entering time to approving payments, so they work with your organization’s specific process needs.

And you’ll be able to meet your clients’ needs with precision, tracking all aspects of project delivery, so your team stays on schedule and on budget. You’ll have access to both out-of-the-box and custom templates, for example, to ensure your invoices match each customers’ business needs.

When it comes to managing internal resources, Intacct Projects is remarkably flexible, enabling you to easily organize team members—employees and even subcontractors—for efficient scheduling. You can control their access to the system for tracking time, expenses, and more, depending on their roles.

Here’s a small sampling of Intacct Projects features that help you maintain control of your projects:

• Project dimension: Define valid projects with project-centric information and tag key transactions by project to see real-time project cost and revenue tracking in the general ledger.
• Time entry rules: Set business rules such as requiring notes on time entries or setting minimum and maximum daily values.
• Talent tracking: Associate positions, skills, and other criteria with your resources or employees, then quickly identify and assign the right resources to a project by searching by skills, availability, location, and more
• Multiple approval levels: Design multiple levels of approval, including expense approval by amount, and automatically email supervisors about approvals, speeding up the reimbursement process.
• Business system integration: Easily integrate with external systems including Salesforce, other CRM solutions, and industry-standard time and expense systems.

2. Automation

The key to streamlined efficiency, increased productivity, and enhanced data accuracy is automation. Intacct Projects is designed to help you automate exactly the processes you need. You’ll have the capability to automate all billable and non-billable time and expenses, from submission to approval. That means billable items are automatically tracked and invoiced—from timesheets, expense reports, AP transactions, and purchase orders—even if your organization has complex billing terms, rules, and schedules, like those associated with deferred revenue.

Here are a few of the system features that support process and workflow automation:

• Indirect costing: Improve profitability reporting by automatically allocating and posting indirect costs to projects and using multiple layered cost pools.
• Unified billing: Generate invoices that include time, employee expenses, and any other company charges and purchases related to a project.
• Automated revenue recognition: Use milestones, schedules, percentage completion, and project completion to drive revenue recognition and gain accurate forecast visibility into a project’s impact on revenue.
• Configurable routing rules: Automatically notify managers of pending actions or add T&E report approvals to each manager’s dashboard.
• Automatic markups: Ensure profitability by automatically applying a percentage markup on any billable transaction.

For more on the power of Automation, don’t miss How Intacct’s Cloud-Based Financial Software Supprts Growing Businesses with Automation.

3. Insights

Finally, Intacct project’s multidimensional general ledger gives your team real-time visibility into all aspects of your business so you can answer detailed questions about profitability, costs, revenue streams, and virtually any other project-related operational or financial issue. That’s because you’ll have easy access to comprehensive reports and role-based dashboards that help drive informed decision-making across the project stages, whether you’re analyzing a past project, monitoring the budget for an active project, or developing quotes for future project bids. Consider these product features that make it possible for you to enjoy deeper insights into your projects’ success:

• Project-specific dashboards and reports: Get up-to-the-minute financial, managerial, and operational reports as soon as timesheets and expenditures are submitted and view current backlogs, project status, and revenue streams.
• Report filters: Filter or breakout financial reports by projects to better understand profitability by project.=
• KPI reports and graphs: Analyze key performance indicators—including project and client profitability, project delivery costs, average revenue per service delivery, and employee utilization—with more than 25 reports designed specifically for projects.
• User-configurable portfolio and detailed Gantt charts: See real-time project operational status in user-configurable Gantt charts with drilldown capability, so you have greater visibility into the resource planning and progress of your projects.

Find out How the Cloud Provides Real Time Insights for Real Time Decision Making.