In my career in years of being a leading technology solution provider, I have always seconded the thought that project management is a tricky endeavour. You need to always be on your toes. You need to remember deadlines, all the communication that you had with the client and keep up with the trends that are shaking up the related landscapes. The constraints that act as a hiccup for the successful completion of projects are time, budget and defining project scope.
Microsoft Business Central is a comprehensive answer to all these concerns. Starting from resource allotment, monitoring the use of the machinery and equipment to completing the project within set budgets, everything can be managed from the Project Management application in Business Central. Let’s dive deep into the functionalities of this ERP solution.
Overview of How Business Central Acts as a Reliable Project Management Application
Microsoft Business Central is equipped with several features that allow you to manage budgets, resource management as well as the status of numerous projects.
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Creating jobs
When you start a project, create a job card that has job tasks and job planning lines integrated with it. Defining job tasks for every job is necessary because that’s the only way to set up a job planning line and predict the resource or equipment consumption for that activity. The job planning line displays the use of resources, items and other ledger expenses. Using the layered structure for job cards enable you to break your jobs into smaller tasks and get better visibility of it. You can figure out if you are meeting project delivery milestones or if there is a budget overrun.
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Recording resource usage for each job
You can review resource or equipment usage and modify them when you transfer the information between jobs and the invoices. There are two planning lines that you can define to record the resources’ consumption. The first one is the budget and the second one is billable. You can mention the quantity of resource usage in the job and can control if the same quantity needs to be transferred to the invoices. By finding the difference between the quantity of resources in invoice and the quantity initially defined when entering the job enables you to identify the correct resource usage.
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Recording time
Timesheets in Business Central are available in seven-day increments. You can use it to allow resources to log time spent on a task or you can use it as a simple time register for your employees. Once you have defined the use of timesheet for your organisation, you can define the manner in which it will be approved. You can designate a time sheet approver for every resource, or you can designate project managers or the administrators to approve time sheets. This will enable them to do the project management appropriately as they know which resources are available to take up the tasks and how much time a resource takes to complete a job.
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Managing job budgets
Adhering to the set budgets is another typical aspect of project management. You can define the budget for a single job or multiple activities in Business Central. You can easily compare the budget with the resource consumption to control the pace of your ongoing project and avoid the future mistakes of under or overestimating the projects.
Fuel your Business Growth with Microsoft Business Central
Microsoft Business Central introduces the flexibility and much-needed ability to have a high-level visibility of all the activities in your project. There are many other capabilities of Business Central that help you ace every business aspect.
Get in touch with a Microsoft Solutions Partner like us to understand the implementation of this ERP for streamlining your business processes. We have experience of working with businesses of different sizes and verticals and hence are the ideal company to suggest a solution that is specific to your business. To get in touch with one of our experts today, call 1300 EXIGOTECH (394 468) or email us at . Let’s get in touch to put technology at the core of your business process and yield intended benefits.