Introducing the Nexus Financial Suite

ProWorkflow has released an exciting new update to our Nexus platform: introducing the Financial Suite! Featuring a Financial tab to control and track your Cost, Budget, and Bill figures, a Profitability tracking tab to ensure you stay on track to be profitable, exciting new Financial options for Items (including Split Rates!), as well as expanded Financial settings, the Financial Suite is designed to track and control your finances in real-time, to maximize profitability.

Financial Tab

The Financial Tab is designed to help you determine the cash inflow and outflow of your project. It is broken down into three different columns: Project Costs, your client’s Budget, and the Bill Total for your client.

Costs can be tracked in one of two ways. You can either use the Staff Cost rates, which will pull the staff pay rate used in your Settings/Hourly Rates/Cost and Charge Rates Defaults, or the Hourly Cost rate, which will use the cost listed in the Hourly Rates half of the same page. You can also turn this off in scenarios where you aren’t interested in cost tracking for this project.

Budget is what you and the client have agreed to or what you intend as an estimate to charge your client. This can be tracked by Set Rates (the sum of quantity and hours & rates) or turned off.

The Bill total is what you intend to charge your client. There are four different ways to calculate your Bill total: Fixed Fee, Time & Materials, Billable Phases/Milestones, and Set Rates (Fixed or Allocated). Fixed Fee means you have set a fixed billable total for your Project. Time and Materials bills against the time that is tracked against your project and the rates associated to any applicable materials. Billable Phases / Milestones means that set fees are designated to phases or milestones within the project. And Set Rates calculates a total based on both allocated and fixed rates against your items.

You can choose to use all of these columns, some of these columns, or none of these columns by modifying the Financial Settings on this page. You can also use these settings to modify the type of Charge Rate and Cost Rate you are using, as with this update we have introduced Split Rates which mean that different hourly rates can be allocated within the same Task/Item:

Profitability Tab

The Profitability Tab collates information from your Financial Tab, Items section, and Invoices to help you assess the relative profitability of your project in real-time. The chart shows both Current and Forecast financial data for your project, allowing you to track how you have done and easily see how you are predicted to do in the future. You are also able to track invoicing on this chart, allowing you to easily keep track of what invoicing has been done (and what invoicing needs to be done!).

For more information on how to use the Profitability Tab, please see our help article here.

Additional New Financial Items Options

With this big update to Nexus, several new item fields and item columns are available. New Columns for Items are designed to help you better organize and customize your view of items on your projects. The available Columns are General, Workflow, Time/Progress, Cost, Financial, and Forecast:

Within these Columns are different Item Fields. You can choose which Item Fields you want to view by clicking on “Columns” and selecting or de-selecting the Fields you wish to view. You can also re-order Fields within Columns by clicking to the left of a field and dragging.

The new Item fields that we have added to these Columns are as follows.

Cost Rate and Rate are now separate Fields in separate sections. Cost Rate is located in the “Cost” Column and refers to the internal or base rate of the item or task i.e. what that is going to cost your company. The Rate field is located in the “Financial” Column and refers to the charge out rate i.e. what you are going to charge your client for this item/task.

In the same Column you can find Cost to Date $ and Est Cost $ – these fields indicate the Time Spent against the Cost Rate $, and the total planned Cost for an item, respectively.

Both the Financial and the Forecast Columns now include a Budget field:

In the Financial Column the “Budget $” field refers to the total Budget amount i.e. what you have Budgeted for your Client to be paying for – depending on the type of item and the type of rate associated to it, this will either be a calculation based on time allocated x rate or quantity x sale price. This field is pre-tax.

In the Forecast Column the “Budget +/-” field refers to the predicted Budget total and indicates whether or not your project is on track to be over, under, or at the amount budgeted in the Financial section.

Also in the Financial section is the Billable $ field, which indicates the amount that you can bill your client for. The calculation for this field depends on the choices you make in the Financial tab i.e. are you billing via Fixed Fee, Time & Materials, Billable Phases/Milestones, or Set Rates (Fixed or Allocated). Based on this, the Billable $ field is used to set or calculate the billable amount.

Bulk Financial Management Tools for Items

With the new Financial fields and options available, we have introduced new bulk management tools for managing Item financials. To bulk-manage the financial settings for your items, select the items you wish to bulk-manage, this will automatically bring up the bulk-management menu:

From here you can select “Accounting/Tax” to manage the Accounting and Tax codes of these items, or “Financial” to manage the following Financial actions:

This allows you to use Set Price to set a price from an hourly rate; modify the Billable Type, change the Budget Type, or choose Apply Discount to apply a percent or dollar value discount to the items. If you are using the Set Price tool and are setting a price via either Margin or Markup, we also have a Financial Calculator tool here that will help you do calculate this.

Expanded Financial Settings

With our new Financial Suite and the new options available for tracking Financials on Items, we have expanded the available settings for controlling your financial options. In your Hourly Rates Library you can set both Cost and Charge rates for Staff:

You also now have an Hourly Rates Library, where you can set cost rates and charge rates against your own created categories rather than against individuals.

On the Accounting and Tax page, we’ve provided space to create a list of Tax Codes and Accounting Codes, which can then in turn be applied to items, as well as quotes and invoices. This is useful in scenarios where you may tax expenses and time differently.

If you’re integrated with one of our accounting partners, this page provides a few more functionalities. Tax Codes, Accounting Codes and Customers can be actively pulled and synced from your preferred partner. You can also choose whether or not to include tracking categories, which means you can more efficiently track certain item categories once they’ve made your way over to your accounting platform.

Products & Services Library

The Products & Services library allows you to add materials and fixed cost items. Things like goods and services can be listed here, and will be tied to certain item types. If you have an item that you sell on a per unit basis that has a per unit cost, this is a great place to put it.

Trial the Financial Suite Today!

Whether you are billing fixed cost projects or items, needing split rates, or wanting to forecast your profitability at-a-glance, our new Financial Suite offers a host of new features designed to work however suites your needs best. While the Financial Suite will be a paid add on in the future, for now it’s available to all our Nexus customers to trial at no additional cost. More information will be released soon regarding the pricing for this module. So if you’d like to check these exciting features out, just ask us to convert your account from Classic to Nexus, or start a trial or talk to one of our friendly team members today!