Why Your Project Manager Needs P&L Visibility (and the Tools to Give It)

Whether you are working for a non-profit and needing to ensure that your budget is returning a net positive for your charity, or you’re a business that depends on making a profit to pay employees and satisfy shareholders or investors, as a project manager you need P&L (Profit and Loss) visibility on your projects.

Why is P&L visibility an important industry standard?

 

Maintain visibility into revenue sources and billing

P&L visibility helps ensure that your projects are fiscally on track. Keeping track of time is important, but it’s not the only important metric, and time in and of itself is also not just a metric in a vacuum on its own – it directly impacts your finances. P&L visibility needs to encompass not just time, but also any applicable revenue sources, as well as your budget for both, and ideally both itemized and overall profits. ProWorkflow Nexus can capture and report on all of these metrics for you, in real time with our financial forecasting tools!

 

Provide insights for future Projects

Financial forecasting is key to applying P&L visibility to your future projects and ensuring that the data you obtain from past projects can be used to correct any mistakes in budgeting and ensure future projects are more profitable. With ProWorkflow’s reporting and financial forecasting tools, we automate most of that process for you, ensuring more accurate and timely budgetary numbers.

 

Good financial forecasting tools like ProWorkflow Nexus provide:

 

Management of Finances and Resources

Tracking time, resources, and both incoming and outcoming money is key to P&L visibility. Only by tracking all of these metrics against your scoped budget can you get an accurate picture of your P&L. ProWorkflow Nexus allows you to capture all of these metrics, as well as break resources down in to individual resource types, and break time down to an item by item level while also keeping an eye on the overall project P&L stats.

 

Ensure spending/costs are kept track of and sustainable

While your goal on any project is to be profitable, we all know the old cliché you have to spend money to make money is true. That said, it’s important to keep track of not just revenue sources but also spending, whether that be where your employees are spending their time, any outgoing costs for resources, or other potential cost sinks; ProWorkflow Nexus helps you keep track of all of these disparate metrics, and consolidates their reporting into overall P&L data.

 

Real-time visibility into projects’ progress and profitability

Keeping track of all of these metrics is important, but for true P&L visibility you need to not just track these metrics but also report on them against your budget. With ProWorkflow Nexus’ financial forecasting tools, you are able to compare real-time data against your budget and maintain real-time visibility into both your current P&L and your forecasted P&L. This forecasting is completely automated, which both cuts down on your work and provides more timely information. This P&L visibility workflow is key to maximizing profitability on your current projects.

 

Advanced and customizable reporting

Not all companies have the same reporting needs; likewise, not all projects undertaken by a company have the same reporting needs. Both ProWorkflow’s library of reports and our project-level financial fields and forecasting tools are highly customizable, allowing you to tailor reporting to your company’s and individual project’s needs. We strive to make our tool more user friendly and customizable to individual company needs than other tools on the market.

 

Manage invoicing from within the tool, consolidate and automate efficiently

A major potential factor in your P&L is the ability to easily and accurately invoice clients. Project management software with good P&L visibility will allow you to manage invoicing directly from within the tool, rather than needing to purchase and attempt to integrate or cross-populate a disparate system. Not only does ProWorkflow have a cutting-edge invoicing tool built directly into it, but our new Nexus software allows you to automate much of the invoicing process, meaning more accurate and more expedient invoicing.

 

Easily integrate with other accounting systems

We also have built-in integrations with some of the biggest names in accounting software, such as Xero and QuickBooks Online, allowing you to easily create invoices in ProWorkflow and send them directly to your accounting software.

 

Net results: Maintain balanced budgets, improve project profitability

With all of these key P&L visibility features built in to ProWorkflow Nexus, you can use the available real-time data to ensure you maintain a balanced budget on any given project. Our customizable and real-time reporting helps provide you with the most accurate P&L reporting possible, helping you to see where you can be more profitable on your future projects. If you’re ready to see how we can help you improve your P&L visibility, start a trial or reach out to our team today!