It’s no secret that high-quality data is the key ingredient in making sound, data-driven decisions. This is especially true when it comes to maximizing your profits. From lead generation to project management to resource utilization to invoicing, several factors contribute to every dollar you make. That's why we launched the Reports module last year — to help you discover actionable insights quickly.
Today, we're adding two new reports to help you maximize your revenue by providing visibility on work that is going off-budget and the key contributors, as well as optimizing your resource utilization by capturing as many billable hours as possible.
One of the most important responsibilities for project managers is setting accurate budgets and holding their resources to them. These budgets are not only important for keeping projects profitable, but are vital in ensuring that your services remain competitive and keeping your clients happy by staying on budget.
To keep your projects on budget, you need clear insight into the key contributors that are affecting them, from the internal resources performing the work to the clients they're working for. The new Planned vs Actual report provides these insights by distilling your complex projects and retainers into simple, understandable metrics for performance — the time and money you've planned for specific tasks and how much of that budget has actually been used.
The Planned vs Actual report offers simple, high-level statistics to help you stay on top of your daily budgets. It also provides detailed information on the tasks, resources, and clients to help you deep-dive into your budgets. That includes filters for focusing on specific types of work, individual projects, and groups of tasks. These details can save you hours that might otherwise be spent gathering, exporting, and manipulating data for your daily check-ins, weekly meetings, and monthly reviews.
Recruiting can be an expensive and time-consuming process. Having too many resources on the bench will impact your bottom line, but not having enough resources can impact your ability to deliver client works. The Planned vs Actual report provides much-needed insight into your team’s workload by using leaderboards to identify how much work they are performing — not just what you forecast — so you can scale resources based on client needs.
Whether it's setting budgets, planning for future hiring, or billing for hourly work, having complete and accurate time entries is critical for any service business. Accelo makes it quick and easy for your team to log their time using tools like automatic email capture and the weekly timesheet. However, even the most vigilant staff will sometimes forget to log their time on a busy day.
The arduous task of following up on missed timesheets often falls to managers, but that can be difficult with everyone working remote. Even with a centralized, cloud-based system like Accelo, it takes valuable time for managers to find out who's missing time entries and when they were missed. Add in PTO and everyone's unique schedules — you end up spending as much time tracking down missing timesheets as there was time missed.
The Missing Time report helps to eliminate this wasted time by providing managers with a simple summary of who hasn't logged their time, when that time was missed, and how much time was missed. This is based on each individual's work availability and PTO, enabling managers to spend more time on client work and ensuring that your team's valuable time is recorded and billed for.
Don't have access to Reports yet? Learn more about the Reports module.