A project gathers the documents that belong to a piece of work, so the income and cost tagged to it can be seen together. It is how you cost a job, an event or a contract that spans many transactions, pulling sales, purchases and journals into one view of what the work earned and what it cost.
- What a project record holds
- How documents are tagged to a project
- What project profitability is, and is not, today
Anatomy of the screen
A project has a Charter tab (code, name, description, the customer, the person in charge and the status) and a Finance view. The charter is the project's identity; the finance side is where its tagged documents are seen together.
How it behaves
Tagging is the mechanism
Across the system, documents carry a project tag: a sales invoice, a purchase invoice, a journal, a reimbursement claim can each be assigned to a project. That tag is the thread, everything related to a job is linked to its project, so you can gather the revenue and the costs of a single piece of work no matter which module they came from. A project runs New, Open, Closed, with Hold and Cancel available.
Worked example
For a customer's office fit-out you open a project, then tag the installation invoices, the subcontractor bills and the materials purchases to it. Filtering your reports by the project shows the revenue and costs side by side, giving you the job's margin even though no single document holds it.
Edge cases and good practice
- Tag consistently. A project is only as complete as the documents assigned to it.
- Read profitability through reports filtered by project, since there is no budget engine yet.
- Close projects when done so the active list reflects live work.
Related
- How to: Set up a project
- Reference: Finance reports (filter by project)
- Reference: Invoice (which carries a project tag)