As a project manager you should make sure all your team members submit claims, hours, expenses etc as soon as possible, and definitely before the end of month accounting date.

If that information comes in late the profit/margin on the project can quickly change and affect plans.

The hours must also be made to the correct project. You don’t want hours suddenly being transferred to your project from a few months ago because they were incorrectly allocated. This could make an in profit project suddenly be making a loss. If it was done correctly first time, the losses could have been seen earlier and planned or allowed for.

Tagged with: claims • expenses • loss • profit

Filed under: Documentation • Human Resources • Planning • Training

If you have control of the system at the start of a project, make sure the project (or even at the program level, project office level, or company level) uses a document and accounting system that can record and output everything.

This would include costs, labour, forecasts, statistics, billing, budget, expenses, changes etc.

It should be able to output things like:

• Weekly reports.
• Monthly cost summary
• Invoices
• Labour costs for a period
• Expense breakdowns
• Cost to date
• Variance
• Total cost at completion

This should all be available from one package or a number of modules that are automatically linked together. You do not want to have multiple spreadsheets that people record things in that are not linked. The result should be a significant reduction in paperwork.

Certain inputs could only be allowed by certain people (by log in), such as:

• Accounts (accountant)
• Billing
• Labour (site manager)
• Design hours (design manager)

Individual hours by each person could be input (linked) from time sheets. All staff/employees should have adequate training so that the system is used properly

To start with, I recommend looking at the list of project management software at Wikipedia.

Tagged with: accounting • budget • changes • expenses • forecast • labour • statistics • system

Filed under: Cost • Documentation • Planning