Professional service companies using Sage Intacct Projects and seeking detailed insights into the time and expenses associated with their engagements may benefit from the new Project Intelligence offering.
Sage Intacct Project Intelligence gathers data from the company’s time and expense and project costing tools to generate dashboards presenting detailed time, utilization, and billing data for projects, teams, and employees.
Project managers, controllers, and CFOs can analyze the health of individual projects by examining real-time metrics such as:
- Billed and budgeted hours.
- Staffing levels and utilization.
- Available resources.
For instance, the Profitability dashboard highlights financial performance, by project, over the current month, year-to-date, and the past year. Managers can monitor key financial metrics for employees such as actual and estimated labor costs, profit, write-offs, and effective rates. Leaders can analyze revenue data to understand the performance of their sales strategies, manage expenses, and develop budgets.
Project Analytics Dashboard
The Project Analytics dashboard provides insights into the overall health of a project, such as billed and budgeted hours, accounts receivable, revenue, and profit. Leaders can examine analytics to identify and correct off-track or at-risk projects, and evaluate the profitability and effective rates for different project types.
Sage Intacct Project Intelligence is designed for firms offering consulting, engineering, accounting, or similar professional services. The offering requires the Project Costing & Billing (Grants Tracking & Billing) modules and Time Sheets in Intacct to supply the data necessary for analysis.
Automating Reporting
One of the primary benefits Sage Intacct Project Intelligence offers is automating project and employee scheduling, and preparing reports on the resulting utilization and profitability of the project team. The software enables companies to track hours by team members, and by role or title, to help establish project-level visibility and insights.
Companies providing billable services often rely on spreadsheets or dedicated professional services automation (PSA) software for hourly employee or project evaluation. This approach often requires manual calculations that can lead to some employees being over-allocated while others are underutilized—an imbalance that can affect a project’s completion or profitability.
Whether a project is being filled on an hourly or fixed-fee basis, allowing managers to analyze how much time employees (individually or as a group) are spending on billable work, compared to internal administrative tasks, can provide important insights to improve utilization.
Similarly, the software can help managers understand the organization’s most valuable projects and customers while providing detailed data on team and employee performance such as their effective rate, revenue contribution, timesheet write-offs, and other metrics.
Nonprofit Utilization
Similar to the tracking and analysis benefits for professional service firms, Sage Intacct Project Intelligence can also provide nonprofits with insights to help them understand staffing levels and provide reports for donors.
Some donors want detailed information about how their grants are being applied to the initiatives they’re funding. Because many donors prioritize different metrics and data formats, being able to customize reporting in a tool such as Sage Intacct Project Intelligence improves reporting while saving time.
