Project accounting software

Project accounting is simply accounting on a project-by-project basis. Project accounting tracks all of the financial components of a project such as budgets, estimates, costs, bookings, billing, and everything in between. It is an important aspect of project management software because it’s important to know whether a project is on budget, if it’s profitable and it also gives you insight on what to bill. Project accounting is included in Professional Services Automation (PSA) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

Is your company exploring PSA for project management?

Download the G2 Professional Services Automation Enterprise Report

How does project accounting differ from standard accounting?

Standard cloud accounting deals with the macrocosm of accounting for a company as a whole, usually within a fixed time period (i.e. quarterly or annually). Standard accounting tallies the total expenditures, budgets and accounts payable across all projects within an organization.

Project accounting monitors the financials of individual projects. It allows companies a closer look into their day-to-day financials, which in turn allows them to identify areas of their finances that can be optimized. It also allows them to identify trouble areas that could impact margins.

Professional Services Cloud – Watch the quick demo

Certinia Professional Services (PS) Cloud solution ranked top choice with G2, leverages the power of Salesforce CRM and the Salesforce Platform. Get an unparalleled view of your business across sales, service delivery, and finance. Keep projects on time, clients happy, and reports up to date—all on one integrated platform.

How does project accounting improve a project’s overall financial health?

Project accounting is powerful because it deals in specifics. By using some form of project accounting software, professional services organizations can locate and eliminate workflow issues (i.e. time-consuming invoicing, miscommunications between departments, etc.) that consistently occur from project to project. It eliminates inaccurate revenue reporting, tracking profit margins, and utilization.

Once a company has identified individual solutions for one project, it can use the same software to automate much of their project financials for all company projects. Not only does this help avoid errors and ensure accurate accounting, it also frees up time, which in turn allows companies to pursue more growth-oriented tasks with human resources.

What makes project accounting software a useful business tool from an organizational standpoint?

One of the most touted benefits of project accounting is its ability to track the budgets and revenues across every stage of an individual project. This empowers project managers because they now have access to everything from project hours and total expenses to incoming invoices and milestones.

Having access to project accounting software ensures that an organization can collaborate on budgets and finances between departments. It also helps management monitor and, if necessary, reassess a project to ensure it meets the overall financial goals of their company.

How will you benefit from the project accounting software functionality in Certinia PSA?

Get full visibility of your project’s financial health

Certinia PSA and the powerful project accounting software functionality provides online access to all the financial detail related to your services projects and opportunities at anytime (and from anywhere). It can start even before a deal is won because Certinia PSA is on the same platform as Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Get anytime access to project related financial data and budgets
Filter info easily by region, practice, and/or group breakdowns
See the finances of projects in every stage: opportunity, in process and completed

Grow project margins

The project accounting software component also allows you to track planned revenue, cost and profit margin to evaluate if the project meets profit requirements before it even kicks off. As the project progresses you will get detailed information into expenses, hours submitted, and can also track when bills are processed, sent, and paid.

Track planned revenue and profit margin when projects are created
Track project financials in real-time as the projects progress
See profit margin, expenses, and related financial detail rolled up to regions, practices, and groups.

Billing & invoicing the way you want

Get flexible billing options which means you are free to develop pricing and billing processes that satisfy customers’ demand and maximize your revenue without driving up administrative costs. Specifically, this project accounting software allows you to:

Bid to bill process is automated and visible to sales, services and finance
Bill by time & expense, flat fee, pre-bill, retainer
Combine different billing types on the same project
Eliminate errors with flexible configuration, workflow, and controls
Generate invoices with Certinia Billing or integrate billing events to your financial backend of choice

Manage revenue recognition as projects progress

With the Certinia project accounting software and revenue recognition modules, you can connect directly to milestones or project completion percentages to calculate and record revenue as projects are completed.

Calculate revenue recognition based on project or milestone completion
Set up revenue recognition rules to match your business need or processes
Import revenue transactions into your financial system
Get visibility into what is ready to bill, has been billed, and what has been invoiced

Create and track project budgets

Track a budget in a way that meets your needs. With Certinia PSA and its project accounting, you can create one or more budgets for each project. Track actual expenses and billing to see how you’re progressing against your budget – meaning you can rapidly adjust to control costs and preserve profit margins.

Auto-create budgets from opportunity detail or use our flexible budget creator
Monitor actuals in real-time against the budget as the project progresses
Use access and workflow rules to control budget approval and requested changes

What are the benefits of Certinia’s project accounting capabilities being on the Salesforce platform?

Certinia Professional Services Automation (PSA) includes project accounting functionality and is built on the Salesforce platform, – the same one that award-winning Salesforce CRM is built on. By having all of the project accounting information inside Salesforce CRM, users can review finances of projects at any stage, whether it’s at the opportunity level or in progress. Thousands of companies are already familiar with the Salesforce platform, and as such, they can easily migrate their back-end processes and front-end processes into one, consolidated area shared by their entire company.