Analyze the project
When your project has been delivered, it'll be useful for you to analyze the transactions, estimates, forecasts, budgets, and their accuracy for future projects. The overall success of the completed projects can lead to information to ensure that future ones are completed comparatively well or perhaps better than previous projects.
Cash inflow and cost forecasting
Cash flow monitoring for the forecasted cash flows and the actual cash flows for a project can help you evaluate cost for each project. Cash flow forecasting is based on your setup, but you can forecast the cash inflows for a selected project and produce expected sales payment dates. You can add general buffer days based on the contract. Additionally, you can calculate the sales invoice due date, along with using the customer's payment pattern, to achieve an accurate forecast. Then, the actual cash inflow will be compared to increase accuracy further.
Cost forecasting is based on the dates that are defined for payment, but the payment date can differ from the actual project date. To calculate the cost payment date, add the number of days from the project date to the number of days in the terms of payment. When all sales and vendor invoices are complete, you can view the relationship between them by using fields on the Cash flow page and the Project statements page. For more information, see Project management and accounting overview | Microsoft Learn.
Utilization rate
Utilization rate is another part of analyzing your project, and it's helpful when you're planning for future projects. Utilization rate is the percentage of time that a worker performed billable or productive work in a specific working period. You can charge these hours to a specific customer and use them to inform how the utilization of the same type of project might change next time.
To calculate these rates, make sure that workers record all working time for the timesheet periods because the calculation is expressed as a percentage of the hours that are entered. By dividing the number of billable hours by the number of working hours in a specific period, you can calculate the worker's utilization rate.
Then, you can use the utilization rate to find the Billable rate or Efficiency rate. To calculate the hour utilization rate for a project, project contract, customer record, or category, you'll need to use the included hours for the calculation. These utilization rates can give you a good idea of the delivered project's effectiveness and if changes occurred to the hours for the next project.
Project statements
After your project has been completed, you might want to view a snapshot of the projects. You can do so with a project statement, where you can specify the criteria that are used to calculate the statement and the results. You can include project types, transaction types, the project or ledger date, and data.
When the statement is calculated, you can view details, such as the general information about the project's profit and loss, accrued revenue, information about the WIP account balances, the consumption of hours, items, expenses, payroll transactions, invoice information, and hour rates that are posted to revenue and cost accounts.
With all that information in one place, you'll be able to better assess the overall effectiveness of your project. Additionally, you can continue to view and use the project type trends to stay informed about how to change future projects to ensure that they're as effective as possible.
