Accurate configuration of your Company's financial settings has a direct impact on project management, reporting, evaluating performance and measuring success.
This article covers the following topics to ensure your account is set up to analyze and manage the financial impact of your projects:
- Currencies and Conversion Rates
- Rate Cards
- Expense Categories
- Internal Hourly Cost
- Clients (for billable projects)
- Invoicing
Currency
Your company’s default currency setting is in the Details tab within the Admin panel. You may have already set your default company currency while working through the basic account configuration section of the first article in this series, Setting up your Forecast account.
Add additional currencies and conversion rates prior to creating your rate cards if you have projects that charge in currencies other than your default company currency. For more on currencies and conversion rates, check out Configuring Currencies.
Rate Cards
Assign standard billing rates based on the roles of your team. Rate cards are assigned the correct rate for a project's budget and can be tailored to a specific client, region or project type. You can create as many rate cards as you need. Rate cards can be edited and versioned to accommodate billing changes and preserve historical data integrity.
Check out Configuring your rate cards for more on creating and managing your rate cards.
Internal Hourly Cost
Internal hourly cost is the rate of pay or salary for an individual. Forecast uses internal hourly cost in project budgets and reporting. The information is visible to Admin and Controller permission profiles only and can be edited by Admins only.
When editing a resource’s internal hourly cost, it is important to enter the corresponding effective date as Forecast recognizes dates and preserves historical values used by in past projects, as well as those already in progress or running.
Read About Internal Hourly Cost and how it works to learn more.
Expenses
Before creating expenses in projects, set up Expense Categories based on the types of expenses you use in projects.
See Defining your expense categories to learn how to organize and manage your expenses.
Clients
Client assignment to a project is not required for project revenue, however billable projects must be assigned a client in order to invoice. In Client profiles, add client information or relevant notes, identify key contacts for various aspects within the business and invite client guest users by granting access to project work in progress to gain feedback. Additionally, report on your client base to gain insights into projects and invoicing in Standard Reporting.
Check out Adding and managing Client profiles to learn on configuring client profiles.
Provide client or guest users limited access to projects of your choosing to add visibility and transparency to client-related information and insights. Inviting a client or guest user to Forecast does NOT invite them into Forecast as a full-time member and does not impact your paid subscription seats.
To understand Forecast from a guest or client perspective, check out Understanding the Forecast Client experience.
Consider integrating Forecast with HubSpot, Pipedrive or Salesforce and import/sync client profiles between systems instead of manually creating and managing future updates within Forecast.
Integration-specific articles can be found in CRM & Sales.
Invoicing
Generate invoices for projects and track payments using All Invoices. View and manage billable project work, apply payments and review outstanding balances. See Creating invoices for your customers to learn more.
Consider integrating Forecast with your existing accounting or billing systems to synchronize invoicing and clients between systems. Check out more on the supported integrations in Accounting & Billing.
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