Accurate configuration of your project financial settings has a direct impact on reporting, evaluating project 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.
You can also add additional currencies and conversion/exchange rates prior to creating your rate cards as you may have some projects that charge in currencies other than your default company currency. For more on currencies and conversion rates, check out Configuring Currencies.
Rate Cards
Rate cards allow you to assign and set standard billing rates based on the roles of your team. Rate cards are used for assigning the correct rate for the project 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. (maybe mentioned custom permissions and the option that allows them to view cost, could be confusing though)
When editing a resource’s internal hourly cost, it is important to enter the corresponding effective date as Forecast will recognize the date to preserve historical values used in past projects or those already in progress or running.
Read About Internal Hourly Cost and how it works to learn more.
Expenses
Before you can create expenses for your Forecast projects, you'll want to review and decide which expense categories your projects will be using.
See Defining your expense categories to learn how to organize and manage your expenses.
Clients
Clients are not mandatory to see revenue on projects. If you will be billing clients for projects, you will want to sent up Client profiles. Client profiles allow you to add client information or relevant notes, identify key contacts for various aspects within their business, and invite client guest users by granting access to project work in progress to gain feedback. Additionally, you can report on your client base to gain insights into projects and invoicing. Check out Adding and managing Client profiles to learn on configuring client profiles.
Forecast also offers the option to invite client or guest users into Forecast with limited access to projects of your choosing. Allowing client or guest user access to projects adds visibility and transparency to client-related information and insights. To understand Forecast from a guest or client perspective, check out Understanding the Forecast Client experience.
Additionally, Forecast integrates with other software such as, for example, HubSpot, Pipedrive and Salesforce allowing you to import and sync client profiles between systems instead of manually creating and managing future updates within Forecast.
Invoicing
With Forecast's invoicing functionality it is possible to generate invoices for projects and track payments. Forecast provides an overview of what has been invoiced to clients, what has been paid and what is still outstanding. See Creating invoices for your customers to learn more.
As with Clients, integrating Forecast with your existing accounting or billing systems allows you to synchronize invoicing between systems. Check out more on the supported integrations in Accounting & Billing.
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