Keeping Projects Productive and Profitable With Sage Intacct

Services companies rely on productive projects to stay profitable, but when you’re juggling so many moving parts, it can be a real challenge keeping your contracts, resources, and financials aligned. Sage Intacct is a leading cloud accounting software, but did you know it also serves as a powerful project management tool? With Sage Intacct Project Accounting, you can easily create projects and tasks, assign resources, track time and expenses, generate invoices, and create and run reports from one, easy-to-use place.

Here’s how to use Sage Intacct Project Accounting to keep your projects on track, your clients happy, and yourself sane.

Choose the Right Project Accounting Modules

Before you get started with Sage Intacct Projects, you’ll need to determine which project management features matter most to you. To help you choose the right Project module or package, here’s a quick overview of each.

• Basic Project Tracking: This module allows you to create, edit, and view projects for tracking and reporting purposes. You can also easily categorize projects based on status and type.
• Time & Expenses: Need to track the hours your employees spend on particular projects? This module enables you to create, submit, and reimburse employee expenses and comes with a full approval workflow.
• Project Costing: In addition to the capabilities listed above, this add-on feature helps you break a project down into tasks and supports charging time to projects, full timesheet approval workflow, hourly and salaried labor costing, indirect cost allocation to projects, actual versus planned analysis, and utilization reporting.
• Project Costing & Billing: This package includes all of the capabilities of the previous three as well as billing and invoice generation for Time & Materials, Scheduled, Fixed Price, Percent Complete, and Milestone project types.
• Project & Resource Management: This package includes all of the capabilities of the packages above as well as operational and financial Gantt charts with drill-down capabilities, resource skills and certification assignment, resource search and assignment, resource availability analysis, out-of-office tracking, and forecast and utilization reporting.

Create Your First Project

Now that you’ve chosen the perfect package, it’s time to set up your first project. This is where you will include basic details, set prices, and assign customers, billing types, budgets, and resources. You can choose from fixed fee projects with percent complete billings, overhead or non-billable projects, time and material projects, or bill to maximum projects.

1. Click the Project tab and enter a project ID, project name, project category, and customer.
2. On the Additional Info tab, specify how the project will be billed (Time & Material, Fixed Fee, or Fixed Fee & Expenses).
3. On the Resources & Pricing tab, select the resources for your project and how you want to set prices.
4. On the Invoices Options tab, enter details about invoices for the project.
5. Click Save to save the project.

Add Tasks to Projects

What needs to get done? This is where you will identify individual units of work to be performed for your project. When employees enter hours on a timesheet, they will assign the hours they’ve worked to the specific task. If you choose for these tasks to be billable, they can be invoiced. Perhaps you are working on a web design project, for example, and add three tasks for the project including “Development”, “Design”, and “Implementation.”

1. Click Add.
2. Enter information about the task.

Import a Group of Tasks

If your projects tend to follow similar patterns, you can save time by importing a group of tasks into Projects.

1. Click Import.
2. Click Browse to find the file you want to import (must be CSV format).
3. To import the records offline while you continue to work, select the Process & Store check box.
4. Click Import.

Add Resources to a Project

Sage Intacct Projects makes it easy for you to manage the resources (employees or contractors) that you assign to a specific project or task. This feature gives you one easy place to sort through your resources based on skill, location, and availability.

1. In the Project field, enter or select the existing project.
2. In the Employee field, enter or select the appropriate employee name.
3. As needed, enter information in the following optional fields (Project, Employee, Item, Description, Billing Rate, Start Date, Labor, Expense, AP/PO).

Track Time and Expenses

Once your project and tasks are set up, your employees and contractors can enter timesheets and create expense reports. Depending on your particular business set up, you can enable employees to submit their own time sheets and expense reports or assign a supervisor to do so on their behalf.

Fill Out a Timesheet

1. In the Timesheet Info section, enter any necessary information like start date and a description.
2. In the Time Entries section, enter the time you worked on the project per task and per day.
3. Submit the timesheet for approval.

Create an Expense Report

1. Go to Time & Expenses > All > Expenses.
2. Verify the Date Filed.
3. Select the Employee.
4. Click Attachments to add any necessary attachments (like a receipt).
5. Enter a Reason for Expense.
6. Enter a Memo.

Generate Invoices

Get paid for your hard work by creating single or multiple invoices for your customer or for a particular project. This is where you can decide whether or not to bill a customer for expenses, labor, and AP/PO purchased accrued by your resources.

1. On the Invoicing Options tab, select an invoice template and a currency.
2. Indicate the Customer or Project that you’re invoicing.
3. Include any Filters in the Filters tab.
4. Click Preview.
5. If necessary, exclude specific charges by clearing their checkboxes.
6. Click Create Invoice to save it as an Order Entry transaction that you can send to your client.

Create and Run Reports

The Projects module comes with the powerful reporting capabilities you’ve come to know, love, and expect from Sage Intacct. Keep your clients and colleagues informed about the profitability and completion of projects by running reports on actual costs, project profitability, employee utilization, and more.

Ready to see whether Sage Intacct Project Accounting is right for your business? Get in touch with the financial experts at ACI Consulting today to get answers and get started.