Where does the firm stand, today and in December?
The P&L updates with every entry and projects to year-end by the day.
What you can do with it
- P&L with day-based projection: you see today where you will stand at year-end.
- One switch toggles between actuals and forecast in the same view.
- Utilisation, margins and costs per employee, project and client from the same data basis.
What is project controlling software?
Project controlling software answers a single question: am I making money on this project? And if so, what are my margins?
In project-based service firms the result hangs on figures that shift every day. On the hourly rate you manage to charge. On how well your people are utilized. And on costs that keep running regardless. Conventional accounting software shows you the result once the month is over. For a consultancy that is too late. If a project runs out of budget in May, the information has to be on the table in May, not in July with the closing.
Project controlling software therefore starts at the time booking. Every hour recorded carries an hourly rate, a project and an employee. Revenue follows from those entries, costs follow from the employment contracts, and the margin follows from the difference.
What separates this from plain time tracking is the analysis. A time-tracking tool tells you how many hours sit on a project. Project controlling tells you whether those hours carry the project.
How project controlling works in QUANTICAL.ERP
The booking is the data source
Your employees book hours onto projects set up beforehand. Each project can carry its own hourly rates, also per employee. Many service-firm ERPs lack this, even though a senior consultant is billed differently from a junior and some engagements carry a special rate.
The P&L runs alongside
The time entries produce a P&L that updates automatically with every entry. You see revenue, cost and margin, broken down by project, client and employee. Every view comes from the same data basis.
A projection that reaches year end
It gets interesting where most reports stop. QUANTICAL.ERP projects your KPIs to year end on a daily basis. The question is not how last month went, but where you will stand in December if things carry on like this. One switch shows you either the actuals or the forecast, all in one compact KPI dashboard.
Revenue and utilization side by side
Keep an eye on your team's utilization as well as on revenue. For every employee you can see how much capacity is already committed, how much is still free and how utilization will develop over the coming weeks. That lets you plan projects and people earlier.
Reports you build yourself
For the recurring questions there is a dashboard with revenue, utilization, budgets and forecast. For everything else there are pivot reports, freely groupable, with export to PDF and Excel. Roles and permissions govern who sees which figures. An employee sees their own bookings, an admin sees the result across everyone.
Why Excel stops carrying project controlling
Excel is a good tool, and for the first years of a service business it usually does the job. At some point, though, the spreadsheet setup tips over.
That point comes quickly once several people feed in numbers that have to be merged centrally. A formula gets overwritten, the workbook gets adjusted, extra columns appear without agreement. Then there is the time lag. A spreadsheet is as current as its last update. Someone has to remind colleagues, and in project work that is exactly what slips. Then the numbers stop matching.
The most awkward part is that Excel forgets. You see the state of things but not how it came about. That is why you need a system like QUANTICAL.ERP, which records every booking with a timestamp and an author.
A typical example from service firms still working in spreadsheets:
A project has been running for six weeks. The client is happy, the team is fully booked and at first glance everything looks fine. Only at the month-end closing does it surface: two senior consultants have booked considerably more hours to the project than originally calculated. Revenue is on plan, but the budget is being consumed faster than expected.
For the client that means an unpleasant message. The milestones that were promised can no longer be delivered within the agreed budget, and the volume of booked hours takes them by surprise.
With project controlling running continuously, that development would not have surfaced weeks later. It would have shown during the project that the budget was being consumed faster than planned, and the project lead could have acted.
Frequently asked questions about project controlling
What separates project controlling from time tracking?
Time tracking collects hours, project controlling values them. Only when rates, costs and budgets are attached to the entry do time entries say anything about a firm's profitability.
How current are the figures in QUANTICAL.ERP?
The P&L updates with every entry. There is no nightly run and no intermediate step anyone has to trigger. It is as current as the last entry.
What does a day-based projection mean?
The system takes the revenue and cost trend so far and carries it forward to year end, to the day rather than in monthly steps. You see early whether a year holds up, instead of finding out in the fourth quarter.
Can we model different hourly rates?
Yes. Hourly rates can be set per project and per employee. Partner, senior and junior rates work, as do special terms for individual engagements and projects.
Does every employee see all the figures?
No. Access runs through roles. Employees see their own bookings and reports, while company-level figures stay with management, meaning the admins.
How does our existing data get into the system?
Through an Excel import for employees, projects, clients and bookings. You do not start out with an empty system, and prior years stay comparable. You also only need a license for employees who actively book. Records of employees who have already left can be imported free of charge.
What does project controlling with QUANTICAL.ERP cost?
90 days free with the full feature set and no payment details required. After that, 12.90 euros per user per month. There are no controlling add-on modules, the feature set is included in the price. Every future development is included at no extra charge.