Are you a project manager who is continually calling Accounting to ask for information on your jobs? Do you ask questions like:

  • What are my commitments?
  • How am I doing compared to my budget?
  • What is the Net Profit on my job?
It’s important that we know where to find design documents, agreements, invoices and other documents relating to our jobs. Seeing the project broken down by various tasks set up at the beginning of a project is helpful. Also, wouldn’t it be nice to see a Net Profit by task so we can determine how we are doing? With the Microsoft Dynamics SL Project Modules with Business Portals, we can attain all these requirements. It is integrated directly out of the box with Microsoft SharePoint.

Here is an example:

 

The first screen gives us a summary of the project.  We see the Financial Summary, AR Ageing, Unbilled Summary and Balances.  Pressing the Project Net profit button will give us a more detailed picture of the job.

This screen will show all the revenue and cost items as defined in the system (Revenue, Labour, Materials, Purchases, Subcontract.)  It shows the current month, project to date, and commitments (from POs or outstanding Time not yet approved) and the total.  Working from the right we have the variance (which is a budget variance), the EAC (Estimate at Completion or the current budget), this is normally also an ETC column or Estimate to Complete.  This example has the column hidden.  Notice the columns that are blue and underscored.  These columns provide drilldown to see the actual details behind the numbers.

Pressing the Task Net Profit button will show the same screen as the project net profit except for each task in the job and will also  provide the drilldown capability.

Notice the little picture beside the Task and Resource Schedule.  This button will open the SharePoint site that has been created for this project.

 

In this case, pressing the SharePoint button causes the following screen to appear.  This screen is built from a company defined template and in this case has sites for financial invoices, graphics documents, design documents and others.  Clicking on the Financial/Invoices site shows all the invoices that have been generated for this project.  The user can click on them and see the actual invoices.

 

 

This post was written by Peter Hummel
Peter Hummel has been in IT since 1974 starting his career as a diagnostic engineer for a computer builder, and as a programmer for an IBM VAR. He also started a company that developed software for a very popular mini-computer capable of work processing. After that, he became an application specialist and for the past 17 years has been an ERP expert selling, installing, consulting and maintaining what is now called Microsoft Dynamics SL.