Managing the budget and commitments

A budget in dated versions

The budget is entered on the project's budget tree, package by package, as amounts excluding VAT; a column of amounts can be pasted from a spreadsheet. A version can be closed: it then no longer changes, and the closed version with the latest effective date is the baseline for financial tracking. Two versions can be compared.

Quotes, orders, invoices, credit notes, amendments

Each financial document becomes an entry, linked to a company and to a package; without a package, it is left to be assigned. Only approved entries count in the amounts.

An entry read from a document arrives as a suggestion: it counts only once approved, and its amounts wait for approval. On an approved entry, whatever a total depends on can only be corrected by whoever manages the project, with a reason kept in the log.

Match quotes, orders and invoices

Equerio links an invoice to its order, and an order to its quote. A certain link — a quoted reference, from the same company — is made automatically; the others are suggested and change no total until you approve them. An entry keyed in twice — same kind, same company, same reference — is refused; an entry read twice is kept separate and flagged as a likely duplicate.

Tracking by package

For each package: the budget, what is quoted, committed and invoiced, the forecast at completion and its variance from the baseline budget. The quoted, committed and invoiced amounts open onto the approved entries that make them up. The calculated forecast can be replaced by an entered value, never below the amount invoiced; each change is kept in the log.

Financial alerts

Alerts open and close by themselves, based on the entries:

• quote without an order;
• order without an invoice;
• invoiced above the amount ordered;
• budget overrun;
• entries to approve, or to assign to a package;
• end of validity of a quote received, among the project's deadlines.

Who sees the financials

Financials are a domain of their own. They are shown only to those who can read them: a guest from whom they are hidden sees neither the financial screens, nor the amounts on the dashboard, nor those of the exported sheet. Everyone counts only what they can read.

The portfolio at a glance

The portfolio analysis brings together, for the projects whose financials you can read, the baseline budget, the forecast at completion, the committed and invoiced amounts, what remains to be committed and the variance from budget, broken down by model and by project manager. It exports as a spreadsheet.