Help › Projects

Projects and project / job profitability

A construction site, a machine order, a large customer job… While the company's total profit looks fine, which individual job is losing money only becomes visible once all of that job's documents are brought together. The Projects window collects sales invoices, purchases, production confirmations, subcontracting, freight, expenses and agreement notes under a single project code; it gives sales, cost, gross profit and margin, and compares them with the budget and with commitments not yet invoiced. Specific rules are applied, and shown on screen, so that the same amount is not counted twice.

1. What it is for and where to open it

• Profit per job: sales, cost (material, labor, subcontracting, freight, expense), gross profit and margin for every project; the line breakdown says which figure comes from which documents.
• Budget and commitment: budget, actual, commitment from open orders and remaining per line; a line over budget is red.
• Timeline: the documents in date order and month-by-month cumulative revenue, cost and profit.

2. Opening a project

Press New project and fill in the form: Project Code, Project name, Customer, Start, End, Status, Cost center, Owner, Agreement amount and Description; then Save.

• The Project Code starts with a letter or digit, is at most 30 characters (letters, digits, space, dot, underscore, hyphen, slash) and is converted to upper case. A second project with the same code cannot be opened; the code cannot be changed later.
• Status: Open, In progress, Closed, Cancel. The project selector in document entry lists only Open and In progress projects.
• If the Cost center is filled in, that center's expenses within the project dates enter the project's Expense line (section 5). The Agreement amount is written under a KPI box for comparison.

You change the header fields later on the Details tab.

3. Linking documents to a project

• On a new document: the header of invoice, delivery note, order and quotation entry has a Project field ("Project code (optional)"); open projects are chosen from the list. If an undefined code is typed, the document is not saved and says the project was not found. The field shows only on new documents; if there is no open project or you lack permission, document entry opens as before, without the field.
• Existing documents: the Documents tab of the project card lists the linked documents (type, no, date, account, amount); Unlink on each row separates the document from the project. For new links the Bulk link box is used.
• Links carried automatically: when an invoice is linked to a project, its automatic delivery note is written to the same project. For a work order with an empty project code, the project is derived when reading from the order its production request came from; so linking an order also brings the work orders opened from it into the project.

4. Bulk linking

If the project was opened later, finding past documents one by one is hard. The Bulk link box on the Documents tab finds candidates in two ways:

1. Account + date range: Accounts, Start and End (by default the project's account and dates; without dates, from the start of the year to today). That account's invoices, uninvoiced delivery notes, orders, quotations, work orders opened from its requests and non-cancelled agreement notes in the range are listed. Cancelled documents and invoiced delivery notes are not candidates (the delivery note comes with the invoice).
2. Order group: type an order number in the or order number (order group) field. The order (if open), the invoices created from it and the work orders opened from its production requests are listed together.

Press Find candidates. Documents already linked to this project do not appear. Those linked to no project are pre-ticked; those linked to another project come unticked with a yellow Other project: … badge. Adjust the selection and press Link selected (N); it says "N documents linked to the project." At most 5000 documents are linked at a time.

5. How profitability is calculated

At the top of the Profitability tab there are six boxes: Sales (returns below it), Cost, Gross profit, Margin (gross profit / sales), Open orders (backlog) (commitment below it) and Estimated project-end profit (agreement amount below it). Below them the document counts and the calculation period are written. All amounts are in TL and exclude VAT.

In the Line breakdown table, next to every line it says how many TL came from which sources (e.g. "Purchase invoices linked to the project: 1,000 · Production confirmations: 218,495 · Cost of goods sold: 59,148"). The unit cost of goods sold is the purchase average of the period from one year before the project start to its end; otherwise the stock card cost. The calculation is kept for 60 seconds; Recalculate refreshes it at once. When a linked document changes or is deleted, the kept result is cleared by itself.

6. Double-count rules

The same goods or service appear on several documents (a delivery note and its invoice, material bought and the production confirmation consuming it…). The program applies the following rules; the ones applied are listed one by one in the Double-count check (N) drop-down at the bottom of the tab:

Worked example

In the project, sales invoices are 200,000 and a sales return 10,000 → Sales 190,000. 100 pieces of product A were sold; 60 pieces were bought for the project at 60 × 500 = 30,000, and the remaining 40 pieces × unit cost 450 = 18,000 are cost of goods sold (Ç2). Component B was bought for the project at 50 × 100 = 5,000; the production confirmations' material cost is 25,000 and includes consuming 30 pieces of B → 30 × 100 = 3,000 is deducted from material (Ç3). Material = 30,000 + 5,000 + 25,000 − 3,000 + 18,000 = 75,000. The confirmations carry labor 6,000 and subcontracting 8,000; the subcontractor's 8,000 invoice is not counted again (Ç4). Freight line on a purchase invoice 4,500, cost center 7,000. Cost = 75,000 + 6,000 + 8,000 + 4,500 + 7,000 = 100,500; gross profit 89,500; margin 89,500 / 190,000 = 47.11%.

7. Budget, commitment and estimated profit

On the Budget tab you enter an amount for seven lines (Sales, Material, Labor, Subcontract, Freight, Expense, Other) and press Save; a line left empty has no budget. The sales budget is expected revenue; the other lines are cost budgets.

• Commitment: remaining quantity × price of the open purchase orders linked to the project (freight lines to freight, the rest to material) + quantity × subcontracting fee of subcontracting shipments not yet confirmed (to subcontract). On the sales side the counterpart is the open sales orders (backlog).
• Remaining = budget − actual − commitment. If actual + commitment exceeds the budget, the bar turns red and a warning says the line's budget was exceeded, with the budget and actual + commitment. On the bar the blue part is actual, the orange part commitment and the black line the budget.
• Estimated project-end profit = sales + open sales orders − cost − commitment: what the project earns if today's orders are invoiced and the purchase orders placed arrive.

Example (continuing section 6): material budget 90,000, actual 75,000, open purchase order remaining 20 × 500 = 10,000 → remaining 5,000, usage (75,000 + 10,000) / 90,000 = 94.44%. Sales budget 250,000, open sales orders 40,000 → remaining 250,000 − 190,000 − 40,000 = 20,000. Estimated project-end profit = 190,000 + 40,000 − 100,500 − 10,000 = 119,500.

8. Timeline

At the top of the Timeline tab there are month-by-month lines for Cumulative revenue (green), Cumulative cost (red, dashed) and Cumulative profit (blue); below, the documents are listed in date order: order, invoice (sales/purchase, return), delivery note, work order, production confirmation, note and expense entry, with their amounts. When the profit line rises above zero shows the month in which the project starts financing itself.

9. Virtual project (account + date)

To see the profitability of a job whose documents never got a project code, press Virtual project at the top left, choose Accounts, Start and End, and press Calculate. That account's invoices, uninvoiced delivery notes, open orders and the work orders opened from its orders in the chosen range are calculated as a single project; the same boxes, line breakdown, double-count rules and timeline chart appear. A virtual project has no budget and nothing is saved.

10. Warnings and Analytics Studio

• "Unit cost is unknown for … products": these products' cost is missing; profit looks higher than it is. Enter purchases for them or correct the stock card cost.
• "… confirmations have labor hours but no labor cost recorded": staff hours were entered but no rate is defined, so labor is understated.
• "… shipments carry this project's documents. No freight tariff is defined": the freight cost of Shipping trips could not be calculated from a tariff; freight comes only from purchase documents.
• "Documents contain undefined project codes: …" (above the project list): codes were found in the Project field of old documents that have no matching project. If you open a project with the same code, those documents come into it by themselves.
• Analytics Studio: the Sales and Production cubes of the Analytics Studio have a Project dimension; drag it to rows or columns to compare sales and production between projects.

11. Closing and deleting a project

Close a finished project by setting its status to Closed on the Details tab; the documents stay linked and profitability remains visible, only the project no longer appears in the project selector of new documents. Delete works only while no document is linked to the project; otherwise a warning says documents are linked and asks you to unlink them first or close the project. Deleting also removes the project's budget and does not touch documents.

12. Permissions

The permissions are in the Cash scenario, projects and price suggestion group of the permissions screen under Settings › Users. The project field in document entry is not shown to users without permission.

13. On the phone

On screens smaller than 7 inches (the Garden + Steps interface) Projects opens with a card list: each card shows the project code, a status badge, the project name and the customer. Tapping a card opens the project profitability card: the same KPI boxes (two columns), line breakdown, budget bars, warnings and timeline chart; ← Projects returns to the list. The Virtual project (account + date) button above the list opens the virtual project calculation on the phone too. Opening projects, linking documents and entering budgets are not available on the phone; they are done on the desktop.

14. Frequently asked questions

Related guides: Document Entry · Production · Framework Agreements · Standard Cost · Analytics Studio · Mobile.