Business people who work consistently on fixed-priced contracts learn early on that the profitability of their business depends on two things: the quality of their job costing analyses and their project management/execution. Surely Microsoft helped many businesses—and saved many an envelope—when it introduced Excel in 1985. But this is 2018 business, not 1985, and using Excel to cost out your projects and run them is going to put you at a disadvantage vs. competitors that are using modern technology.
While Excel can do a fine job calculating your cost estimate from your line-by-line manual entries, it will in no way help you translate your estimate to actual real-world activity, nor will it give you any insights (absent further manual entries from you) into how you’re performing on your project. Worse, as we all know, everything in Excel is subject to human error: accidentally messing up a formula or misentering even a single field could cost yourself thousands.
Enter Knowify project management
We bring job costing and project management together in a simple yet incredibly powerful way to ensure that you can produce a precise job cost estimate AND track, on a continuously updated basis, your performance against your targets.
The basic sequence is this: you begin by putting together a project plan in Knowify with various phases and tasks, then you add materials budgets to the phases and the estimated hours required for each person allocated to the project to complete his/her assigned tasks. Knowify will automatically calculate a cost estimate from these inputs. You can then use Knowify’s industry-leading Contract Jobs module to bid the job, including collecting an e-signature from your client. Once the contract and project plan are live, each time you or one of your employees makes a purchase or puts time in, the project plan will automatically update to display the current tallies on time and spending on the relevant milestone or task. Altogether, you will get a real-time view into your performance, most notably how much time or money you have remaining until you exceed your budget. Further, you’ll also get collaboration tools that will allow all of your employees to sync up on the project.
Overall, Knowify (1) will save you an enormous amount of time in costing, bidding, and running your projects, (2) will reduce your errors throughout, and (3) will increase the operating efficiency of your team. As we said in the title: project costing and project tracking belong together… just like Knowify and your business!
Let us show you the power of Knowify in your business today. Sign up for a 14-day free trial.