Phased project management setup and workflow

Overview

Use the phased project management setup and workflow to track your budgeted and actual revenue, as well as your budgeted and actual project expenses by phase.

Before you begin the setup for project management, review the Introduction to project management and project label hierarchy documentation to decide the best setup option for your business.

Things to know

• Setup level of effort: Intermediate

• Use project labels and sub-levels to manage your project. To learn more, see Project Hierarchies.

• The phased project management workflow supports progress billing.

• The phased project management workflow is typically used in the Construction industry to track cost types, such as labor, material, and equipment, at a more granular phase level, such as Rough-in, Trim-out, Start-up, to get better insights into your company's performance.

Best practices

• Set up project label defaults to avoid having to manually assign labels to records.

• Use project statuses to track the progress of your projects at a high level.

• Avoid double costing issues by following the workflows.        

  • For more information, see:                

    • Manage double costing from booking a job from a sold estimate

    • Manage double costing from chargeable materials

• Avoid Uncategorized expenses/revenue on the Budget vs Actual table.

Set up phased project management workflow

1. If you are using the itemized estimate/budget creation method, the pricebook should be set up and have relevant services, materials, and equipment added.

2. If you're using the rough project estimate/budget creation method, create summary services, materials, and equipment and apply appropriate project label defaults to those items.        

   1. Go to your pricebook and create services that can be used to represent the contract value for each phase of work and assign the appropriate project label:                

      1. Rough-in

      2. Trim-out

      3. Start-up

   2. Go to your pricebook and create materials that can be used to represent your costs you want to budget for by phase. We also recommend you use a service to track projected labor cost budgets.                

      1. Rough-in material cost 

      2. Rough-in equipment cost 

      3. Rough-in labor cost 

      4. Trim-out material cost 

      5. Trim-out equipment cost 

      6. Trim-out labor cost

      7. Start-up material cost 

      8. Start-up equipment cost 

      9. Start-up labor cost 

         Note: Don't use equipment records to represent costs when using the rough estimation method.

3. Create job types for each phase of work. Assign the corresponding labels to the corresponding job types.

4. Set up payroll information, such as pay rate and labor burden in Technician settings so that labor actuals generate with timesheet entries.

5. (Optional) Learn about the Progress Billing workflow to best set up your budget and estimates.

6. (Optional) Set up the custom cost tracking workflow.

7. (Optional) Set up retainage for projects.

Use phased project management workflow

1. Create a project record.

2. Create a project opportunity on the project record you created.

3. Create a project estimate for the opportunity you created.        

   • Create a line item estimate: Use this method if your pricebook already contains the specific services, materials, and equipment required for the project. Line item estimates are ideal when you know that your pricebook already contains the specific service, material, and equipment tasks to include or when you want to use other features, such as requisitions, to procure inventory directly from your current stock.

   • Create a rough estimate: Use this method if your pricebook does not contain the specific line-item services, materials, or equipment required for the project. Rough estimates are ideal when you may not know the exact material or equipment tasks to include yet, or when you need an efficient workflow to create and populate a budget for your project.

4. After you've won the bid, sell the estimate to populate the project's financial information.

5. Perform the required work and track your costs.        

   • Book the necessary jobs and perform the work for the project.                

     • Make sure to book the correct job type when booking a job. This helps ensure that the project label hierarchies work automatically while accruing and tracking costs on the jobs.

   • Track costs by:                

     • Materials and equipment costs

     • Purchase order costs

     • Custom costs                        

       Note: You can automate labor tracking using timesheets.

6. Use the Budget vs Actuals (BvA) table and reporting to track your project progress and financial performance.        

   Note: Uncategorized transactions should be addressed in order to get accurate data on the BvA table.

7. Invoice your customer using:        

   • Progress Billing (manual process)

   • Progress Billing through the Application for Payment

Want to learn more?

• Visit ServiceTitan Academy and enroll in Project Management Basics

• See End-to-end guide to project management