Projects (also called as engagements, jobs, or matters) are the backbone of any business. There are metrics that a project manager or owner should check regularly to ensure that everything is on track. If you have to calculate everything on your own, staying on top of it can be hard. Even some of the most sophisticated project management software do not make it easy to track progress on your projects.
The Projects screen in BQE CORE is organized to display the most important and useful information front and center on its Project Center > Overview tab. It is a one-stop shop for all your insights on a project. It gives a cumulative and comprehensive overview of your active projects as well as their overall finances in terms of what’s ready to bill, your work-in-hand, and what’s overdue. The widgets on the Overview tab offer a one-click drill-down to the source data and related reports. There are additional security permissions to give access to relevant employees to various areas of the screen. This way more employees can be granted access to the project data because the CORE admin/owner has better control of what each user can see. It also offers better visibility across teams and their workload. Click to watch this explainer video on Project Center in CORE.
Project Overview
In the Projects screen list view, when you click on a project record on the grid, CORE takes you to the detail view, known as Project Center. The first Overview tab shows you everything you need to know about the overall status of your project. It displays various widgets with essential project-related metrics.
-
Unbilled Time and Unbilled Expenses
This covers the work-in-progress (WIP) for your projects. It not only tells project managers how far along work is, but it gives a clear indication of upcoming cashflow.
-
Invoices
This widget displays up to 30 most recent invoices associated with the selected project, offering a comprehensive view of billing information.
-
Timeline
A Gantt chart-style Timeline displays a 12–14-month period beginning two months before the current month and extending 10-12 months into the future. You can hover on each phase and see some details or dig deeper into a report. Only immediate phases of the selected project are shown, excluding sub-phases or deeper levels.
-
Analysis
This widget serves as a critical tool for assessing project performance, displaying key indicators related to the project's progress and valuable insights into the financial health of the project. This data is available on separate tabs.
-
Progress: This tab provides additional insight into how things are faring against the contract amount. Besides displaying information about billed amount, work-in-hand and cost amount, you get a comparison of the contracted amount, spent amount, and remaining balances. This comparison is further refined by service and expense contract amounts. This way, you will understand ahead of time whether or not your project will exceed your contract amount.
Similarly, the budget analysis shows a breakdown of your services and expenses in terms of what has been used and what is the budgeted amount. You will get a quick picture of whether your project is over budget or approaching budget.
-
Profitability: This widget helps in assessing the profitability of a project. It gives you a breakdown of your services and expenses in terms of billable, billed, unbilled, and non-billable amounts. This is a great tool to assess how costs are faring against the billable time and expenses. You can also check write-up/write-down on your billable time entries. This is helpful because you might want to bill the client more or less than the actual billable amount to manage your project budget.
-
Billability: This tab displays the billability of the time spent on a project, irrespective of the project status. You can easily see how much of the total time turns out to be billable. You can see it both in terms of hours as well as amounts. This metric is crucial if you are billing hourly or hourly-not-to-exceed projects. It is useful even if you are working on a fixed-fee project. You will gain a clear picture of your project’s efficiency in terms of billable versus non-billable hours.
-
Retainers: This tab shows you all the information about retainers associated with a project and client. You can instantly view what you have received versus what has been used and what is left. CORE allows you to see the 10 most recent retainer requests, retainers received and retainers used.
-
Progress: This tab provides additional insight into how things are faring against the contract amount. Besides displaying information about billed amount, work-in-hand and cost amount, you get a comparison of the contracted amount, spent amount, and remaining balances. This comparison is further refined by service and expense contract amounts. This way, you will understand ahead of time whether or not your project will exceed your contract amount.
-
General Information
This widget aims to provide a quick overview of basic and general details of a project, such as contract, budget, duration, etc.
-
Phases
This widget displays up to 10 child phases of the selected project. It also shows the approved spent % of the phases along with a small pie chart reflecting the percentage. You can add new phases by clicking + on the widget.
-
Team
This widget displays the list of team members assigned to the project. You can add team members by clicking + on the widget.
-
Client
It displays the name of the client associated with the project along with the address. It also displays the primary contact details such as email address and phone number.
-
Assets
This list widget displays the project's to-dos, notes, documents, RFIs, submittals, and drawings along with the number of records associated with them. Each of these assets is clickable and opens the list view of the respective screens. You can click + to add new items or records.
When you use CORE, these metrics are calculated in real-time per project, as a whole, and phase-by-phase. These indicators—if checked throughout the life of your project—will help ensure that projects are completed on time and within budget.
For more information on project KPIs, check CORE Help Center. Check out the detailed descriptions available in Projects > Fields Descriptions > Overview.