Accounting and the Work Breakdown Structure

If you use the Accounting or Time and Expense applications, a well-planned work breakdown structure can help you track and measure important information about the project, such as the parts of a project that an employee worked on, and for how long.

A well-planned work breakdown structure will help with:

• Assigning labor costs to the right employees and projects.
• Assigning expenses to projects.
• Providing accurate and tailored client invoices.

Even if you do not use the Accounting or Time & Expense applications, you should consider the needs of your accounting department for project billing and assigning expenses to projects when creating your enterprise-wide work breakdown structure.

Accounting Requirements

Your accounting staff has the following requirements of a work breakdown structure:

• The ability to meet contractual billing needs, such as determining whom should be billed, what billing methods and terms to use, who performed the work, and when clients should be billed.
• Detailed expense information, including how expenses should be applied to the project as a whole or to its individual components.
• Detailed labor information, such as who worked on a project, how long each person worked, and what to pay the individual.
• An easy, efficient, accurate way to get data from project managers.
• A balance between the need to record information for general ledger purposes and project management's need to manage the project.
• A structure that is manageable. Can employees reasonably track their time at the levels that you are defining?
• A flexible structure to accommodate most of your billing requirements.

Your accounting staff does not want the following:

• A structure too simple to capture the required data.
• A structure so complex that it becomes hard to extract and manipulate the required data.
• The project manager to be a bottleneck for important information.