Organization Reporting Structure

Use Organization Reporting to divide your enterprise into distinct units and track data separately for each unit.

You can track both project and financial data separately. This enables you to monitor the profitability of your business more effectively, because you can get a financial snapshot of each organization and compare that snapshot to the performance of your enterprise as a whole.

Before you begin using the Organization Reporting application, you should consider the following questions to determine what structure will most effectively support your needs:

• What levels of performance do you want to track?
• How will subcodes be set up to identify organizations?
• Are any label changes necessary?

One way to use Organization Reporting (assuming that your enterprise has several branch offices) is to set up organizations by location. For example:

• An enterprise with offices in Boston and San Francisco could set up two distinct organizations to identify the offices: Boston Office and San Francisco Office.
• An enterprise with clusters of offices in the northeastern and southeastern United States could set up two distinct organizations to identify the regional offices: Northeastern District and Southeastern District.

Organization Reporting is also used to track business transactions by discipline or function. For example, you could divide an enterprise with three disciplines (Architecture, Engineering, and Environmental Consulting) into three organizations. And, you could divide an enterprise with a single office into three organizations (Sales, Administration, and Support).

After you set up your organization structure, you can view project reports, track financial transactions, and assess profitability for each organization.

Important: If your only activated modules are CRM and/or Resource Planning, you set up organizations in the browser application, in Settings > General > Organization. See Organizations (CRM or Resource Planning) for details.

If you have any other modules in addition to CRM or Resource Planning, you set up Organization Reporting in the desktop application, Settings > Organization. See Organization Setup for details.

One-Level or Multi-Level Organization

Depending on the size and complexity of your enterprise, you can create a fairly simple or more complex organization structure. For example, a small enterprise may opt for a simple, one-level structure to track its two branch offices. Or, the same enterprise may set up a two-level organization structure to simultaneously track branch offices and disciplines. A larger enterprise may want to track regions, offices, and disciplines. They would need a three-level organization structure.

With a multi-level organization structure, you determine the various combinations of regions, offices, and disciplines that make up valid organizations. Vantagepoint can accommodate up to five organization levels, although most enterprises need only one or two levels. The number of organization levels that you need will depend on your enterprise’s structure and the level of detail that you require.

You use subcodes to identify each organization level that you set up.

Examples

These are some of the ways in which you could divide your enterprise into organizations:

• Cities where offices are located (Boston, Atlanta, San Francisco).
• Regions where clusters of offices are located (Northeast, South, Midwest).
• Business functions or types of practice (architectural, engineering, environmental).
• Corporate structure (professional corporation, partnership, subsidiary).
• Companies (XYZ Corporation, ABC Corporation, 123 Corporation).

You could also combine any of these organization levels to create a multi-level organization structure:

• Companies/Regions/Cities
• Corporate Structure/Regions/Business Functions