Project Control Overview

Project Control helps you keep your projects running smoothly. You can manage project activities and monitor project progress.

Use Project Control to record each of your firm's projects, coordinate project activities and monitor project progress, process labor and expense transactions, charge direct and overhead costs to projects, track employee time, generate project reports, and maintain project budgets.

You can use Project Control on its own or use it with other Vision applications such as Billing, CRM, Proposals, Resource Planning, and Time and Expense, as a complete financial and project management system.

Maintain Project Information

Before you use Project Control, you must enter basic information about each of your projects, including phases and tasks, if applicable. You must also enter basic information about your clients and your employees, and you must set up unit tables if you are using units to charge any expenses to your projects.

Then, on a regular basis, you supply Vision with current project-related information. For example, you:

  • Establish budgets for projects.
  • Process timesheets, which Vision uses to cost and distribute labor to projects.
  • Process expense charges to projects.
  • Process invoices for projects.
  • Update percent completes for projects.

As you process transactions and update project budgets and percent completes, Vision uses this information to calculate:

  • The overhead allocated to each project.
  • The direct expenses charged to each project.
  • The revenue earned by each project.

Project Reports

You can generate various project reports that show the financial status of your projects, including:

  • Project Progress Report
  • Project Detail Report
  • Project Summary Report
  • Office Earnings Report
  • Project List Report
  • Unposted Labor Report

Some project reports are designed to help project managers monitor the performance of their own projects. These reports include detailed information about the labor, expense, and revenue postings to individual projects. Other project reports are designed to help principals analyze the performance of the firm as a whole. These reports provide a more summarized view of all of the firm’s projects.

Related Topics:

  • Project Records
    Enter and manage your project records in the Project Info Center.
  • Projects, Phases, and Tasks
    When you create a project record, you can divide the project into phases and tasks.
  • Project Charge Types
    When you create a project record, you must assign a project charge type to determine how labor and expense costs are charged to the project.
  • Interaction of Project Control and Accounting
    Project Control and Accounting form the core of the Vision management information system. When you process a transaction, you must supply Vision with a project number, a phase/task number (if you are using phases and tasks), and an account number.
  • Labor and Expense Charges
    When you use Project Control, all of the work your firm does and all of the money it spends and receives is associated with a project. Every labor and expense transaction must have an associated project number.
  • Project Planning Overview
    A Vision project plan is an outline for organizing work and associated costs. In Project Planning, you can develop full plans for opportunities or projects, create new plans, clone and modify existing plans, and run hypothetical project scenarios.
  • Project Budgeting Overview
    To get the most out of Vision Project Control, you should establish budgets for your project's key components — including labor, expense, and overhead — and then periodically enter percent completes to reflect the projects’ current level of completion.
  • Project Reporting
    Vision offers a variety of summary and detailed reports designed specifically for project management.
Parent Topic: Concepts Overview