Accounting and the WBS

If your firm uses the Accounting or Time and Expense applications, a well-planned WBS can help ensure that proper pieces of the project, such as what portion of a project an employee worked on, and for how long, are tracked and measured.

A well-planned WBS will help with:

• Assigning labor costs to the right employees and the right projects.
• Assigning expenses and costs to projects.
• Accurate and tailored client billing.

Even if your firm does not use the Accounting or Time and Expense applications, Deltek recommends that you consider the needs of your accounting department for project billing and assigning expense and cost to a project when creating your firm-wide work breakdown structure.

Accounting Requirements

Your accounting staff has the following requirements of a WBS:

• 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.
• To balance the need to record information for general ledger purposes with project management's need to manage the project.
• To create a structure that is manageable. Can employees reasonably track their time at the levels you’re 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 too hard to extract and manipulate the required data.
• The project manager to be a bottleneck for important information.