About Ajera

Deltek designed Ajera to help architectural and engineering firms quickly produce accurate estimates and complete projects on time and within budget.

Integrated with accounting

With Ajera, you have seamlessly integration of financial and project-related information from time and expense entry, billing, and reporting. For example, when building a budget, you can enter how many hours you expect it to take to complete a task, and Ajera automatically enters the contract amount using the rate table. On that same window, you can view an instant report, which contains up-to-date information about the project, by clicking a tab.

Project templates

Your firm may choose to work from project templates, which help set standards for budgeting, naming conventions, work breakdown structure, and security.

When setting up Ajera, your firm can choose to work with templates in one or all of the following ways:

• Use the industry-specific templates provided, as-is.
• Modify the industry-specific templates.
• Create templates from scratch.

The industry-specific templates include the following:

Template	Description
Quick project	Use this template when you want to quickly start a project with a minimum of detail and plan to enter the details later.
Top-down	Use this template for projects that you want to budget top-down.
Bottom-up	Use this template for projects that you want to budget bottom-up.
Top-down with Business Development	Use this template for projects that you want to budget top-down when using Business Development. It includes a Business Development phase to give you a head start at tracking your BD efforts.
Bottom-up with Business Development	Use this template for projects that you want to budget bottom-up when using Business Development. It includes a Business Development phase to give you a head start at tracking your BD efforts.

Estimating and budgets

You can easily create project budgets with Ajera. You can use templates to help define essential information for estimating a project. For detailed instructions about budgeting, see Budgeting top-down and Budgeting bottom-up.

Managing resources

You can specify the resources that are required for a project in several ways. You can start scheduling a project with unspecified resources or resources specified only by employee type. As the project progresses, you can change the resources to specify the exact names of employees with their hours or percentage of the workload. You do not need to fully schedule all work so, if you choose to do so, you can assign and manage only critical resources.

Working with the Gantt chart (timeline) and resources is simple because the timeline is an interactive component of your work breakdown structure.

In Ajera, you also have reports that answer such questions as:

• Do I have enough work? Too much work?
• Can I move projects around to relieve timeline stress?
• Can I project revenue in the future?
• Do I have the right type of employee to complete the work that I have?

You can also add tasks when you want to track the individual to-do items that comprise the work needed to complete a phase or project.