There are different levels of project costing and reporting that companies need to track and audit. Our Budgetrac solution enables companies to not only track and account for project costs, but a most important feature is to also track contracts with vendors. As an organization enters into contracts with vendors, these contracts can include various costs and may also have the element of retention that will need to be managed.
Budgetrac provides the ability to create contacts, note the retention, which also has the ability to change during the life of the contract, and manage draws. The contract process itself typically does not create “debits and credits”, however, it is a key tool in managing the larger payables. Consider the benefits of having your contract information organized and available for reporting:
- The ability to have a report of vendor exposure across your projects and be able to review their provided results
- The ability to see all the contracts for a project and what has been paid to date by cost code and what is still committed for
- The ability to manage retention
- And ultimately, a more efficient AP/payment processing procedureWe find that without a tool such as Budgetrac, this level of reporting is typically managed manually and redundantly between the project managers and accountants, thus providing inconsistent results and can impact project management decisions. Simply by taking this from “spreadsheet” management, to a single database type system there will be many efficiency gains. Not only will the draw and payment processing be most accurate and efficient, the information that is now available to project managers will allow them to better track the elusive “cost to complete”. Contract Management starts from the origin of a project and is critical for the tracking of commitments until the end of the project. Written by: Kara Schwab