Projects are the centerpiece of daily business in Poool. That’s why Poool has a built-in for controlling.

By using Poool, automatic analyses and comparisons are created to provide a good overview of the project progress and economic efficiency. The more details are maintained in Poool, the more precise and valuable the analyses become.

In project controlling, we can see whether the project is developing in the right direction in terms of content and how the budget of the project is doing.

The order serves as the basis for this and the time and cost expenditure are continuously compared so that we can always see where we stand and whether the project is profitable.

At a glance you can see the order value, how much of it has been commissioned and what has already been billed.

The costs of the project are made up of external costs assigned to the project and the costs of employee hours that have been booked to this project, phases or linked tickets. This view allows you to see the financial status of the project at a glance.

For an order, the services are usually specified with hours and a price. However, you have to be carfully in this case as not every employee costs the same. If, for example, a project manager (€150/hour) instead of the sold consultant (€100/hour) were to book the open hours at a higher hourly rate, the hours would be booked correctly but the budget would be exceeded.

It is therefore advisable to always keep an eye on the financial key figures in Poool and not just concentrate on the hours used.

In most cases, the booked time of the projects comes directly from the tickets. With the tickets, the offered services are broken down into tasks and allocated to the employees. A time quota is stored here for each task, which can then be booked by the employees. These booked times are automatically included in the performance analysis of the project.

Here we also recommend checking whether the hourly rate offered matches that of the employee. In Poool, a different time allocation and time value can also be specified for the tickets than for the sold function in the order.

If there are several budgets and offers, you can also define the time allocation from which this task is to be debited.

In the project under the tab Orders we find the section Reporting.

In this section we find the performance analysis of the project based on the Orders.

Here all services sold are displayed with the hours and monetary values from the order.

All bookings on a project are shown here. Ideally, they are properly posted to the tasks and functions.  However, if there is a booking directly to the project (instead of a ticket or phase) it will also be shown.

Flat rate benefits are also converted into available time on the basis of the hourly staff rate.

Flat rate performance €1000.

Hourly staff rate = €100

Hours Target = 10 (1000/100)

With the button Actual: Kunde we can switch to Actual: Intern. Here we can look at the evaluation with the internal or external costs.

Use the Diff button to switch between € values and percentage values.

This view updates every time an invoice has been created.

This allows you to quickly check whether what has been done matches what has been accounted for.  This is very interesting for retainer projects or projects with more complex accounting plans.

The hourly costs department helps to control the project financially and results-oriented. Here we can see at a glance how high the order is, what has already been billed and which items are still  open. A good metric to quickly see the financial success of a project is the average hourly rate. We see here the  value for the services billed and the value for the services contracted in numbers and percentages.

Under Projects → Order management, we can find the target and actual comparison of the internal services and external services of the orders for all projects and thus provide us with a quick overview of the situation of the  projects. There are also many filter options to search for projects where the budget is exceeded. (Negative Actual-Target checkbox)

When creating a project it can be defined whether direct time bookings on a project are possible or whether times may only be booked on phases and tickets.

For smaller projects it can be interesting to book times directly on a project.

However, for better controlling, we recommend deactivating this and allowing the time to book only phases and tickets. This helps to better allocate and control the times and thus also costs in case of a later course.

Should a project go wrong and take too much time, it is easier to determine where it was lost and to correct it for the next offer.