Project Tracking versus Red Chair Project Accounting

You may or may not have heard, Red Chair is ending their product support for their Project Accounting solution. But the good news is, there’s an alternative.

By implementing  Project Tracking with Advanced Analytics you will continue to have the ability to oversee multiple projects and analyze profitability from within Dynamics GP with the added peace of mind that you are investing in a mature, stable solution that will be supported for years to come.

Learn more about Project Tracking

Project Tracking creates a seamless connection between a company’s financial transactions and project revenue and expenses. With this product you can quickly and easily assign project information from within Microsoft Dynamics GP at the time of transaction entry.

Project Tracking with Advanced Analytics is an easy–to-setup project tracking solution that is so flexible it can be customized to most businesses and is a great alternative to both GP’s Project Accounting and Analytical Accounting.

Project Tracking lets you:

• Manage multiple Projects easily that extend beyond the fiscal year end
• Add optional security to restrict access at the project level
• Close and archive projects to retain core data
• Simplify your project distributions with variety of defaulting behavior for your project breakdowns
• Customize your own reporting analysis with ease using the Advanced Analytics feature which offers excel type functionality in a single User Interface window

5 Key Differenced between Blue Moon Project Tracking and Red Chair Project Accounting

Split Distributions

When assigning Payables transactions to project(s) you have the added flexibility of splitting a single GP distribution line and assigning the expense to multiple projects.  Save time by including the optional Project Tracking Importer module and eliminate the manual data entry required to break out a single expense against multiple projects by easily importing project details.

A great example where this would be beneficial would be when entering a payables transaction to reimburse an employee for expenses relating to multiple projects.  The single GP distribution expense line can be split between multiple projects utilizing the split distribution feature included with Project Tracking

Labor & Material

When defining your expense ‘Breakdown Codes’ in Project Tracking define your expenses as a Labor or a Material type expense to allow for more detailed analysis of your project’s profitability.

Subdivisions

With Project Tracking you will have the ability to define an unlimited number of Breakdown Codes (Red Chair refers to this feature as a subdivision) and each Breakdown Code can be assigned up to a total of 7 user-defined field values giving you the ability to further slice and dice your project information.

Adjusting Projects

With Blue Moon’s Project Tracking w/Advanced Analytics module correcting project distributions is a breeze!  You can easily move project information from one project to another through a project adjustment entry, eliminating the need to enter a correcting transaction provided the GL account was correctly assigned to the original transaction.  Project adjustments can also be imported utilizing the optional Project Tracking Importer module.

Reporting

Project Tracking w/Advanced Analytics provides powerful reporting and inquiry capabilities through the user interface within Dynamics GP, standard Report Writer reports, the included Advanced Analytics reporting and inquiry tool, pre-defined SmartLists, as well as the ability to create comprehensive SSRS reports to meet your company’s reporting requirements.   For Red Chair clients who are familiar with and love their Crystal Reports, you can continue to use Crystal Reports with Project Tracking once the reports have been created.

Additional Options

Budgeting

Track budget versus actuals by including the optional budgeting module and create and track your project budgets across fiscal years or even across multiple years.  With Project Tracking Budgeting you can create and save multiple revisions of a project budget and easily add additional periods should a project start earlier or continue longer than expected.  Create budget periods that align with your company’s fiscal periods or choose another period duration based on your needs ie. Single period, annual etc.

Importer

Project Tracking optional import add-on is a huge time-saver that will assist you in creating and updating project master records on a mass scale from a CSV file.

The Importer can also be used to import Project Adjustments with or without a General Ledger transaction (helpful to bring in your project beginning balances if you have projects already in progress) or use it to attach project distributions to open year Payables transactions.

The Importer also supports budgeting to allow you to create and update project budgets from an import file

Making the Move

When you are ready to make the switch, here is what you need to know. The entire process from start to finish could take as little as a week depending on the number and complexity of your projects. Training will be split into 3 phases with homework required between each phase.  If you have resources focused on completing the homework/data entry tasks between each training session, you will be up and running and fully trained in little time

Phase 1 - Understand the setups required and how to complete them prior to the Phase 2 meeting.

Phase 2 -Distributing transactions to projects

Phase 3 - Reports and inquiries

Once the Phase 2 training is complete you're ready to start assigning transactions to projects.

Next Steps:

• Check out this blog, Is Dynamics GP Project Accounting overkill?
• Schedule a demo or start your 30-day trial

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