Financial tracking of a project comes down to three figures: what was sold, what was consumed, and what remains to be done. The first two almost always exist somewhere. The third, the only one that looks ahead, is almost always missing, and it is the one that decides whether the project can still be recovered.
Confusing budget consumed with progress is the most common mistake, and the costliest.
What was sold, possibly adjusted for amendments. It is the reference: without it, no gap can be calculated.
What was actually produced, costed. It comes from time entry, not from issued invoices.
The only projection. It is an estimate, it can be revised, and that is precisely why it is informative.
A project that is half consumed is not a project at the halfway point. It is if, and only if, the remaining work equals what has already been done. Without this third term, the consumption rate is read as progress, and it is not.
In most organizations, the financial tracking of a project comes from accounting: what was invoiced, what was paid, possibly what was provisioned. This is reliable, audited data, and systematically late.
The lag is mechanical. Production takes place, it is entered sometimes a week late, approved at the end of the month, invoiced the following month, paid thirty to sixty days later. When a gap appears in the accounting dashboard, it is between six weeks and three months old.
On a six-month project, that is half the project. Financial tracking built on issued invoices looks at the past. Financial tracking built on what the field has consumed looks at what is being done now.
As long as financial tracking is produced once a month to be presented, it remains a document: it arrives after the decision it should have informed. It becomes an instrument the day it is a permanent property of the project, updated by the same gesture that moves production forward.
This assumes that time entry, remaining work and the budget sold live in the same place. Separated, they require a manual reconciliation, and that reconciliation happens at the frequency at which someone has the time to do it.
Finance then joins operations in a single reading, frozen at each committee. This is what we call operational commitment management.
Four points, all aimed at reducing the delay between a fact and its financial reading.
Each quarter-day entered moves the consumed, and therefore the gap. There is no end-of-month processing to make the figure readable.
It is revised by those who produce, as things go, and not estimated once and for all at the start.
Consumed plus remaining work, compared with what was sold. It is the only way to see the margin being made instead of discovering it.
From one meeting to the next, the gap can be read. You can say when the drift appeared, and not only that it exists.
The input data comes from time entry, and the function that uses all of this is covered on project management control. The full tour is on the product page.
The billing mode is chosen on the project contract, when it is created. It changes what is invoiced, not the way of steering.
Orders, amendments that the client confirms or refuses, and a payment schedule where each line is an amount, a share of the order or the balance, conditioned if needed on a milestone. The tracking sets consumed against sold: that is where the margin is made or lost.
Profiles and their daily rates on the contract, one profile per person in the project team, and a monthly schedule calculated on the days produced, frozen once marked as invoiced. An order envelope flags the overrun, without blocking anything.
In both cases: ordered, invoiced, paid and the balance due, by project and by client; on the supplier side only, cost and margin at completion; and a month-end close in three steps, time entry, approval, billing calculation. Time and materials as such is not outside our field: what is outside it is pure time and materials, where the client alone directs the work.
The financial tracking of pylotik is steering: it says what is ordered, produced, to be invoiced and paid, and what the margin will be worth at completion. It does not issue invoices, does not calculate VAT and does not keep accounts: it connects to the ERP, through a connector built according to your needs, to send it the billing orders; invoices are produced there, and recorded in pylotik to be tracked. It therefore replaces neither.
The gap between those who waste little and the others is a gap in steering maturity, and it can be worked on. The details of the studies are on the value lost in projects.
Yes. The project contract carries the billing mode: on time and materials, the monthly schedule is calculated on the days produced and the rate of each profile. Tracking of consumed, invoiced and paid stays the same as on fixed price.
By asking those who produce, work package by work package, and revising it at each follow-up meeting. It is not a subtraction between the budget and the consumed: that formula assumes the initial estimate was right, which is precisely the thing to check.
No. The two answer different questions at different rhythms. Accounting establishes what happened, with the rigor that requires; project financial tracking sheds light on what is happening, with the imprecision that implies.
It is available at all times, and it is looked at at the rhythm of the governance bodies: every week on the team side, every month in the internal review, at each committee with the client for what concerns them.
They see what concerns them: orders, billing milestones, what has been delivered. They see neither internal costs, nor margins, nor workload.
It is enough to do the calculation, and it fails on feeding and freshness. The figure in it is right at the moment someone entered it, and then ages in silence. It is also the file that no one else knows how to open when its author is away.
As a dated revision of the committed budget. What matters is being able to say what the reference budget was at the date of a past committee, and not only what it is today.
Describe your chain, from time entry to the dashboard. We show you what the gap becomes when it is calculated at entry rather than at closing.