Project Progress

The Project Progress report enables you to compare labor and expense budgets with actual performance and shows you where to take action to avoid overruns. You can generate this report in many different ways. For example, you can select different levels of detail, use cost rates or billing rates, and display labor hours only, or both labor hours and monetary amounts.

You can use the Project Progress report to do the following:

  • Verify that a project is on target and within budget.
  • Pinpoint any trouble areas.
  • Diagnose situations that put the project over budget, so you can avoid overruns.
  • Confirm the accuracy and completeness of current period labor and expense charges.

Labor Section

At the lowest work breakdown structure (WBS) level, the report displays labor hours and amounts by labor code level or by employee within labor code level. You choose how many labor code levels to show. If you select either Current Detail or JTD Detail in Labor Detail on the Time & Expense tab, the report displays individual labor transactions.

Below each labor section, the report displays the total overhead allocated.

Expense Sections

At the lowest WBS level, the report groups expense information by type of expense and by expense account. You select the level of detail: expense type totals only, account totals only, individual transactions for the current period, or individual transactions for the job to date.

Project Information and Financial Analysis Sections

In addition to the labor and expense information, you can include the following:

  • Selected information from the Projects hub (principal, project manager, client, and so on) for each WBS level.
  • User-defined fields.
  • A Financial Analysis section for each WBS level. Those sections display the following for the current period, the year to date, and the job to date:
    • Fees billed, consultant billed, reimbursable billed, other billed, total billed, revenue, and spent amounts.
    • The difference between spent and revenue. This is labeled Profit if you report at cost rates and Variance if you report at billing rates.
    • Profit percentage, if you report at cost rates, or the variance percentage, if you report at billing rates. This percentage is the profit or variance divided by revenue.
    • Expected gross compensation.
    • Current cash received for the job to date.
    • Total accounts receivable and unbilled amounts for the project to date. These amounts include retainage amounts, if applied.
    • Effective multiplier, if you report at cost rates, or realization ratio, if you report at billing rates.
    • Revenue method.

Symbols Used on the Report

The following symbols may be used on the Project Progress report:

Icon Description
* An asterisk to the left of a detail line indicates the transaction was transferred from another project.
u A small u indicates an unbilled transaction.
If plans are included that have unpublished changes, a Caution indicator displays as an alert that you are not viewing the most current data.

Select the Source of Budget Data

If your firm uses Planning, use the options on the Budget tab to select the source of the project budget data for the report:

  • Project Budget Worksheet in Accounting
  • The plan mapped to the project in Planning

Effective Dates

Billing includes the option to specify effective dates for billing rates. You can establish a schedule of rates at which employee labor is billed throughout the course of a project.

If a project's billing rate is determined by a billing labor rate table, the date of the transaction affects the billing rate. This applies to transactions entered through Transaction Entry, using a Billing Labor Insert, or using a Billing Labor Transfer. DPS compares the transaction date with the effective dates in the billing labor rate table to determine which billing rate to use to calculate the billing amount.

Expanding and Collapsing Report Groups

If you are using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and if, on the Options tab of the Options dialog box for this report, you select Print Financial Analysis and you also enable the option to collapse and expand a report group, the expand/collapse option is disabled for report groups when you generate the report with this set of options. This is necessary because a defect in Microsoft software would cause the report to fail otherwise.

Options Dialog Box

Use the Options dialog box to specify reporting options for a report. Depending on the report, the dialog box contains one or more of the following tabs: General, Sorting/Grouping, Columns, Budget, Metrics, User Defined Sections, Activity, Drill Down, Layout, and Graph.

Related Topics:

  • Display the Project Progress Report
    The Project Progress report is a project report.
  • Project Progress General Tab
    Use the General tab to select report options for the Project Progress report and to save sets of options for reuse.
  • Project Progress Labor & Expense Tab
    Use the Labor & Expense tab to indicate if you want the report to display labor detail, expense detail, or both. The tab also provides a number of options for how the labor and expense information is displayed.
  • Project Progress Budget Tab
    If you use Planning, use the Budget tab to select the source of the project budget data for the Project Progress report.
  • Project Progress Columns Tab
    Use the Columns tab to select or clear columns, change column sequence, provide new column labels, set column widths, or select number and date formats.
Parent Topic: Project Reports