When the right data is at your fingertips, it’s much easier to understand why some projects perform better than others. You also gain insights to improve the way you run your business. You can use estimated expenses to help plan and quote for the costs you expect to incur on a project. You can also use estimated expenses to group actual expenses, and mark-up multiple expenses in one go. Simply create an estimated expense, select the expenses that relate and click track.

View financials on a dashboard

It can not only help you track time and manage projects more effectively, but will also give you good visibility over your business profitability. Assign bills and expenses to projects in Xero accounting so they show in Xero Projects. There’s also the added frustration of knowing that the longer it takes to get your invoices out, the longer you have to wait to get paid. When you use job management software, you’ve got more time and headspace to work on high-value activities for your business, instead of spending hours on administrative tasks. Job management software lets you easily track the tasks, time and expenses that go into each project and turn that data into digestible reports.

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You can easily accept and add time entry suggestions to a project meaning no more manual timesheets for you, or your employees. You can save locations against a project using the Xero Projects iOS app. The app then suggests time entries whenever you arrive at that location. Monitor and manage project financials to maximize profit on current and future jobs using a range of project reports. Don’t forget Xero Partners – you get programme points for using your free version of Xero Projects with your practice org.

1. Plan, estimate and check to see that your job is making a profit using the job costing software in Xero Projects.
2. You can easily accept and add time entry suggestions to a project meaning no more manual timesheets for you, or your employees.
3. Details from your job tracking are added to Xero invoices which can include a pay now button for easy payment.
4. Invoice accurately and promptly, either as the job progresses or once the job’s complete.

Record time and track costs

Work out the costs of time and materials so you know what to quote. Job costing in Xero Projects is integrated with and dependent on using Xero accounting. Bills and spending can be assigned to a project in Xero accounting and show against the project in Xero Projects, while project costs are invoiced from Xero. Get resource management reports that show chargeable and non-chargeable hours for any period. Create fixed price or time-and-materials invoices based on your project tracking, and choose how much real accounts vs. nominal accounts job information and detail to display.

If your project’s deadlines, costs or scope change, it can be time consuming to update multiple spreadsheets. You can also lose information if team members inadvertently work off old versions. Most importantly, you can miss out on billable hours and revenue, because spreadsheets don’t record how much time each employee is spending on specific tasks. Say goodbye to complicated integrations with project accounting software. The great thing about Projects being part of Xero is seamlessly linking your costs and accounting.

You can identify potential issues or overruns fixed asset turnover ratio definition and adjust the work accordingly. Compare the estimates in your project budget with actual costs to check if there are cost overruns and to make sure the project is making a profit. Use Xero’s job tracker to track time, with a start-stop timer and location-based tracking on mobile.

Snap receipts and submit expenses or mileage claims anytime, anywhere with Xero Expenses and assign them to a project to recover the costs. You only pay for employees who use Xero Projects within the month. You don’t pay for an employee if all they did that month was view job information or run project-related reports. You can see a full feature functionality comparison for Xero Projects and WorkflowMax to help decide which will best suit your needs. While spreadsheets can be useful for starting cost estimates, they’re not a great tool for managing projects with many moving parts.

If you use Trello to allocate resources to tasks and manage workflows, you can log time that’s entered against tasks in Trello directly to Xero Projects. The time entry details show that it came from Trello and let you click through to the Trello card. View project accounting metrics and monitor progress on a specific project against spending variance definition and meaning the project budget. Jeff Manson, Director at Studio LBA, helped his architecture firm uncover billable time that they weren’t sufficiently tracking and charging to their clients. It’s the ultimate way to ensure time is tracked accurately and you never miss chargeable time.