Project Costing - Why is it so difficult

Determining the entire cost of a project - regardless of the type of project - is extremely difficult. You need to track

1. Tasks
2. Expenses (Invoices and Purchase Orders)
3. Time
4. Contracts and Change Orders

Managing this data is a time consuming endeavor. Even if you have individual systems in place to manage each piece, you need to integrate that information together to ensure all of the data syncs together. Even if the data is synced between systems, you still need to export the data to Excel, or use a third party analytics tool, to get any useful information.

Here’s an example - a company manages their project tasks in ClickUp, tracks their billing in Quickbooks, and handles contract change orders and document signing via Docusign. How would they calculate their expected cost of a change order?

First they would open Docusign to get the language of the change order. Then, they would author the tasks needed to complete the change order in ClickUp and assign those to the team. Now that the change order has a breakdown and task estimation, how would you get an estimated cost?

You would need to go into Quickbooks and assign the expected hourly rate from Quickbooks into each of the tasks in Clickup. Clickup doesn’t have a great sum rollup feature, so even if Quickbooks was integrated into Clickup, and I could get an estimated cost per task inside Clickup, I would then need to export my costed tasks from ClickUp into a 3rd party graphing/analytics software, or Excel.

That’s a lot of manual work, and potential errors. When handling so many moving pieces, integrations between systems don’t solve the problem because none of the systems in play are designed to answer questions that take in information from a variety of different systems.

In an ideal world, there would be a single system that allows you to

1. Create, assign and manage your tasks
2. Track your billing and invoices
3. Show analysis of your estimated and actual project costs
4. Handle sending information to your other systems (such as Docusign and Quickbooks)

Enter Thruline - our ERP is designed to help manage every facet of your business, including your projects. Our focus is ensuring that you can streamline all of your information in a single place - including analysis and integrations into other systems. With Thruline you can estimate your projects, track and add your financial information, and when it’s complete automatically generate and send contracts out for signature via Docusign. From the same screen generate and send invoices via the provider of your choice, such as Quickbooks.

This allows you to handle all of your information in a single place, and have a single view of your timelines - without Excel.

At Thruline we’re not just built to manage your projects - we’re built to manage your business, which is why we’ve tackled the hardest part about business software, making sure you can use all of your company’s data from a single place. Reach out for a private consultation! You can also try us out for free on our website - no credit card required.

‍