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Monthly Projections

Has anyone come up with a good way to do projections using C&P Classic? We have created an Excel spread sheet to look at each client's income and job costs on a month-to-month basis. We print out the Income Statement for Client P&L analysis each month and manually update the spreadsheet. Starting with January, we fill in actual for the information that we currently have and projected for the rest of the year. This is a time consuming and error prone method for seeing how much have we billed each client and how much more we expect to bill this year.

Does Clients & Profits have any easy way to do this? Is there a way to modify budgets to reflect clients? Is there a way of getting all billings to date broken down by client?

Shanny R. Morgenstern, Chief Operating Officer Morningstar Communications Company

We use the Projected Revenue Report, part of the Analysis Side Bar Menu under Reports.

Donna Peper

I think I know what you are after. If my explanation doesn't help, please explain again for me!

We issue estimates for 99% of our jobs. As each estimate is sent to a client, the production status code and the billing status code are changed to "Estimate Approval Pending" When the client approves the estimate (required before work can begin) the production status code is changed to "Ready to Schedule" (and proceeds on its merry way as status changes for production purposes) and the Billing status code is changed to "Estimate Approved".

Now, if you run the Projected Revenue Report ( View/Job Tickets/Print Reports/Analysis) after selecting Billing Status = the status code for Estimate Approved, you will get a report showing The Estimate Amount and the Billed Amount (indicating any billing for deposits, etc). The difference between the two should represent the amount to be billed remaining on each job. Thus this represents the estimated value of your work in process. This is a useful number to track your backlog of work (and thus your future billings).

include this info on a daily ProForma Income statement i manually assemble for data in C&P (together with AR, AP,PO,etc) to give a pretty fair assessment of where we stand financially each day.

Does this make any sense??!!

Art Rogers Controller Bjornson Design Associates, Inc.

I hadn't found the Projected Revenue Report yet. It should help significantly. Is there was a way to view the projections on a monthly basis?

Shanny R. Morgenstern, Chief Operating Officer Morningstar Communications Company

Yes, use the "due date" as a criteria. We currently use the due date field to indicate when the job should be closed and billed. Not when the job is due to the client or due to pub etc.

One must be emphatic about Account Managers updating the due dates regularly. This has taken me 2 years of nagging, but they see the results now!

Caveat: It's a good ballpark revenue predictor, but if you do progress billings (where you recognize revenue vs retainer or advance billings) this report is misleading.

Roxanne Cowan

We run the report by Due Date, this provides a monthly overview.

Donna Peper