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Welcome back. My name is Cris. And this video, we're going to be taking a look at project management in Net Suite. And out of the many different things that NetSuite can do project management is definitely one of its strongest features. And this is important not just for project managers but also for people who are working on projects. The accounting team who has handled the billing side of things as well as consultants in training who no doubt at some point are going to come across a company that as part of their implementation, needs to have projects set up. So there's a lot of different uses for project management. And in this video we're going to take a deep dive into it. So let's get into this. All right. So here we are in our home dashboard and notice I'm in the administrator role currently in a demo account specifically for services, and it does have project set up in it. And if I want to take a look at some of the projects that are available on this account, I would go up to lists, down to relationships and you can see we've got projects here. So let's take a look at all the various projects we have. So I come to this list here and as you can see, this current demo account has a bunch of projects set up and you can see we've got the customer in the middle here, we can see the project name, etc. So a lot of different options. So let's just check out one of these. We've got this customization work phase over here, so let's actually view this one and we're basically starting by just taking a look at what goes into a project and you're going to see that this is important to understand when you're creating new projects, the various information fields you're going to need to fill in when creating them. So first off, at the top here, we have the project name and let's actually go into edit mode that we can show some of the actual options you have available. So we can see this is currently customization work phase two for the customers, Cooper Software. So a lot of this is pretty straightforward. You know, we've got the form that we're using for the creation of this project. We can see the ID that was created for it. It was given a name. We can see the customer. There's a hyperlink to check out that customer info. And of course the customer is associated with a subsidiary. So you can see that auto filled in. Every project will have a project manager that's assigned to it. So in this case it's Mark Collins and we can see the status of it. So is this project, you know, is it a closed project? Is it already going? Is it maybe not even awarded yet, but it's something that we're hoping to have as an upcoming project so you can set what that status is as you come down. So in the beginning, this is actually you're just going to fill in one field. When you're first creating a project, you're basically put in what you what the planned work is for that project as the project is built on. And we'll get into that in a second, but you'll add other tasks to your add other people who are going to be doing those tasks and that will assign more and more hours to this thing. And then as people actually start working on the project, they'll start using up those hours. So you can see a few different fields here. You can see planned work. In other words, what was planned to be done for this project? You can see a baseline is basically where you're taking kind of a snapshot moment in time. We're saying, okay, we set a baseline and it gives you something to compare a future date back to this original baseline. So you can see the plan work baseline there, which in this case is the same as the original planned work. We can also see the allocated work, which means what is the actual time that has been now assigned and allocated to this project. So in that case that 788 hours of work and then actual work who's actually put in time on this project is only 16 hours. So you can take that planned work of 228 hours, you can put in the actual you minus that 16, and you can see that there's 212 hours of remaining work. And that comes out to this percentage here of 7% complete. You can also see this percentage, you can assign risk levels. If that's relevant, you can say this is high priority or risk, low, medium, etc.. You can put information about that if you want. Going down from that. We have projects. What are some of the key dates related to this project? And we're not talking about milestones, but in terms of the creation and existence of this project. So for example, scheduling, are we basically setting a start date and then scheduling forward from that date, or are we scheduling a date, an end date where the project has to be done by a certain time and then we can build back from there? So that's either forward or backward. And because this is forward, you can see that it's given us the option of putting the start date, in other words, that first date that we build forward from. So there's a bit of other information you can set. You know, what the end date is for this thing. There's also the classifications down here. You can set the department class location associated. Obviously the fourth classification is subsidiary, which we already saw at the top of this page. And then coming down here, this is where we really get into the meat of this project. These subtypes have a lot of the kind of bread and butter of the projects. Now before I actually get into the schedule, I want to talk about something that's really important to the creation of a project, that seminal moment where your starting a project and really dictating how this project is going to operate and the way you do that is preferences sub tab. So this basically has a bunch of different settings and I'm not going to walk you through every single one of these because, because you can click on any single one and you can see the field level help for that setting. So I'm really just going to cover some of the key ones. There's a number of features that are here that really are dictating how people can assign hours or basically log their hours for this project. So, for example, allow time entry that dictates can people even basically assign time to this project in the first place and then a few other ones dictate does a person let's say we have an employee, Joe, does Joe have to be assigned to this project to be able to log hours for it? Maybe he has to be assigned not only to the project but also to a specific task before he can log hours for that task. But he couldn't log for a different task. So you have a few different things like that. For example, allow allocated resources to enter time to all tasks, limit time and expenses to resources. You also have allow expenses. So a few different thing that limit what employees can do in terms of logging time and expenses. You also have things like classify time as utilized, productive, exempt. So I'll give you three different examples to kind of understand the types of projects you can have. So let's say in the first example, we're going to say that let's say in this case, this project is to build a house. I know it's a very simple example, but let's just take that as we're building a house and utilize time would be obviously if you have, let's say, an architect who's spending time designing that house, that would be utilized billable time to that construction project, so that would be utilized. Now exempt supplies can apply also to utilize projects where basically you're going to be logging hours, but you want to also have the option to log hours to that project, but also not have it be billable specific hours. You say, okay, I did 4 hours, but that should not be billable and that should not be considered utilized. In that particular case, you can have exempt as an option. So that's the first category is utilized time for a particular project. The second type would be, let's say your company has an enhancement project where it takes the existing employees and makes them better at their jobs or maybe gives them new skill sets. Now that's not utilized time because it's not like you're going to be billing it to customers, but it is productive time As far as the company is concerned, the company is investing time into its employees to make them better employees, so it is considered productive, but it is not utilized. And the third example of a project would be something that's not utilized and is also not productive. For example, you would want to create a project that is called holidays, so that if you've got employees that are logging their time and let's say it's Christmas and Christmas is a paid holiday, then they should be able to log. They need to choose that project is the holiday project log their 8 hours and you would want to have that as an option. So that would not be utilized or productive compared to the other two. So that just gives you a concept of what these things even mean. So a bunch of other features, again, you can click on these to know what they mean. For example, you've got things like time approval. How do you want time approval to happen? Do you want to go through several individuals or maybe just supervisors? You can set that here. You can give the ability to allow purchase orders and vendor bills to be tied in with projects. Those are all different options. So this is really an important part of the origination of a project to set how that project is going to be and operate at this point. I do want to make mention if you're finding this video helpful, please hit that like button. And if you want to see future videos like this, hit subscribe. I come out with a new video every single week. And lastly, if you want to leave a comment and let me know any kind of video you would like to see in the future. For example, the only reason I'm making this video is because someone left me a comment saying, Can you help me out with project management? And so here we are. So leave me a comment below. Let me know what you'd like to see in the future. And if you're finding these videos helpful and you want to leave me some feedback, it really makes a huge difference. It means a lot to me personally to hear that you guys are finding these videos helpful. So let's continue. All right. So now I'm going to go from preferences over to financial and I'm going to scroll down here Financial. This is another sub tab, this really important for really dictating how this project is going to operate from a financial standpoint. So skipping this first is just a template up here. But this billing type, this is really one of the key aspects of a project. This is where you specify how are you going to build your clients for this project? And in some cases there's not going to be billing, right? You might have a project that's like holiday and there's not any kind of billing, but for any kind of client based project, you will have some type of billing and there's one of four types. So the first in this case we're looking at charge base. So this is where you're going to assign charges that will occur and will basically be billed out to the client. So that's especially in a service based industry like consulting, where you're simply putting in some amount of time. You have consultants that are working with the clients. Every time they put in an hour with the client, you're going to bill, let's say at the end of the month you'll bill a client for that time. So that's time material. Then you have two that are very similar. It's called fixed bid milestone and fixed bid interval. So fixed bid, that simply means you have a fixed amount. Let's say it's a project that costs $1,000,000 and you're either going to build the client by milestone. So let's say milestone one is the completion of the foundation and we're going to bill 20% at that point. And then let's say completion of framing is another 30% and then completion of the House is the final 50% and that all adds up to 100%. The second very common method of doing a project is called Time and Material. as you can probably guess from that, it means that certain intervals, let's say it's every month or whatever the time period is you're going to bid or you're going to build a certain amount to that client. So those are the four year fixed bid interval milestones, then charged based and time in material, which is probably the most common. So that's the billing type. Now once you've selected the billing type, then you actually have to specify the billing schedule. So billing schedule, that's basically your template. You can have you can have these billing schedules that basically be templates, but they'll be tied to what that billing type is. So let's say you chose time, the material, you might have a billing schedule that says that the first of every month, all of the hours that were put in are going to be added up and they're going to bill on the first of the next month. So that would be a billing schedule specifically tied to time and material. You might have a billing schedule tied to fixed bid milestone where it says at these various milestones, this is the percentage that's going to be allocated or distributed. This is going to be the percentage that's billed at this specific time for this specific total amount. So billing schedules are really important and do go hand in hand with those billing types. Yeah, some basic information. What's the currency? What's that exchange rate, the revenue recognition forecast role. So if you are dealing with revenue recognition, I have a separate video on revenue recognition, but the concept is if you are using revenue recognition and you want to forecast what the revenue is going to look like in the months to come, you can set what that rule is. It's basically going to be a template that's going to dictate how that forecast works. A number of other features, you can click on the field help if you want to look into these. Some of these features are for very specific use cases. So I don't want to get into every single one of them. But you have things like you can set information about the budget and how that gets allocated. You can have things like estimated costs, the estimated revenue you also have. Do you consider the expenses in this project to be considered regular or as overhead? Now you've got a bunch of different other rules that come down here. I'm not actually going to get into every single one of these things because they really dive deep into more of the accounting side of projects. But for example, you have percent complete override. That's where you can actually dictate for this month, regardless of other information that's pertinent to the project you can set. As of this month, we've actually completed 25% of the project, even if maybe no hours have even been put in as actual work done. You can you can override that and you can say, No, no, this is exactly how far we've made it through this project and you can set that right here. So a lot of different functionality that you have available here. And if we come up here, notice we've got things like estimates and charges summary as this project has various tasks that start getting put in and hours that start getting allocated and used up, you're going to start seeing this fill in with things like money that's ready for billing to the customer. How much has been billed, how much is pending to be billed, how much would be remaining for this project as well as labor expenses? So these numbers will start filling in as you start going through this project. And the way that information gets put in is when we come over here to the schedule. So let's click on that now. So this is really where the beating heart of this project is in terms of the real time put in. This is where we deal with tasks and milestones. So what is the difference between a task and a milestone? The best way to think about a task is it's an activity that spans time. So that's where you're going to be logging hours to. That's where you're going to have those resources that are assigned to these different tasks. And I'll show you that in a second, as opposed to a milestone, which is a moment in time that is marking the completion of some activity. So let's say we're building our house. We might have several milestones. One is the completion of, let's say the planning phase and the blueprints. Then we would lay the foundation. That's another milestone. And then maybe the framing and then finally the completion of the house in its totality, that would be a final milestone. So we have these moments in time along the way, and they're going to have all these tasks that get those milestones accomplished. And if I scroll down, you can see we've got all of these different things. You can see things like the name of the task or milestone in this case, things like design complete. That's going to be a milestone. The rest of these are going to be tasks. We can see the resources that are heading these various activities, the service item that's tied to it, and we can see the work that's put in the remaining work, the estimated costs associated with that as well as the revenue. So we've got a lot of great information here, but let's actually dive into one of these things. Let's go to conceptual design and I'm going to hit edit on that. So this is going to pull up the task called conceptual design. And here we can see if I scroll at the top here. So we've got basic things like the name. We also have this concept of parent task. Now you're going to see this in a second. You saw it a little bit there. But also when I show you the Gantt chart, you're going to see this is actually a pretty elaborate project. Most projects are not this elaborate. Most clients I see, they really have a pretty straightforward, maybe a few task one or two milestones, something really simple In this demo, they make this very, very elaborate setting just to really show all the bells and whistles about how this can work. So in this case, a parent task. We've said that not just do you have a task, but you can also have little baby tasks or child tasks that live under a parent task you have insert before. That's really where you just slotting in. Where does this task or this milestone fit in amongst the others? And then status, you know, as it not started, maybe it's already completed and you're now logging it so you could change that. You can also mark it as non billable or is it billable like the project is overall? And then we've got the information just like when we start with a project, this is almost like a little subset of that. We can see how much work is allocated, how much work has actually been put in that percentage breakdown. And we can see various date factors such as is this task supposed to start as soon as humanly possible or is it supposed to happen at a specific date in time? So we know it's going to start on the 15th as opposed to as soon as we can start it? We should. And so we see other dates that relate to that and if we come down here, we get to assign these. This is really where we're going to put end the various resources to this task to get it completed. And I will talk about this in a second, but not right at this moment. So we can see that now if we go to predecessors, this is where we're going to set. And again, you're going to see this in a moment. So you can set forward a little bit if you want to get a visual representation of this. But the way we can think about this, if we're looking at this, is our housing construction example. The certain tasks have predecessors, in other words, things that have to happen for the next task to occur. So if we're making a house, we would have to lay the concrete foundation before we could build the framing. And we might need to dig a hole before we can lay the concrete. So those would be predecessors to the later tasks. So you could set the predecessor tasks like Lay foundation before you're doing your current task of framing. And then the relationship is the type. So finish the start is the most common that would say that the foundation laying has to occur and finish before the framing can start. Sometimes you'll also have like a start to start where the foundation at least needs to begin before you can start doing the framing doesn't actually need to be finished, but you only need to start one before you can start the other. So you can set what that type is and then you get lag time, let's say upon the completion of one five days has to happen or span before you can actually jump into the next activity and then start date and dates. You have other things you can set there says are predecessors. Now let's go over to budget and if I scroll down here, notice we've got the basic categories. So there's going to be labor expense, supplier related expenses and any kind of other will fit into that other category. And in this case, we only have one month. But let's say this task spanned, let's say a year, we would actually see every single one of those months and then they would be aggregated into that total. And you can manually put this information in in terms of the budget for this task, and you can also actually set it up. You've got a few different options up here which allow you to, based on the information that you've put in in terms of the hours assigned, the way the project was set up, the sales order that this project is tied to, you can allow it to draw from these other sources of information to automatically populate some of these figures. And you do have some buttons up here such as set distribute, total sets are calculated. You could do things like you could put the labor costs $60,000 and if it was over span of a year, you could hit distribute. It would just distribute those evenly over the 12 months. You could click to clear values. You've got these selection buttons here. You really just need to play around with this and you'll find it's actually quite straightforward. But that's how this works. Now, this is the cost budget we're looking at. You also have the billing budget and budget is maybe not the best choice of words in this case. We're looking at the billing like what are we expecting to build from this project as opposed to what is this project going to cost us? So that's the budget subtype. Now keep in mind we're in the task window here. So in the project we're looking at one specific task and this would be the budget for this particular task. You can look at time tracking. So that also exists, that exists at a project level and at a task level. And we can see that there's been 8 hours here and here that were assigned to this project. And that's how we got if you remember up here, we had this 16 hours of actual work is these two times that were logged in most projects you're going to see dozens and dozens of lines of actual assigned time. So you can come to time tracking if you're managing that. So now we've got a concept of what a task looks like. Now we can also take a look if I close this. So now we've taken a look at a task. Now I could show you a milestone, but really they look very similar. The two windows. The big difference is that, again, as a task will have a number of hours assigned to it. A milestone generally is just that moment in time upon which something is completed. So milestones will look very similar just with that absence of the hours. Now here we can see we've got all these different tasks and milestones laid out and you can see notices or lines here. These are really dictating what I was talking about with the parent child relationship of tasks. You can see that you've got one task that has all these child tasks underneath it, and then you have another task that has even more children under it. So we have several echelons here that we're looking at, and this view can actually be changed. Right now. We're actually looking at a specific view for this schedule, which is called Project Task Assignees. And we can actually change this view. We've got a bunch of different views here. So let's look get planning and you can see this is a very different view. And so up here we can actually see if this thing is a milestone or a task. So this is not a milestone. Not, not, not, not. But surprise, surprise design complete is in fact, a milestone. And we can see the dates that these things started, their end date, how much work was planned for them, and how much work has been actually calculated. Estimated costs. Now, while I'm here at one point I do want to make is notice this column here, copy task. I'm going to get into this more a little bit later in the video, but you do have the ability by clicking on this copy task, you can take any one of the tasks assigned here and actually allocate that to future projects. So I'll get into project templates in a little bit and you'll understand why this can be so important. But for now understand it is there and this is under the planning view. So you have a bunch of different views. Again, you can take a look at any one of these will give you a slightly different perspective on this project schedule. And you have other things like you can create a new project task, you can create a new milestone, you can also create a custom view if you want to decide that certain columns are not applicable to you, but you also want to maybe merge two existing views and have your specific columns by clicking Customize view, you're basically going to pull up what is going to be a saved search. You dictate what are the criteria, what is going to limit buy and what are the results that are going to be shown. And as long as you know, to do a save search, it's the exact same process. So now let's click on View Gantt chart. So this is going to pull up this window. And as you can see, this is pretty elaborate. And again, this is a demo account. So they really went through great efforts to make this look pretty snazzy. 99% of customers don't have something this elaborate if you need it, it's here. But in most cases, you don't have to get quite this complicated. So what are we looking at here on the left, we're going to look at all these various tasks so I can actually open this up. We can see by task and milestone the start dates and dates, durations, days, predecessors, etc.. And then over here on the right, we can actually see the timeline, the Gantt chart for this thing. And by the way, you have up here, you have some options like if you wanted to kind of punch all the way out, you can mess around with the view resolution up here. And really what we're looking at down here, notice we've got the year and the month on top in this case is broken down by week. In this particular case, we can see the days specifically up here and we can see the task or the milestone milestones are actually these little diamonds. So you can see there's a couple of milestones here and these tasks are showing and we can see a few different things here. So, for example, this task we can see because it's red, we know that it's overdue or it's behind target. So it's only completed 7% of its progress, but it should have been far further along for this particular time. Same thing with this task. And then we have these blue tasks that are not necessarily overdue or they they haven't run past their allotted time. And we can see the thick blue as opposed to the light blue. We're basically looking at how much time has actually been put into this thing as opposed to the full amount of time that was allotted and notice these little arrows coming down. These are the predecessors. So like the example I pointed out, when you're building a house, you got to lay that foundation. So this would be like foundation has to be completed before you can start framing. That's that relationship that you can see there. and it looks like we've got the current time. It gives us a little dotted line going down that we can click on these various activities. It gives us a bit more information on each of them. We also see that resource, that prime resource that was allotted for each of these tasks. In this case, we seem to have mostly the same guy in this particular project for these tasks. Usually Francis Murphy is in charge and we'll get into that a bit more. But again, it's a pretty neat view. You can scroll around here to get that broad perspective of what's occurring with this project. So let's close that window. All right. So now that we have a solid understanding of how tasks and milestones work within projects, now let's take a look at the resource side of things. So if we click on this resources tab here, we can see all the resources that have been allocated to this project. Now let's take a step back here because there's actually a number of different ways you can do this. So this employee, let's say we've got Francis Murphy here now, I'm not going to do this at this exact moment, but all of your employees that you have in net suite, you can actually go to an employee record and you'll see that there's actually a section on that employee record in the header section that gives a lot of the information about that employee in relation to project management. And I'll say like, does this resource, can this resource be allocated to projects? What is the expense related to this resource? Who's a project manager? Are they a project manager, etc.? So that information right there, if you selected an employee on their record as being able to allocate to a project and keep in mind, remember we had this preferences setting this tab where we set all these different settings, basically knobs and switches where when this project can do A, B and C, but it can't do D, E, F in preferences depending for the project on what you've set, it dictates what method of resource allocation you can choose. So again, you can set up a project one way where if you have an employee record where the employee's checked off saying yes, they can be assigned to projects, you could just leave it at that level. And any employee who has that checkbox on their record could go into any project and any task and say, I just spent 8 hours working on Project 597 and I worked on that task and you could log your hours. So that's one way that you have employees basically have their resources and their time allocated to various projects and tasks. The second way you could do it, which you'll see they get a little more structured and involved each time. The second way is you actually you come here and you go new resource allocation and you take an employee and you assign them to the project, not necessarily to the task, but you sign them to the project. And then again, if this project is set up properly in the preferences to do this, that employee could then assign time to any one of the tasks that is in that project. So that's number two. The third way you can go about doing this is not just assigning the person to the project, but also allocating them and really what it's called assigning them to the task specifically. So you have the project, you assign the employee to the project and then to the task, and that's obviously the most involved way. One of the benefits of doing that, even though it's a bit more involved, is that it provides more structure and it provides a lot more limitations in terms of what an employee can and can't do. So if you had a larger company, a lot of employees, a lot of projects, things are more involved, especially something like what we're looking at here where there's tons of tasks, tons of projects, employees, etc. You would want that structure to really limit what can be done and provide that kind of framework. And of course, if you have things are a little bit more loosey goosey, maybe you only have a few employees and a couple projects that you do, maybe you don't care and you just want to say, All right, any employee who is a project resource can work on any project or task that might be beneficial in that specific case, but it's generally recommended to go with a bit more of a structured approach. So what we're looking at here is again, at a project level, we can see who is assigned. Now one key thing you'll notice here is the resource that is assigned can either be a person like Francis Murphy or Marc Collins, or it can be a generic resource. So if we're given our example of the home project that we're building, then you might have something like a project resource is a architect or a concrete layer or a framer. Those are all not individual people, but they are a type of person. And that's great. From a planning standpoint. Let's say you have a project coming up and you don't know who's going to be available at that time, but you do want to set out kind of a forecast of what does this project can entail? How many hours are we going to need? What are we going to be building for it? Then you can go about and go, okay, now the project's about to start. We need these 20 different people. Now. Someone can come in, a project manager can start assigning people to these various roles and swap the role out, basically go in and literally edit it and say, Oh, this US project manager is now Joe. All right, this architect is now Sam And then you can turn them all from generic roles to specific employees. So keep in mind that that is always an option. So here we can see we've got the resource allocation and I'm actually going to double back now for a second and go to schedule, and I'm actually going to open up this task that we had open. So now again, we're at the task level. Now we can go down to assign these and we can take a look at in this case, people were not just allocated to the project but also then assigned to specific tasks. In this case, we have Francis Murphy was assigned to this particular task and this units by the way, this is often misunderstood. People may think that we're talking about what percentage of the full task. That's not how it's the way to look at it. The way to look at it is regards to the employee. So if Francis Murphy puts in a certain amount of time every day, let's say it's 100% of his time for the day, which it could be 8 hours, it could be 20 hours, it doesn't matter how much of his day is on this particular task. In this case, we're saying it's 100%. So that means all day he's spending his time on this task. If it was 25%, that would mean in an eight hour day, he's only spending 2 hours on this particular task. So the units are related to the person. And that's important because that person on his employee record, he will have a certain expense tied to him. So maybe Francis Murphy cost the company $50 an hour. So if he's spending 100% of his day on this project, we know that 50 hours, you know, we can start doing the math on what this person is, the expense that's related for this employee, for this particular task. Then you go over to the right here, you can see you assign not just the person, but they also have a service item that they're assigning. So when the person's logging time to log, you know, what's the service item that they were doing, It might be project management. In this case, it might be doing things like when I log my time, I make training videos. So the service item is training content. You can have things like planned work, calculated work. The difference between those two planned work is like, okay, good, this guy should do 6 hours calculated work says if the guy now done 2 hours, but there's still 16 hours left of work. Now it's a bit of a more of a in reality concept of the time. So now the plan was 16 hours, but he's already put in 2 hours and he still has 16 hours left. So now the calculated work is 18 hours. And then, of course, the unit cost is what I was referring to before on the employee record, it says, What does that person cost every hour? And that would be the unit cost. You multiply the unit cost by the calculated work and you come out to the total cost for this employee, for this task. So that's kind of a breakdown of how those assignments work and that applies to any different task assignment. So this is a pretty simple one. A lot of times you'll see maybe five or ten different employees that are assigned to a particular task with various unit allotments and hours, etc., so it can get quite involved. So we'll go back to our resources tab and again. So we should this should be pretty familiar here. We can see the start dates and dates, hours, percentage of time that they've put in, etc.. Also, the allocation type can be either hard or soft in terms like fixed amounts or, you know, you can kind of play around with those figures and then we can come over here to resource details. So in this case, we actually only have two specific people are named on this. So it kind of has Mark Collins and you can see the role the person is doing, the cost for that person. So you get that that basic information with your resources. Now, one additional thing I'd like to point out. You can assign resource groups if you have that open as a feature, and that's basically saying if you've got, let's say, a team of people, they always work together. It's Joe is the project manager and then he has Bill Sam and Bob that always work with him. If those teams always work together, you can create a resource team or group and then assign the groups so you don't have to add every single person you can assign that entire group, and that will just be working on that particular task. So we've now let's just take a step back for a second. We talked about how to create a project, the templates and kind of how the set up for that project goes which preferences and financial. Those are the two key subtypes to dictate how that project operates. We've then dug into really the nitty gritty details in terms of the day to day actions with that project, which is the schedule and the resources. In other words, what are the tasks to get this project done and who are the people that are going to do those tasks? So those are really the key tabs and the key sources of information and editable features on any given project. But there are a few other tabs that are important to take a look at. So let's check out Related Records. So here, depending on how much your CRM functions are tied into projects, you might have your various opportunities listed out here. You also can come over to transactions and you don't see here. But I'll talk a little bit later about the billing process for projects and you'll often see if it's set up in this way, you'll see the actual sales order that's tied to this project or really that this project is tied to. Then you can come to time tracking. So this is taking a look at not just at the task level, but at the entire project level, all the different employees that have log time to this thing. So again, remember those three different ways that you can allocate resources if you want with the first method, which is any employee can log task or time to any project or task, then you might have a whole bunch of different employees and you could see which hours they're putting into which tasks at what, whether they've been approved, not approved, build, etc.. So this can be a very helpful way to just kind of check out what's happening. Also, if there's case management tied to a project, you can check out the cases, the policies, all kinds of different information here. So now let's jump over to the panel. Now, unfortunately, this particular demo project that we're taking a look out doesn't actually have a useful panel. So unfortunately, I don't have a lot to show you here except for you can see the categories, but usually it'll actually a proper panel. You'll see all the various entries, you'll see what are the costs associated with these different things, What is what is the expected revenue maybe what's the actual revenue that's been realized? And you can see the profit line and the margin for this project as a whole, which is a great way to just take a snapshot of is this project making company money or is it actually bleeding money then going down from that last tab that I really want to take a look at is project indicators. So if we scroll down here, this is just a helpful quick way to get a grasp on if this project is operating properly from an administrative standpoint or is it going a bit off the rails. So in this case, we have these three different types of indicators. Are the expenses getting approved? Is time being tracked and it's time being approved and we can see the status is green, meaning everything's fine for that. The time being approved is being tracked and the expenses are being approved. So we can see that they are and it doesn't recommend any actions. Now, if one of them was red, let's say no time is being approved. So people are logging time to this project, but no one's actually going about approving the various time. Then you would see it would read, it would give some kind of recommendation such the project manager needs to go through the backlog time entries and actually approve and pass those on. So another quick way to take a look at one of the kind of a health chart for this project. So now that we've taken a look at project indicators and really all the sub tabs, we have this project and I'm actually going to hit save on this. And the reason I want to do that is because now that we're in view mode for this particular project, notice we have a tab up here which says create template templates can be great from a standpoint of let's say you have one customer that you do, you end up doing a lot of projects for this particular customer instead of having to create a new project from scratch. Every time you can take this project, make it as a template and then simply update it, create a new version of it every single time for that one client, or if maybe every time you take on a new client, let's say again, we're building homes. Let's say it's really the same methodology every time we could create a template based on this project and use that template to make a new project for new clients as they come on. So in that case, the creation of the template, it would really test, take all the basic features that I showed you and it would allow you to edit them as needed and then set that as a formed template that you can use for the creation of new projects. Now you can either do that from in this case we're looking at an existing project. We can use this project to create a template. You can also go from lists, go down to relationships, and notice you could just create a project template from scratch. So that's another option. Now, one problem you might run into in creating a project is one of the key things about creating a template and really copying it over to a new client is not just all the features in the settings, but also the tasks themselves in those various milestones. Now the way you could do that is again, if you come down here and I pointed this out earlier, if we scroll over here, we have this copy task feature. So you can create a project template and then you can go about taking these tasks and copying them over. Basically, you click on this, it gives you a little window where it says, Okay, what project are you trying to assign this to? So you can assign the template to create a new project for, let's say, a new client. And then you can go about taking the task and go, Good, I want to copy these guys over as well. And that saves you the time of having to go through and create them entirely from scratch every time. And you even have the ability to copy assignment. So let's say you have ten different people assigned to this particular task and let's say a whole budget and the whole nine yards. You can just take it all as well as child tasks and just take them all over and dump them. In this new project that you've created. So that's a great way to save time. If you have a lot of repetitive projects or very similar from one to the next. Now one additional aspect of project management is that billing process, not just in terms of the billing schedule on the project, but also how is this project really being tied to a customer from a billing standpoint? And there's a number of different ways that can be done. Generally, you will have you can approach it really two different ways. Like if we go up here into this new, we can create a sales order. So this is often how it will be approached. Let's say if we go to customer and list. That project we had was with Cooper Software. So we're going to click and Cooper in the customer will pull up the customer and it fills in the subsidiary and all their basic information. And we can come down here at a line level and you can basically assign. So the two ways you can approach it is you can say, okay, we we're going to create a sales order, and after we create a sales order, we're going to generate a project and then we're going to go back to the sales order and we're going to link it to that project. Another way you can approach it is you can create the project first and then generate a sales order. And of course at that point the sales order can just be linked directly. You can go down to item and you can link it directly to that project. In some cases you can also add customizations where there's another column that specifically has an A project. So you can go down a list, you can select the ones that that customer has access to and you can link them that way. So a few different ways to go out. Those are just some examples. There are more you can get quite complex with that relationship from a billing standpoint, but the important thing is just to make sure that it is properly set and depending on the project type, remember we had fixed bids, we had charged base and also there's time of material. Each one of them has some important aspects that have to be kept properly, whether it's employees properly logging their time. So the time of material can happen and be billed to the customer, or if it's fixed bid, you need to make sure, especially if it's a milestone, you need to make sure that the project managers are actually assigning and saying that milestones are done and complete before you even have the ability to charge the customer. So these are all important concepts to think with. When you're talking about the billing side of project management. Now the last thing I want to show you before we jump off this video is if we go up to lists and we come down here to custom, we're going to go over to Project Task Manager. So let's open that up and we'll click on that. And you remember we, I showed you that Gantt chart for the project and for the tasks. This is more it's a little bit like a Gantt chart where you're seeing not just for a particular project, but you're looking at it by role and then by employee and per employee. What are all the tasks and projects that that employee is tied to And then how is that going? So you've got a bit of a color legend at the bottom here where you can see, for example, red means they're going over time, yellow is their assigned, blue is worked, etc.. So you've got in this case, it's just a generic role, but You can actually see actual employees. And if we scroll down, you can see you can just kind of get a snapshot of where people are assigned. If you see a lot of red, you can see that maybe a particular employee is often going over time. You might also see certain resources and allocations where maybe a particular employee is way over allocated, maybe another employee is underutilized. It's a very nifty way to get that bird's eye view on all of your projects. And that's it for your overview on project management. I know we covered a lot in this video, so if you found it helpful, please hit the like and subscribe buttons. And with that, I'll see you in the next video.