Project financials can be simply defined as the money you have for your project. Strategically planning, tracking and managing this money is how project financials can determine whether a project is profitable and to a great part, whether it will be profitable. The Project Management Institute takes this a step further and defines powerful project financials.
Your project financials center around controlling project costs. Different roles within your company may have levers they can utilize to control project costs and profitability from their view. As all project financials are interrelated, it is important that all roles, with appropriate permissions, can access and report on the same set of accurate, real-time project financial data.
A modern accounting and project financial management system, with project level operational and reporting capabilities, centralizes all the components of your project financials and provides teams across your company the means to look at related data in a way that is important to their roles, whether it be the financial leader looking at metrics and profitability from a business or client view, or the Project Manager who wants to look at project-level data to determine if a course correction is needed on a particular project. In all cases, the project financial and operational data are in one place, are accurate, current and accessible.
Project accounting, project billing, project health, project progress, and even project resources comprise the majority of your project financials. You can continuously monitor the health of your project financials using trendlines and forecasts and by looking at budget versus actuals whether at a project, entity or company level.