Track Project Cost and Revenue

When accounting for a project based company, you might want to track the project’s cost and revenue, and also summarize it accordingly.

In Zoho Books, this process can be done by associating projects with transactions. Once the projects are associated with transactions, you can view the summary of the project’s profitability from the Reports module.

In this page…

Record Transactions with Projects

Projects can be linked directly to different sales and purchase transactions in Zoho Books. It can either be associated at the Entity level or the Line Item level. Entity and Item Level

Entity and Line Item Level

Projects can be associated with transactions at the Entity level for Estimates and Retainer Invoices, and at the Line Item level for Sales Orders, Credit Notes, Invoices, Bills, Purchase Orders and Vendor Credits. Let us understand this case better with a scenario.

Scenario: Patricia is the manager of a project based company. She works on a project for her customer, Brandon. While working on the project, she requires a few items in her organization. When she uses these items, the project cost subsequently increases, and she has to bill her client for the same. In this case, she can associate a billable expense (cost of the items utilized) for the project, and also create an invoice for the same. To do this, Patricia creates a new invoice, adds the items she uses in the project, and links them to the project that she is working on for Brandon.

To associate projects at the line item level:

Go to the specific module (such as Invoices).
Create a new transaction or edit an existing one.
In the Item Details section, click the More icon (…) next to the line item you have added.
Select Add Additional Information.

Select the project from the dropdown below Associate Projects.

Click Save.
After entering all the other required details, save the transaction.

To associate projects to the entire transaction:

Go to the Sales module and select the Estimates/Retainer Invoices module.
Create a new transaction or edit an existing one.
Select the project from the Project Name dropdown.

Enter the other required details.
Click Save.

Insight: To enable the Project Name dropdown, you will have to select a customer.

Bulk Update

You can bulk associate Projects to line items of an Invoice. You can select multiple items and associate projects easily in just one click.

To bulk update projects:

Go to Sales > Invoices.
Click + New in the top right corner of the page.
Enter the other required details.
Click the Bulk Update Line Items option above the Item Details table on the right.

Click Update Projects.

Select the projects to update from the Projects dropdown.
Click Update.

Create Transactions from Projects

You can track your project cost or revenue by creating transactions right within the Projects module. To allocate cost, you can choose any of the Purchase module to create a transaction, and similarly a Sales module to track revenue.

To create a purchase or sales transaction from projects:

Go to the Projects module in the left sidebar.
Select the project for which you want to create a transaction.
Click New Transaction from the top right corner of the page.

Select the sales or purchase transaction you wish to create for the project.
Enter the transaction details in the page that follows, and save it.

Insight: When creating transactions from projects, you can change the project associated with individual line items by clicking the Edit icon next to the project name in the project line.

Project Reports (Project Profitability)

You can customize reports and filter them based on the projects associated with different transactions. The overall profitability of a project can be viewed from the Profit and Loss report and the transaction based project details can be viewed from the transaction specific reports.

Profit and Loss Report

Project profitability can be customised and read from the Profit and Loss report. You can tailor the report and view them based on specific projects. To do this:

Go to the Reports Module in the left sidebar.
In the Business Overview section, select Profit and Loss.
Click Customize Report in the top left corner of the page.

Select Projects from the Advance filter dropdown and select the name of the project from the adjacent dropdown.

Click Run Report.

Insight: You can view the project’s profitability in a chart format right in the project’s Overview page by clicking the Profitability Summary. You can directly go to the specific Projects Profit and Loss report from this page by clicking Profitability Report below the chart.

Other Reports

You can view the reports of transactions created for a project. These reports include:

Purchase Order Details Report
Invoice Details Reports
Estimate Details Report
Sales Order Details Report
Bills Details Report
Expense Details Report
Debit Note Details Report

For instance, to view the projects associated with bills:

Go to the Reports module in the left sidebar.
In the Payables section, select Bills Details.
Click Customize Report in the top left side of the page.
Select Projects from the Advance filter dropdown, and select the name of the project from the adjacent dropdown.
Click Run Report.

Was this document helpful?

Yes

Let us know where we can improve

By clicking Submit, you agree to our Privacy Policy.

Thank you for your feedback!

Want a feature?

Suggest