Sage 50 Accounts For Dummies, 3rd UK Edition

Chapter 13

Managing Projects

In This Chapter

• Assigning status and costs to a project
• Managing project resources
• Recording and analysing project costs
• Charging project costs to your customers
• Completing a project

Sage's Project Costing tool, available to users of Accounts Plus and Accounts Professional, enables large and small businesses to successfully manage a project.

In Chapter 3, I describe how to set up a project using a blank record. You can follow that process or access the Project Record wizard by clicking New Project from the Projects Task pane. After you set up the project, the information in this chapter comes into play, because here I tell you how to manage projects.

With Sage, you can track costs and ensure you capture every expenditure associated with a project. You can then charge the client a fee that produces a profit for your company. You can evaluate future projects more accurately and target your business towards more profitable ventures.

Appointing a Project's Status and Costs

Project status helps you track a project's progress. You can set the status to allow or disallow postings. Sage has five status categories for you to use, according to where the project is in its lifecycle.

Each status has its own rules as to whether or not you can make postings to it. Postings that assign costs to a project are usually allowed when a project is in full swing, but postings are no longer allowed in a project's later stages. You can also decide at which point in the lifecycle ...