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How to Drive More Profitable Projects with Dynamics 365

Published Date
Author Ryan Pollyniak

Want more efficient and profitable projects? In this article, we highlight a few powerful benefits of Dynamics 365 for project-based companies. Read on to discover how easy it can be to deliver successful projects for your customers, your employees and your bottom line.

Many of our clients are tasked with managing projects – from simple to extremely complex. What we’ve learned over our 30 years is that every project-based organization, no matter how large or small they are, share the desire to make projects more profitable and accurately measure that profitability. That’s what we want to talk about today. How Dynamics 365 can help you do just that.

But, first.

Before we go into the advantages of Dynamics 365 for projects, know that everything we discuss here is possible with Dynamics 365 Business Central Essentials—the most affordable Dynamics 365 plan. Even better, some of the tasks only require you to add a “Team Member” user to your Dynamics 365 Business Central Essentials (or Premium) subscription at a much lower cost than adding a full user. So even with a minimal investment, know that you can transform the way you budget, manage, schedule, track and bill your projects.

Now, on to the benefits!

1. Automatically allocate time and expenses to each job

A huge hurdle for project-based organizations is allocating time and expenses to each job in their system. You might do this manually right now through a lot of paper or an Excel spreadsheet then handing it off for someone to enter again into your ERP or accounting system. That’s both time-consuming and risky. With Dynamics 365, this is all automated and your employees in the field can even enter time and expenses on their tablet or smartphone. Then, these costs are automatically (and accurately) posted to the correct job in your system.

2. Detailed project planning

The key to a profitable project often starts with the plan, right? Dynamics 365 is a project planning powerhouse. You can manage your entire project and go as deep and detailed as you need to. You can add and subdivide tasks and requirements, and plan for multiple resources across projects.

3. Full profit visibility across your entire project

This is a huge benefit for project-based companies. Because you can post any item, resource, miscellaneous GL expense, etc. to a job, you get a true picture of job profitability. You can track budgeted cost against actual cost, including expenses. You can track profitability by the entire project, or drill down into profit by project components so you don’t get to the end of your project and wonder what happened to all your profit. All this information is readily available at any time, from any device.

4. Dimensions, Dimensions, Dimensions

You might not know what a dimension is yet, but go schedule a demo and we will show you why this feature alone gets people excited. Dynamics 365 dimensions enable you to drastically simplify and streamline your chart of accounts. You no longer have to set up separate GL accounts for everything you want to track against. Dimensions empower you to slice and dice your project financial data by any parameter you like.

5. Tailored Financial Reporting

As mentioned above, dimensions give you the ability to segregate your reporting by basically anything you want to see. What did you make by division? Department? Location? Project type? Project manager? Dynamics 365 automates the posting of your items, invoices, etc. to the appropriate dimension, and then presents the information to you exactly how you want to see it. You can use Microsoft’s acclaimed data visualization tool, Power BI, to take this a step further and see your information in customizable dashboards and reports.

Learn More About Dynamics 365 for Projects

Project-based organizations can achieve powerful results with Dynamics 365 Business Central, or expand capabilities even further with Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. Each solution provides a fast ROI not only through the above features (and several others we can show you) but also with its low total cost of ownership. Take the first step in your digital transformation and talk to Western Computer experts who will help you deploy solutions that result in more profitable projects.