Understanding Project Intelligence
Watch the short video to learn what Project Intelligence is and how it can help your business.
Project Intelligence
Experience the power of Project Intelligence and watch your business transform with improved efficiency and informed decision making.
In an industry where companies’ primary asset is their workforce, it’s important that management has reliable and timely insights into employee time and performance.
With Baker Tilly’s Project Intelligence, increase real-time visibility to gain an in-depth understanding of employee efficiency and uncover project trends that drive intelligent business decisions.
Why Project Intelligence?
If you're currently using Sage Intacct to monitor employee time and bill your clients, then Project Intelligence is tailored for you.
Many companies extract timesheet data to Excel to calculate employee key performance indicators (KPIs) and manage projects in third-party systems. These practices often lack the timeliness and accuracy to quickly review project health.
With Project Intelligence, eliminate manual processes to increase profitability and offer your employees quantifiable metrics to evaluate their performance.
Dynamic dashboards at your fingertips
- Utilization
- Realization
- Project manager
- Profitability
Utilization
Obtain detailed metrics for individual employees and groups. Determine who is achieving their billable targets, identify those needing more work and support those who might be overallocated.
The utilization dashboard can help with the following:
- Understand high and low performing employees, providing necessary development opportunities to increase utilization
- Analyze if work is being effectively distributed and delegated across the team, and provide guidance on effective work delegation
- Discover which employees are over-burdened and provide assistance to prevent burnout and better retain your high performers
- Evaluate if new hires are meeting their billable targets and make any necessary improvements to your employee onboarding program to shorten the ramp-up timeline
Realization
Explore the revenue contribution, effective rate and write-offs of your team members, allowing you to quantify employee performance with more than billable hours. Understand which employees have consistent problems with write-offs, and the effective rate you’re achieving across employees and positions.
The realization dashboard can help with the following:
- Go beyond utilization and evaluate employee performance in dollars, looking at which employees and positions bill at higher rates and generate more revenue
- Review which employees and positions contribute the least to profitability, and adjust hiring plans or billing rates accordingly
- Evaluate your write-offs for potential customer relationship issues, proactively reaching out to those clients to increase realization
- Identify employees with frequent satisfaction issues resulting in write-off of billable time and provide coaching to decrease write offs
Project manager
Gauge the health of your projects. Provide crucial project metrics for service leaders and project managers, including project hours against the budget, projected efficiency and core financial metrics such as accounts receivable, revenue and profit. Identify early on when a project is off track or at risk, allowing you to take corrective actions to meet business objectives and improve financial performance.
The project manager dashboard can help with the following:
- Identify at risk projects early on based on your estimated efficiency and take corrective action to reduce hours and increase profitability
- Evaluate the profitability and effective rates for different project types, enabling decisions on which services to pursue and which aren’t generating sufficient value
- Track your accounts receivable (AR) balance and any write offs to identify potential customer satisfaction issues to proactively improve customer satisfaction and reduce revenue leakage
- Quantify the impact of internal automation initiatives on reducing service delivery hours for certain projects
Profitability
Evaluate the profitability of your service team through a detailed analysis of the projects, clients and employees driving revenue. Review your project financials compared to your financial budget, trending over the last 12 months. Identify growth opportunities and areas for improvement among your client base, service lines and employees.
The profitability dashboard can help with the following:
- Evaluate which customers and projects are most profitable and focus on growing that part of the business
- Review the customers and projects that aren’t profitable and make necessary adjustments for success (pricing changes, adjusted resourcing, additional employee training, discontinuing services and delivery automation)
- Identify which employees and positions contribute the least to profitability and adjust hiring plans or billing rates accordingly
Boost productivity and prevent burnout with Project Intelligence
Transform your business operations
With Project Intelligence, both service leaders and employees can:
- Gain real-time insights into their utilization, profitability and project health
- Access curated Sage Intacct dashboards that are effortless to maintain
- Efficiently evaluate employee performance and make informed staffing decisions based on hard data
- Examine metric trends over time, leading to insightful conclusions about automation impacts and new service initiatives
Case study
Environmental services company saves time and improves project management accuracy with Project Intelligence
Northeast Technical Services struggled with a lack of accurate and customizable metrics for managing employee utilization and project profitability. More specifically, their metrics were being tracked and calculated in Excel because it wasn’t possible to calculate and report on them directly out of Sage Intacct.
Learn how Baker Tilly helped the business implement Project Intelligence to optimize the analysis of project and employee performance while saving their team time each month.
Included metrics
With Project Intelligence, you have access to a vast array of new performance metrics to effectively evaluate customer and project performance. These metrics are available out of the box, with a set of dashboards and reports that provide the insight you need to run your business.
Billable utilization
Measures the ratio of billable hours worked by employees to the total available work hours.
Nonbillable utilization
The utilization percentage an employee spends on activities that don't contribute directly to revenue.
Utilization target
Target percentage of working hours to spend on billable projects and tasks.
Utilization to target
Compares an employee's actual billable utilization with the target to determine if they've met their utilization goal.
Total work
The overall percentage of time an employee is utilized for work-related activities, including both billable and nonbillable tasks.
Revenue
The total amount of service revenue.
Labor costs
The total cost of service labor.
Gross profit
The difference between service revenue and the costs associated with producing or delivering services.
Billable hours
The amount of time an employee spends working on tasks or projects that can be directly tied to revenue.
Effective rate
The average hourly billing rate for services.
Write-offs
The dollar amount of service revenue unable to be billed or collected.
Realization percentage
The percentage of billable hours that translates into service revenue.
Budget hours
The amount of time an employee is budgeted to work on tasks or projects directly tied to revenue.
Draft hours
The number of hours on timesheets that haven't been submitted/approved.
Current efficiency
The ratio of billable hours to budgeted hours.
Observed percentage complete
The estimate of how complete the project is as of a specific date listed on the project.
Estimated efficiency
The estimated final actual to budgeted hours on the project based on the current hours used and observed % complete.
Billings
The total amount invoiced to clients.
Accounts receivable
The outstanding amount owed by clients.
Our Project Intelligence leader
Drew Kangieser
Drew Kangieser is a director with Baker Tilly’s digital solutions practice.