NetSuite’s Project Management will bring operational efficiency to your Consulting Business

Managing which hours should be invoiced can be done in NetSuite, but it requires modifying each charge separately. To improve this process, we’ve developed a Charge Management Tool that you can use to edit multiple time-entries at once.

Actual worked time and billable time can also be separated if needed.

You can filter per project per month and work through them until that month is ready for billing.

Charge management inside or outside of NetSuite?

Depending on your needs, charge management can be done within NetSuite or outside of it.

The main benefit of handling your time-entry and charge management outside of NetSuite comes in form of cost saving due to not needing Employee licenses in NetSuite.

Here’s a preview of what charge management outside of NetSuite can look like:

To ease the invoicing process for external contractors, we’ve developed a tool that does the following:

• Contractors insert time & expenses to your NetSuite projects
• When the project invoices are sent, a vendor bill to be paid to the contractor will automatically be generated, and the contractor will receive a copy for their own accounting.

One of the most burdensome parts of the NetSuite Projects module is inserting resources (employees) behind projects. With Greensteps Auto-Assign, you automate assigning resources based on rules. For example, you can automatically:

• Assign internal tasks to new employees
• Assign department specific tasks to employees when they are assigned to that department (Ex your Marketing department in the Netherlands will see their own projects).
• Create custom searches for employees with any NetSuite criteria and assign projects/tasks to them

NetSuite has a few flaws and missing important features to get valid time entries. To help with this, we’ve developed a tool that will validate the time-entries:

• Checks that the time entry matches the current month (exact match or a pre-specified range of months). Better control in the process compared to the standard grace period
• Checks that the time entry matches a valid period based on the project task start and end date information
• Notifications and warnings if the project budget is about to be exceeded

The validation can be done on any criteria that suits your company best.

If mistakes were made and time-entries have been allocated to the incorrect project, then you can migrate them to the correct one using our tool for admins.

Look & Feel

By default NetSuite’s Sales Invoices and the accounting go hand in hand meaning that the Sales Invoice will have as many lines as the NetSuite accounting transaction. This might be confusing for clients if you have multiple people from different departments working on the same projects.

We’ve developed tools to configure the look and feel of the invoices sent from NetSuite to your needs.

Pre-Approval

Sending an invoice and then having to correct it through credit invoices can take a lot of time. Sometimes it’s better to pre-approve the invoice from the customer before sending it. For that purpose, we’ve built a tool through which your customers can pre-approve invoices before they are sent.

Flex time is quite popular for consulting companies where projects might temporarily require more work than the normal work hours.

We’ve built a tool that will automatically calculate the balance of the employee based on their worked hours, vacations and work contract.

NetSuite does not have any pre-built tools for adding multiple days at a time meaning that each day has to be inserted separately.

We’ve developed a tool to make this easier for your employees, allowing them to add for ex. a longer vacation or absence with one form after which we automatically create the time entries for each day.

The time-entries will be created based on the employees work contract.

Payroll systems often require that vacations are reported in periods, whereas NetSuite allows you to report multiple separate days at the same time.

Our HR integration tool will split the vacation days to periods before reporting them to your HR/ Payroll tool.

Vacation Planning in NetSuite?

With our Vacation Planning tool, you can approve vacations directly in NetSuite. To assist with resourcing, we’ve also developed a view to see when your team members will be on vacation.

When a vacation request is approved, we automatically create the time entries for it.

The NetSuite Advanced Project Profitability Cloud Application enables you to report project profitability with actual and committed (forecasted) costs and revenues from the following areas:

• Time sheet entries
• Purchase orders
• Sales orders
• Amortizations
• Revenue Recognition

This will allow you to see the following:

• Project Profitability Report
• Profit & Loss tab at a project level
• Project Profitability KPIs

There’s also a report where you can see the Employee Profitability per Project.

To enable the Advanced Project Profitability app, go to Setup -> Company -> Enable Features -> Projects -> check the Advanced Profitability box & save.