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The project structure in plain terms
Project card
Holds the customer to bill, the person responsible, the status and the WIP method. One project can also bill several customers at task level in recent versions.
Project tasks
A breakdown of the work into phases or deliverables, with headings, posting lines and totals, much like a chart of accounts for the job.
Planning lines
Each line is Budget, Billable or both. Budget lines are what you expect to spend; billable lines are what you intend to invoice.
Resources
People and equipment with unit costs and prices, grouped into resource groups, and scheduled against their capacity.
Project journals
Where hours, materials and expenses are posted to a project task. Purchase invoices and inventory issues can post to projects directly.
Time sheets
Staff enter hours per week against project tasks; a manager approves them, and approved lines post to the project.
Choosing a WIP method your auditor will accept
Billing: from planning line to customer invoice
Invoices in project accounting come from billable planning lines. For time and materials, posting hours to a task can create billable lines automatically, and you then pull those lines onto a sales invoice. For fixed-price work, you create billable lines for each milestone or progress bill and invoice them when the milestone is reached.
Because the invoice comes from the project rather than typed separately, the project shows invoiced to date against budget at any moment. Recalculating WIP and posting it to the G/L each month then moves the difference between cost, revenue and billing onto the balance sheet.
Some firms need retention, certified pay applications or complex contract billing formats. Those are not standard and usually call for an extension or a specialist app.
How we build project accounting around your contracts
- 1
Read the contracts
We look at a handful of real contracts: fixed fee, time and materials, and anything unusual, because billing terms drive the whole design.
- 2
Agree the task template
A standard task structure is defined so every project reports the same phases, which makes cross-project reporting possible.
- 3
Set costs and prices
Resource costs, price lists by customer or project and the WIP method per project type are settled with your controller.
- 4
Switch on time sheets
Approvers, periods and reminders are set up, and a few staff pilot the weekly routine before everyone starts.
- 5
Run a WIP month
Finance calculates and posts WIP for a trial month in a sandbox, then compares the result to their existing schedule.
Signs a project setup needs rework
- ✓Project managers keep their own budget spreadsheets because planning lines are never updated.
- ✓WIP is calculated but not posted, so the balance sheet ignores unbilled work.
- ✓Every project uses a different task structure, so no report compares one job to another.
- ✓Purchase invoices for job materials post to G/L accounts instead of project tasks, and job margins look better than they are.
- ✓Time is entered weeks late, which makes billing late and costs incomplete at month-end.
Project accounting questions
Is Business Central good enough for a professional services firm?
For firms that bill by project, track hours and need WIP on the balance sheet, the standard module covers the core well. It is lighter on resource scheduling across a large bench and on client-facing portals. Firms with those needs sometimes pair it with a dedicated professional services app.
Can we bill different customers on one project?
Recent versions allow a bill-to customer per project task, so a single project can invoice more than one party. Before that, firms created separate projects per customer. We check your version and set it up accordingly.
How do time sheets connect to payroll?
Business Central time sheets record project and resource hours, not pay. Payroll in the US is handled by a separate payroll provider, and hours can be exported to it or fed through an integration. We help you decide whether one time entry can serve both, which saves staff from typing hours twice.
Which WIP method should we use?
That is an accounting policy decision for your controller and auditor, not a software default. We explain how each of the five methods behaves in Business Central and run your own data through the one you pick. Many firms use different methods for time and materials and fixed-price projects.
Talk to us about your project.
Tell us what you run today and what has to change. A senior consultant replies with a written next step.