Dynamics 365 F&O Implementation for Professional Services

The Project Management and Accounting module in D365 F&O helps your organization plan, execute, and control projects efficiently.

There are various project types available in D365 F&O, so no matter the type of project you have, D365 will enable you to utilize the project management and accounting module to manage and control your projects on a continuous basis

Through the Project management and accounting module you will be able to manage project planning, manage project budgeting, perform transaction and milestone invoicing, tracking cost and revenue and tracking project progress.

D365 F&O supports various project types for various purposes:

– Time and Material projects

•  Definition: In this type of project, the customer is billed based on the actual time spent and materials used for the project.

•  Use Case: Commonly used in professional services industries, such as consulting, where the customer is billed for the actual work and resources consumed.

•  Billing: Customers are invoiced for the actual hours worked by employees and the materials used during the project.

– Fixed Price projects

•  Definition: In this type of project, the customer is billed a fixed amount regardless of the time spent or materials used.

•  Use Case: Suitable for projects with a defined scope, budget, and schedule, such as construction or product development projects.

•  Billing: Customers are invoiced based on predefined milestones or a percentage of completion, rather than actual costs incurred.

– Internal

•  Definition: These projects are used internally by an organization to track costs without invoicing external customers.

•  Use Case: Used for internal initiatives like IT projects, R&D projects, or any internal improvements where the organization needs to monitor costs and time.

•  Billing: No external billing is involved; it is primarily for cost tracking and resource allocation within the organization.

– Cost

•  Definition: These projects are used to track costs without any associated billing to external customers.

•  Use Case: Suitable for short-term initiatives like internal audits, product development, or marketing campaigns where costs need to be monitored but no external billing occurs.

•  Billing: No invoicing; the focus is on cost accumulation and internal reporting.

– Investment projects

•  Definition: These projects are used to track costs for capital investments, such as purchasing equipment or building a new facility.

•  Use Case: Used for large capital expenditures that will result in the creation of assets (e.g., construction projects, asset acquisition).

•  Billing: There is no customer invoicing, but costs can be capitalized as fixed assets on the balance sheet once the project is complete.

– Time Projects

•  Definition: These are simplified internal projects focused on time tracking.

•  Use Case: Ideal for tracking employee time spent on internal or external activities, especially for time management purposes.

•  Billing: Not used for billing customers, but for tracking and reporting on time spent.

Each project type in D365 F&O is designed to meet specific business needs, whether it’s customer billing, internal cost tracking, or capital investment management. The selection of the appropriate project type depends on the nature of the work being tracked and the billing requirements.

Categories play a crucial role in organizing and managing various aspects of project-related transactions and costs.

Categories are generally used for:

• Classifying different types of work, expenses, items, and revenue within projects.
• Budgeting purposes and enabling the project manager to define cost and revenue breakdowns at a granular level.
• Organizing transactions into categories, thereby enabling project managers to monitor project costs and performance more effectively.
• Determining the posting profile of specific costs posted with a specific category.
• Defining cost prices and/or sales prices across projects
• Each transaction being created on a project, as categories are mandatory to add to your transaction

Categories in D365’s Project Management and Accounting module provide a structured way to classify and manage various project transactions. They are essential for accurate project costing, invoicing, revenue recognition, and reporting, helping organizations maintain control over complex projects and ensuring that all financial aspects are well-tracked and organized.

The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a project management tool used to define, organize, and structure the work involved in a project. It breaks down a project into smaller, more manageable components, helping to ensure that every part of the project is accounted for.

Key features for the Work Break Down (WBS) structure in D365 F&O:

Hierarchical Structure:

• The WBS is structured hierarchically, with the overall project at the top level, broken down into smaller sub-tasks or work packages. Each level represents a more detailed specification of the work.

Task Management:

• The WBS in D365 F&O allows users to define project tasks, set dependencies, assign resources (such as employees), and allocate costs to those tasks.

Budgeting and Cost Control:

• Users can associate costs and budgets with individual tasks or phases of the project, which helps in tracking financial performance against the budget.

Time Tracking and Scheduling:

– Project managers can use the WBS to set start and end dates for tasks, define dependencies between tasks, and monitor progress. This helps in ensuring that the project stays on schedule.

Billing and Invoicing:

•  The WBS also connects with the billing processes in D365 F&O, facilitating the generation of invoices based on the completion of tasks or milestones within the project.

Yes, it is possible to handle time and expense registrations on a project using a mobile device in D365 F&O.

By utilizing the expense module in D365 F&O which is fully integrated to the project management and accounting module in D365 F&O you can register expenses directly on the different active projects in D365 F&O.

Microsoft offers a dedicated mobile app for D365, which is compatible with both iOS and Android devices. The app allows users to enter project-related data, including time and expenses.

• Time Registration: Users can log time entries directly on their mobile devices. These entries are associated with specific projects, tasks, or activities.
• Expense Registration: Users can submit expenses related to projects, such as travel costs or purchases, by entering the details and even attaching receipts using the phone’s camera.

At Sprint 365, we have prepared specialized templates developed based on best practices from other companies in the industry. This means, that we have pre-configured a lot of the basic functionality within project management and accounting module in D365 F&O enabling us to get you started using the project management and accounting module within a short timeframe and enabling you and us to focus on your unique requirements for the implementation instead of focusing on all parts of the configuration.

We have developed different enablers covering videos, quick guides and cheat sheets to enable your users to get training when it fits the users schedule and thereby get your users up to speed on the new processes in D365 F&O project management and accounting module. To use the approach of using a pre-configured template that we can use as a basis for your implementation and to use our enablers for getting your users trained allows us to accelerate the implementation process in your company, enabling some projects to be completed in as little as 4 weeks. This approach ensures a fast, efficient, high-quality implementation tailored to your needs.

There are a numerous amount of reports available within project management and accounting module, including Financial reports, Time and Expense reports, Project resource utilization reports, Cost control reports, project forecasting and planning reports, Project Invoicing and Billing reports and Project Ledger reports.

In Sprint365 we often experience, that our customers already work with a numerous of different reports, which they would like to replicate to the new way of working through D365 F&O. There is also a solution for this.

In addition to standard reports, D365 F&O allows integration with Power BI for more customized reporting. With Power BI, users can build interactive dashboards and reports that combine project data with other business metrics for advanced analysis.

Finally – D365 F&O also offers an easy export possibility, where it is possible for the user to find the relevant data needing to be used for ad hoc reporting, export this to excel and do the simple ad-hoc reporting based on the exported transactions.

Yes, it is possible to migrate projects from your existing system to Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (FO).

In Sprint65 we will support you in having all your active projects migrated along with having your opening balances on fixed price projects and investment projects migrated, for you to be able to continue working on your ongoing projects.

Historic transactions on your projects we advice you to solve through power BI reporting across your different systems.

Yes, you can add budgets to your projects in the Project management and accounting module in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (D365 F&O). This is an essential feature that allows you to plan, monitor, and control project finances.

You can set up a budget for a project at various stages, such as the planning phase or after the project has been initiated. A project budget in Dynamics 365 FO typically includes costs, revenues, hours, and expenses. Budgets can be created for both fixed-price, investment and time-and-material projects.

Once a budget is created, Dynamics 365 FO allows for monitoring against actuals in real-time. Budget control enables you to track expenditures and ensure that they do not exceed predefined limits.

• You can set up budget thresholds and alerts to notify project managers when costs exceed certain percentages of the budget.
• Compare budgeted vs. actual costs, revenues, and hours through various reports and inquiries.

Project budgets in Dynamics 365 FO often require approval before they are finalized. The system can be configured to have workflow approvals through a specified approval matrix for budget creation and revisions, helping to ensure proper oversight.

The module also provides comprehensive reports that let you track the budget performance of your project. These include:

• Budget vs. Actuals Reports
• Cost Analysis Reports
• Financial Projections and Forecasts