View the New Project Budget and Milestone Reports
Pie introduces new project reports for people billing budgets and also for task milestones views. This feature is now available for all Pie customers on the Enterprise plan.
The Project Budget Report is for companies to track team member time and cost per hour for both billing and internal costs. This is very useful for professional services firms, such as consulting companies.
The Milestones-Only Report is for companies to keep track of the important project milestones. This is very useful for any type of organization using Pie to manage projects.
Why Is the budget report important?
Maybe you work in a consulting firm, creative agency, professional services department, or an IT department delivering solutions to internal customers. The projects you run most likely will have a finite budget, and that budget is mostly about people costs.
Therefore it’s important to know how long it’s going to take, how many people are needed, and how much time is required to get the job done. The cost is typically derived from hours worked multiplied by their billing rates.
Your end client or internal customer most likely will be requesting information from you such as
How long will the project take?
How much will it cost?
You can turn this data into reports to help you make the right decisions assuming you are using people roles, target task durations, start and end dates, and time tracking. The value can include:
Determining people scheduling, work load, and costs
Billing estimates for clients or internal customers
Ongoing budget updates as project progresses
With the above market needs, we added the new budget report feature to compliment our existing time tracking for billable tasks.
Take a Peak of the New Pie budget report
The new Project Budget report pages provide information about the team members’ planned work hours, billing hourly rates, and internal hourly rates. As team members post their time to the project or project tasks, Pie reports in real-time how much time team members posted, how much this translates into costs, and what is the trend if we continue at the same pace. A benefit includes the ability to know what to bill clients and whether or not you’ll meet the plan.
Play the following short video to see how the Budget Report works.
Why should we care about milestone Reporting?
No matter what type of company or business unit you are part of, your key projects most likely will have a lot of moving parts. You could have hundreds or thousands of tasks in a project. The overall percent complete is good to know, but even better is to ensure the most important key stuff is being done. This is where milestones come in.
Executives and project end-customers mostly care about the important deliverables, not how much of the work underneath needs to get done. Therefore milestones reporting help answer questions for:
What are the most important set of activities or key tasks in the project?
How many are late, done, and projected to be done in the near future?
From here, other questions can be asked, such as where are the roadblocks and how can we support you to solve problems and get back on track.
Take a Peak of the New Pie Milestones-Only View
Pie has had milestones features for a quite a while where you can mark a task as a key milestone. In the past, the timeline reporting could show all tasks in a nice Gantt-like timeline view. But, filtering out all of the tasks surrounding milestones to see only milestones was not possible. Our customers gave us this request and we listened.
We are now introducing the Milestones-Only view to make it super simple to see only milestones for faster analysis. This view is in two places. The first location is within the regular Timeline view. The second location is in the Project Reports as noted at the top of this article.
Play the following video to see how the new Milestones-Only view works.
I hope you give these two report views a try in Pie. If you do, please send us feedback on how it works for you. We’re always looking for ways to improve! Thanks!
Written by: Paul Dandurand, Pie CEO & Founder
Banner photo by: Allef Vinicius