Today, we are starting accepting users for Beta testing of Price&Cost — a new breed of project estimation and budget-tracking tools.
Why we launched Price&Cost?
Working in a number of agencies in different delivery roles I have come across an issue that most agencies face and are reluctant to fix.
One of the responsibilities of people in the delivery roles in the agencies is to track the project financials amongst other project attributes. The calculations can vary from very simple ones to more complex considering a number of factors.
Even though tracking project financials is the very basic requirement for a Project Manager (PM) it is often left to PM-s to decide how to do this – usually this ends up being in differently formatted and unstructured Excel tables, which vary from project to project. All this may be a way to track one or two projects, however it lacks integrity and as such when tasked with produced a combined view of the programme or the account (multiple projects) – this often turns into tedious and labour-intensive process. Also, most agencies require this information to be kept and logged periodically as this serves as the basis for billing the clients.
At best small to medium size agencies would implement an Excel version of the solution. The examples I have seen and used are VBA-rich applications which are often “take-it-or-leave-it” solutions – once set-up they are very hard to update and slow.
There are myriad of web-based Project management solutions, however 90% of these are focused on Agile Project management, task management and collaboration. Some include the budget management functionality, but it’s rudimentary and at most offers simplistic total budget variance comparison.
This is where the idea of the Price&Cost came along – create a SaaS solution offering a simple, yet effective way to track the financials on the projects/programme and/or accounts.
What is Price&Cost?
Price&Cost is a project estimation and budget-tracking tool. Our focus is on monitoring project’s financial health, allowing you to track key metrics as the project progresses.
Estimate your project based on resources involved and their effort and then reconcile with actuals regularly, leaving an audit trail of snapshots that you can compare to get an in-depth view of your project’s financial health at any time.
Flexible MS Project and CSV import, versioning, metrics gauges and powerful graphs – are just some of the features Price&Cost gives you.
So, clunky spreadsheets just don’t stand a chance!
The workflow is really simple and effortless:
1. Create estimates
Convert your MS Project files into effort estimates or enter manually. Easily create multiple draft versions. Choose one and set as baseline.
2. Track and update
Update the time spent on the project and adjust the effort forecast periodically. We’ll make sure every version is saved.
3. Stay on budget
See changes in your current and projected price, cost and margin. Make informed decisions and keep your project budget on track.
Head over to Price&Cost and request your beta invite!
