Posted: December 17, 2003

Want to maintain better control of your business and its projects? Increase staff utilization? Capture costs more accurately? Better understand the profitability of your project portfolios? The combination of Microsoft Business Solutions–Solomon® and Microsoft Project 2003 provides project-driven organizations with tools to help manage people, money, and projects more successfully.

Project and financial managers can now efficiently plan projects and control budgets together to help maximize profitability.
 

• Guided Planning: Quickly master the project planning process with Microsoft Project 2003 to set up plans and track projects. Customize plans to effectively promote your organization's best practices from directly within Microsoft Project.
• Granular Budget Control: With the ability to track and control your budgets from initiation to completion in Microsoft Project, you'll see how change orders and revisions affect your budget throughout the life of a project. Revenue and cost budgets can be defined for each cost category for each project task, making it easy for project managers to spot and receive alerts when cost overruns and other potential problems threaten project success.
• Flexible Project Creation and Standardization: Create projects, tasks, and budgets manually or reuse templates to promote standardized planning and reporting across your organization. Initiate and update projects automatically in both Microsoft Project and the Microsoft Solomon Project Series, so project managers and accounting staff can use the tools most appropriate for their roles.
• Centralized Resource Management: Manage resources effectively throughout your organization with a central resource pool. View, group, and edit enterprise resource information and evaluate availability across multiple projects. Update the enterprise resource pool automatically so back office staff and front-line project managers always access the same set of data.
• Resource Optimization: Get accurate information about resources throughout your enterprise so you can assemble the best team for each project. Evaluate skills and assignments with the help of resource availability graphs and related tools.
• Demand Planning: Determine the skills and resources required to execute on proposed projects to ensure the right people are available for the right jobs when you need them.

Collaborative tools and shared data allow project teams and business stakeholders to keep projects on time and on budget.
 

• Time and Expense Reporting with Materials Capture: Eliminate errors and duplicate data entry by allowing project team members to capture time and expenses at the project and task level for multiple purposes—costing, billing, payroll, and project status updates and more. Your project and accounting staff can capture materials costs and other accounts payable transactions directly against projects and tasks, providing insight into all costs associated with your projects, not just labor costs.
• One-Time Data Entry: Help reduce administrative delays and errors caused by duplicate data entry. Customers, contracts, projects, tasks, resources, budgets, time, expenses, and financial transactions can be entered once and used everywhere they are needed throughout the solution. And, server-level connections completely eliminate the need for manual import and export of files to and from Microsoft Project.
• Enterprise Portfolio Visibility: Quickly evaluate mission-critical initiatives and identify projects that are behind schedule or over budget with high-level views of projects across your organization.
• Resource Utilization: Maximize profits by efficiently, accurately, and consistently tracking employee utilization data. Track everything from goals for billable hours and revenue to actual hours billed and revenue earned.
• Team Collaboration: Easy-to-use Web-based tools let team members and project stakeholders view, update, and submit project information, such as time cards, expense reports, and task status updates. Review and approval capabilities streamline workflow and ensure timely and accurate submission of mission critical data. This allows you to bill your customers, analyze profitability, and review project status faster than ever before.
• Centralized Project Documentation: Encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing through integration with Microsoft SharePoint Team Services, which provides a central location for organizing and tracking project-related documents and issues down to the task level.

Customizable and automated revenue recognition, accounts receivable, and billing tools will help you increase your cash flow and profitability.
 

• Project Financial Reporting: Get a clear and detailed view of project and task profitability. Evaluate budget versus actual with fine grain accuracy using drill down and graphing tools. Whether you are a project manager, line manager, or project accountant, you always have easy access to the data you need for analyzing project financial performance—even on multiple projects at one time.
• Shorten Billing Cycles: Improve cash flow by automating your management of unbilled receivables. Utilize specific billing methods and apply custom mark-up rules to automatically post billings to Accounts Receivable, and then to General Ledger once they are approved.
• Flexible Invoicing: Invoice customers with different types of compensations and fees—all at one time. Does your company apply retainer, retention, project management, or service fees to projects? You can schedule, track, and invoice appropriate amounts using custom invoice formats that meet the specific needs of your customers.
• Contract Management: Turn change orders into billable work, automate the document tracking process, and tighten payment controls to keep projects on budget.

Your solution can be adapted quickly as you grow and tailored to meet the specific needs and goals of your project driven organization.
 

• Easily Add New Functionality: Integrated General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Payroll, Distribution, and Field Service applications can be included with the initial solution or added later. This helps ensure that project driven organizations with varying or changing needs—professional service firms to construction companies—can maximize their long-term investment.
• Configurable and Customizable: Administrative tools allow non-technical users to make changes to best suit your organization's needs. Power users and programmers can customize the solution to provide unique enhancements and integrations to other lines of business applications.
• Reliability and Viability: With more than 20 years of experience meeting the needs of project driven organizations, Microsoft will continue to provide reliable and affordable solutions for years to come.