Project controlling: This is what you should keep an eye on

Companies operating in project-oriented sectors (IT service providers, management consultants, advertising and internet agencies, etc.) face the challenge of having to keep track of many different tasks and activities in order to ensure business success and to ensure that the projects carried out can be invoiced precisely, promptly and correctly.

This starts with the preparation of the offer and continues with time recording, invoicing and dunning. In addition, there are numerous tasks that are related to project management within the company, e.g. time sheets, holiday applications, break compliance or travel expense accounting for the employees involved in the projects.

And if all this were not enough, the project or management team has to keep track of all the projects that are currently running. On the one hand, this involves target/actual comparisons of ongoing projects to ensure that they are running within the agreed project framework. In addition, staff utilisation plays a central role when it comes to planning existing but also new projects.

The "Where do I find what?" phenomenon

Many companies still suffer from the "where do I find what?" phenomenon. In order to have a permanent overview of all the above-mentioned tasks and activities, those responsible - business/project management, project manager, project assistance/administration, financial accounting - usually have to access a wide variety of data sources and applications and combine the information contained therein in such a way that in the end either the necessary detailed picture (for creating a quotation, an invoice) or the necessary overall picture (project status, employee workload) emerges.

The "It can't be?" phenomenon

In addition to the Sisyphean task of having to obtain data from various sources, there is another phenomenon in project controlling in many companies: the "it can't be" phenomenon. This phenomenon occurs especially when companies enter project data manually, usually using a spreadsheet programme such as Microsoft Excel. If the project assistant sends an e-mail with a table to five project managers asking them to enter their hours, she usually receives five different tables back, which she first has to combine into one table - phenomenon 1 - and will also often come across "inconsistencies" and "inaccuracies", because who remembers exactly which project they worked on a few days or even weeks ago. Endless enquiries and reworking takes time and effort and hinders the all-important proof of the project work done as well as its accounting.

If the project/management then wants to create a target/actual comparison of a project, they will not be able to do anything with the tables and lists. An up-to-date and precise project overview is almost impossible.

ZEP: We keep an eye on your projects

So the solution can only be to bring a project controlling tool such as ZEP into the company. Thanks to central data storage in one application, the "where do I find what?" phenomenon is eliminated once and for all. All project-relevant data and facts can be retrieved at the click of a mouse and displayed in meaningful dashboards or overviews.

A web-based user interface and mobile apps also facilitate timely time recording. The project employee simply books the start and end of work into ZEP every day at the click of a mouse - and the data is available - also at the click of a mouse - to the project assistant (accounting), the project management (target/actual comparison) and the management (employee utilisation). This also makes the "It can't be?" phenomenon a thing of the past.

You can find proof of this on the ZEP website.