Cost management 2.0 - Keeping costs & prices under control with ZEP

Do you always want to keep an eye on your project costs and turnover? In today's blog post, we'll show you how ZEP can help you digitise your cost management. Whether you run a business, manage projects or have responsibility for finances, the right project time tracking software can mean the difference between profitability and financial challenges.

The right pricing

Before we dive into the details of ZEP, let's take a closer look at why correct pricing and careful recording of receipts are immensely important. As a responsible person in your company, you are constantly confronted with the challenge of pricing your services or projects appropriately. This affects all industries and business areas equally. Let us illustrate this with two vivid examples:

Example 1: IT service provider

Suppose you are Managing Director of an IT services companythat develops customised software solutions. The pricing of your services can have a significant impact on your business success. If you set your prices too low to attract clients, you could end up with more costs than you generate from the projects. This could lead to financial bottlenecks and quality problems, as you might not have enough resources to carry out the project. On the other hand, prices that are too high could scare off potential clients and lead to a lack of orders. This is where ZEP comes in, by allowing you to accurately value your services per employee and client/project and set prices that are both profitable and competitive. More on this later.

Example 2: Management consultancy

Imagine you are the Managing Director of a renowned management consultancy, which specialises in strategic consulting and process optimisation. In the consultancy industry, correct pricing is crucial as it can make the difference between a thriving business and a lack of profitability. If you don't keep a close eye on your internal costs, including your consultants' salaries, office rents and technology expenses, and price too low, you could face financial problems in the long run or even find yourself in economic distress. On the other hand, setting prices too high may cause potential clients to switch to other consulting firms. Given the specific requirements of your industry, where travel costs are often built into project pricing, ZEP provides the flexibility you need to accurately allocate associated expenses to the respective projects and ensure that your budget includes both consulting time and external expenses.

In both examples it becomes clear how important it is to carefully plan and monitor pricing to ensure profitability and your company's success - no matter what industry you are in. But: prices are only one part of the equation! Receipt capture also plays a critical role in ensuring financial transparency and increasing your profitability. In the next section, we will now take a closer look at the additional module Prices & Receipts in ZEP.

Transparent cost management with ZEP

With the ZEP module Prices & Vouchers (add-on for ZEP Compact & already included in ZEP Professional) you can set prices per employee and activity. With this feature, you can accurately value your services or project and ensure that you are not selling yourself short. In addition, ZEP offers the possibility to use hourly and daily rates per project, which allows for flexible pricing. You can store the experience levels of your users (from junior to senior, for example) and assign individual hourly and daily rates to each user. In this way, you can easily price the work that your employees perform. The settings can then be adapted for each client or project - depending on the experience level, you can also price your employees differently. Example: Employee A is assigned to client A at price X. However, employee A has much more experience for customer B's project. So employee A can be assigned to customer B at price Z. And thanks to ZEP's turnover and profit evaluation, you can monitor the profitability of your projects, customers and your entire company. In addition, you can also carry out an evaluation per employee with ZEP. This gives you a detailed overview of how each team member contributes to the company's results. As a result, you can make informed decisions about your pricing strategy and ensure that you get the most out of each project.

However, you can not only define the external costs that you pass on to your customers, but also keep an eye on your internal costs. For example, you can store the internal hourly rates for consideration in revenue calculations, turnover or profitability for each individual team member with the Prices & Vouchers module. Do you also want to store flat-rate and fixed-price projects? No problem! In ZEP you can calculate your projects according to effort, flat rate or fixed price. Maximum flexibility with simultaneous budget control! Another feature that makes the Prices & Receipts Module includes the function to store special times or surcharges. This can be, for example, weekend work, night bonuses, work on public holidays or other times that are to be specially priced.

And since the module naturally includes not only price management but also the management of receipts, we want to show you how to take your receipt management to the next level with ZEP. Because: Recording receipts is another crucial step in keeping an eye on your project costs. ZEP allows you to record third-party costs as receipts and assign them to individual projects. If you have several expenses for a project, you can enter all costs in one voucher, including different tax rates. With the project-specific allocation of all receipts, you ensure that all relevant costs are passed on to the customer. This in turn ensures the profitability of your project. Do you also work with international customers who have a different currency? With ZEP's Prices & Receipts module, costs are automatically converted into the customer's currency. Sometimes it is unavoidable that costs have a different performance date. For expenses such as pre-booked flights, you can adjust the service date in ZEP to record exactly when the costs were incurred. In addition, there is the possibility of integrating the Prices & Receipts module excellently with other modules - such as the Travel expense report - to combine. Once you have started with the Prices & Receipts Module If you record your external costs, it is obvious to also record travel costs via ZEP. Just like the receipts, you can also assign these to the respective project and ultimately invoice your customer.

As you know, professionalism is often in the detail. We have made this our goal and, with the Prices & Receipts module, offer you the little extras that make a truly powerful software should contain:

Cost accounting of privately paid receipts for employees: If your employees (have to) incur expenses in connection with projects, you can easily record them, assign them to the project and settle them.

Support for hourly and daily rate models: With this flexibility, you can use a wide variety of price structures for different projects.

Financial transparency

With ZEP, you not only get full transparency for your customers through detailed invoice attachments, but you also have an overview of the Profitability of your projects, customers and your entire company. In this way you can ensure that you do not sell yourself short and at the same time increase your profitability. Because: Financial transparency vis-à-vis employees and customers is not only beneficial for your daily management, but also helps long-term strategic planning. You can identify trends in your turnover and cost patterns that enable you to make informed decisions for upcoming projects.

So why wait? Seize the opportunity, Test ZEP for 30 days free of charge and without obligationand experience for yourself how our software can take your projects to the next level. Maximise your profitability and keep your project costs and turnover under control.