If you use NetSuite to manage your projects, then you may want to check out NetSuite’s Advanced Project Profitability feature. Essentially, this feature gives you a wider range of reporting options on your projects. It provides some standard project profitability reports, and it allows you to create custom project profitability reports as well. Let’s take a look!
Overview
The first step in using this feature is to ensure that you have enabled it. You can enable Advanced Project Profitability under the Projects section of the Company tab in Enable Features. Then, to view the existing project profitability reports, you would navigate to the Reports dashboard, expand the Projects category, and select Project Profitability Reports. This will take you to the list of standard project profitability reports, which include a basic Project Profitability (summary and detail) report; a Project Profitability by Month (summary and detail) report; and Project Profitability by Accounting (summary and detail) report.
These reports map items and accounts across the report columns and rows. Key accounts that may appear in these reports include Actual Cost, Actual Revenue, Committed Cost, Committed Revenue, Cost, Revenue, and Unbilled Receivable, which display as columns in the report. In the rows, you’ll be able to see the breakdown of items like assets, expenses, and services.
Custom Project Profitability Reports
Aside from the standard profitability reports, NetSuite’s Advanced Project Profitability feature also allows users to create their own unique reports, mapping accounts and items in the ways that would be the most helpful for them. Let’s look at some of the customization options that you would have with this feature, including creating a new report configuration and editing an existing configuration.
Create a New Configuration
To create a new project profitability configuration, navigate to Setup > Accounting > Project Profitability, and select the New button. Then, you’ll be able to set up the parameters for your new profitability configuration.
In the Define Rows section, choose the item types that you want to report on. The default item types are Asset, Expense, Service, and Other, but you can easily add or delete items. Then in the Define Columns section, you’ll choose the accounts and account types that you want to see data on. As with the Rows section, you can add or remove accounts from this list. In the fourth section, Define Profitability Calculation, you can choose the accounts that will be used to calculate the profitability and margin of your projects. You’ll have to choose an account for the Cost field and an account for the Revenue field, and the available options will include any of the accounts that you listed previously for your columns. Then, you’ll be taken to the Reports section where you can decide which reports you want for this configuration.
You can create a report for this configuration with each of the basic profitability report types: project profitability, project profitability by month, and project profitability by accounting period. For any of these reports, you can change the action from Create to Do Not Create if you don’t need that particular type of report.
On the Settings section, you’ll be able to choose additional transactions that you would like to include with the profitability calculation, including things like Planned Time, Actual Time, Sales Orders, Expense Reports Pending Approval, and Journal Entries Pending Approval. And finally, if you use multiple languages in your account, then you can provide translations for the report columns and rows in other languages. When you’re done, click Finish. Now, your completed configuration will appear in the list of configurations under Setup > Accounting > Project Profitability.
If you would like your customized configuration to populate the P&L subtab on project records, then you can select your configuration in the P&L Default field while you are on this page.
Edit an Existing Configuration
Suppose you need to make slight changes to an existing configuration. How would you do that?
On the Project Profitability Setup page, you can select either Copy or Edit next to any of the configurations. Doing so will take you right back into the report builder, and you’ll be able to click through each of the sections to make the changes you need. After making your changes, hit Finish.
Conclusion
NetSuite’s Advanced Project Profitability feature can be an immense asset to project managers. If you enjoyed this blog, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter below to receive new blog posts right in your inbox each week!