Industry — Project businesses
ERP for project-based businesses
For agencies, consultancies and engineering firms: estimates that become budgets, time and cost tracked against them, and margin visible before the project ends.
The problem
What project businesses tell us
“Utilisation is a monthly guess.”
Timesheets arrive late and incomplete, so capacity planning runs on intuition and the next month is oversold.
“Scope creep is invisible until invoicing.”
Extra work is absorbed quietly because nobody compares effort against the estimate until the job is done.
“Billing takes a week every month.”
Invoices are assembled by hand from timesheets, expenses and milestone schedules held in different places.
The system
What ERPNext gives a project business
| Area | What it does | Who uses it |
|---|---|---|
| Estimates and budgets | Quotations that carry into the project as the budget to track against | Commercial |
| Timesheets | Time against task, costed and flagged billable or not | Delivery teams |
| Expenses and purchases | Claims and supplier invoices posted to the project they belong to | Finance |
| Milestone billing | Invoices raised from milestones, completion or time and materials | Finance |
| Utilisation | Billable against available hours, by person and by team | Management |
| Profitability | Budget against actual by project and phase, available during delivery | Management |
Why margin needs to be live, not retrospective
In a project business the product is time, and time cannot be recovered once it has been spent on the wrong thing. A profitability report produced after delivery describes a decision that can no longer be made.
Tracking effort against the estimate as the work happens changes the conversation. A project at seventy per cent of budget and forty per cent of scope is a discussion with the client this week, not a write-off next quarter.
We configure the project structure around how you actually sell — retainers, fixed scope, time and materials, or a mix — because a structure that does not match your contracts produces numbers your own managers quietly ignore.
FAQ
Questions we are asked before signing
Will our team actually fill in timesheets?
That depends more on friction than on policy. We configure entry to take seconds — a week view, sensible defaults, mobile entry — and set the approval rhythm so that it is a weekly habit rather than a monthly reconstruction.
Can we run retainers and fixed-price work together?
Yes. Billing method is set per project, so retainers, fixed scope and time and materials all run in the same system and report into the same profitability view.
Does it show utilisation by person?
Yes, as billable hours against available hours, by person, team and period. Combined with committed project work, this is what makes the forward capacity view usable.
Can clients see progress?
A client portal can expose project status, approved documents and invoices where that suits your relationship. What is shared is configurable, and most firms start conservatively.
Services
How we help project businesses businesses
Walk us through your operation.
A 30-minute call, no slide deck. You describe the process; we tell you honestly whether ERPNext is the right answer.