Submit Your Suggestions For ProContractor

I have tried to create my own cost vs budget report that allows the user to compare total costs to date against budget earned to date but the system struggles when performing subtotals at each cost code level and at the project level.

We had a custom report prepared for us (it is an extension of the project status report) that computes budget earned to date and cost to date, but the information is only at the cost type and cost code level.  There is no ability to sum it up to all of the different cost code level 1, 2, 3 ect and at a project level. 

It would be really nice to look at a report that can show the project budget earned to date vs cost to date and a gain/loss to date to have a real high level of how the project is performing.  Also, if you are doing monthly qty claiming, you should be able to compare how you did in the current period cost vs budget earned in the current period.

When we were sold this system, they told us PCMX has the ability to do cost vs budget reporting.  I made the assumption that this meant a user could track qty complete and release budget as the qty is incurred (like any other major software that calls itself a construction accounting software)... instead, this system only has a total cost and a total budget column and a gain loss column.  Well this is all fine and dandy if you want to compare cost vs budget when the project is 100% complete.  But we have projects that last anywhere from 2 months to 2 years.  Every month we do a cost vs budget report.  (not to mention the weekly labour reports)

We get by with the custom report we had created for us... but really I feel it is unacceptable that we were sold a system that promises cost vs budget reporting, but only gives us a very useless report total cost vs total budget and we have to pay for anything greater.  And now the customer reporting staff don't even do custom reporting.  Little bit frustrating.  Extreme buyers remorse over here. 

Anyways...This is the same for the project dashboard feature.  You have all of these really pretty graphs that really do not mean anything.  Let's say I set up a project in month 1.  It has a budget of 1 million dollars.  Lets say that in this month I have spent 200k.  Then I go and run a cost vs budget report or look at the project dashboard, PCMX tells me I'm doing great.  of my million dollar budget, I have only spent 200k.  I pull the dashboard details, it says we are below budget by 800k.  We are high fiving all around.  Oh but what about cost at completion? I should be able to compare the cost at completion vs budget... that will show me how the project will do at the end of the job right?  Really?, I can put any number in there I want... I can go to the owner of the company and say... we are 200k into the project and we have a cost at completion of 700k.  He's says great.  I forget to tell him that even though we've spent so much... we really didn't do anything and the guys were looking at their new boots for a month and really we were only 1% complete and not 20% complete.   without a proper cost vs budget todate report, no one will know any better. 

Our company keeps track of quantities on a daily basis.  The field staff compare productions on a daily basis.  They know how things are going on a cost code level (this is all tracked in excel)... but without having to export the PCMX data to excel and perform 15 minutes of data manipulation each time they run a cost vs budget report, I cannot do a project level summary of how the project is doing cost vs budget earned to date wise.

Explorer software has it.  Timberline has it.  Spectrum has it.  I'm sure Vista has it.  All of these softwares advertise they are construction softwares where a huge function of what they do is perform cost vs budget analysis.  PCMX has all of the data available, I find it frustrating that I have to go to so many places to do proper analysis of the construction data, when there are industry standards that are out there that basically say: this is a standard construction report.  So why wouldn't a software be able to do a standard construction report?