Ready to take your project profitability to the next level?
13 min read
What is project financial management? Learn the processes, techniques, and project management KPIs needed to evolve as a project manager and run healthy projects.
Time tracking
Build your perfect data foundation for spotless invoicing and deep business insights with easy time tracking.
Project management
Be a world champion project manager. Keep your projects on track - and profitable.
Resource management
Efficiently staff projects and run a predictable business with confidence.
Insights & Reporting
Get smarter - faster - to make clever decisions for long-term growth impact.
Project accounting & Invoicing
Invoice everything - fast and accurate - while staying on top of project finances.
Staff & Salary
Give accountants and HR an intelligent tool to eliminate draining administration.
Financial Systems
TimeLog offers standard integrations for all your favourite financial systems. Save time and reduce manual tasks.
Payroll Solutions
TimeLog offers standard integrations for multiple payroll solutions. Get easy salary administration and only enter payroll information once.
Add-ons
Track time automatically via Outlook, use gamification or find another add-on that can support your business.
Multiple Legal Entities
You can create synergy between your departments and across borders and offices with the Multiple Legal Entities module from TimeLog.
Business Intelligence
Utilise the insights you get from TimeLog to the fullest. Our system is ready to integrate with multiple BI solutions.
Partner Integrations
TimeLog PSA is part of a large ecosystem. Get an overview of all the partner integrations in the TimeLog family.
Economy department
Save 1-2 days a month on your invoicing process.
Project teams
From planning to execution and evaluation. Robust tools for every project manager.
Management teams
Create a performance-driven culture with solid reporting capabilities.
Large enterprises
Enhance operations and performance across entities, countries and departments.
NGOs and non-profit organisations
Simplify internal processes, spend less time on administration, and get documentation in place - at a discounted rate.
Blog
Get inspired to run an even better business with articles, guides and analyses.
Guides, podcasts and webinars
Get access to templates, guides and webinars that help and inspire you.
Help Center
Looking for help material and user guides to the TimeLog system? Look no further. Find all the help you need now.
Get a single source of truth
Discover how companies maintain a single source of truth across borders, departments, and currencies.
Get integrated
Discover the advantages customers gain from utilising our integrations and API.
Reporting in real-time
Explore how others leverage reporting to optimise their processes and make informed decisions.
Get started with resource planning
Discover how other companies thoroughly grasp their resources and enhance their ability to predict future trends.
Improved project financials
This is how the efficient financial toolbox from TimeLog helps project managers and CFOs improve their project financials.
Faster invoicing
Discover how other companies have slashed the time spent on invoicing by 75% - and uncover how you can achieve the same efficiency.
The Story of TimeLog
Get insights on TimeLog and how we can help you grow and evolve your business.
Employees
See who shows up every day to deliver the best PSA solution.
Career
What's life like at TimeLog? Are we hiring? Get the answer here.
Partner
Create even more value for your customers, as well as ours, as a TimeLog Partner.
Premium Service
Online Help Center, tailored onboarding and support from Day 1.
Corporate Social Responsibility
We work to ensure a positive impact on planet, people and businesses.
Security and GDPR
Learn more about how we work to keep your data safe and provide maximum security.
5 min read
What is project financial management? Learn the definition and get introduced to processes, techniques, and project management KPIs that will secure healthy projects and keep you evolving as a project manager.
As a project manager, you are a doer. You know your customers' needs and can translate them into specific tasks for your coworkers. You handle risk, whether related to delivery or finance, and you smoothly manage a project from idea to execution and handover.
But how do you feel about project accounting, project finance and KPIs?
For many project managers, handling and optimising the finance aspect of a project doesn't come quite as naturally as being an excellent communicator, coordinator, and motivator.
Also read: A project management tool for consultants, architects and engineers
But suppose you're a project manager in a professional services organisation, such as a management consultancy, IT consultancy, or engineering company. In that case, you must also measure, steer, and optimise the project finances.
Yes! The CFO is a huge part of project finance.
Still, for most of our customers, project managers play a pivotal role because they are the ones who know firsthand about deliveries (agreement, project, and tasks), payment terms and price model, hours spent so far vs. what has been delivered, and knowledge of what is left.
That gives you, as the project manager, a unique position. And as stated by both Pippi Longstocking and Spiderman: 'With great power comes great responsibility'.
Project financial management is about running projects, measuring them, and examining ways to improve them in the future.
The goal is to manage projects in a way that will lead to more profit. This will open the door to more projects (clients) and create more wiggle room for your company and you.
Also read: The effective project plan - the project manager's ultimate guide
Venturing into new territory is hard! You must learn a new language, traditions, working methods, and habits. Sometimes, you even need to unlearn a thing or two.
As a project manager, you can't escape the fact that you depend on others and have a lot of teamwork and interdependencies. This means it's not solely up to you to succeed.
The above examples illustrate how companywide processes (like time tracking) are more than nice to have. They lay the foundation for your company's possibilities for advanced project accounting and profitability.
And even if it isn't easy, it is rewarding (in terms of profit, happy customers, and employees with a better work-life balance), so we hope you're ready to level up your project financial management!
Happy adventure! 🦸♀️
Get the e-book Level Up Your Project Financial Management Now
We'll kick it off with a definition of project financial management.
Project financial management refers to the systematic approach of planning, organising, and controlling the economic aspects of a project to ensure that it stays within budget, meets set financial goals, and delivers value.
The process involves cost estimation, budgeting, financial analysis, and resource allocation, all of which aim to ensure the successful completion of projects while managing financial risks.
In TimeLog, we utilise a 4-level model for project financial management. Each level involves specific processes and key performance indicators (KPIs) that must be implemented. As you progress through the levels, you become more advanced and mature.
The KPIs and insights from measuring them serve as the foundation for various project profitability analyses that can enhance your finances.
You can find multiple models relevant to project financial management. The model we present is based on over 20 years of experience working with professional services organisations in the Nordics.
As the saying goes: ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’. The same applies to all the excellent project managers we meet every day in the world of consulting.
Experience comes from years of doing, and skillsets gradually evolve through theory and practice by building on past experiences.
With that in mind, we’d like to present the TimeLog PSA model for project financial management maturity.
Need a deep dive into the maturity levels of project financial management? Jump to our other blogs about project financial management, processes and KPIs to measure and optimise project finances.
As you master the processes, you establish the groundwork for monitoring project management KPIs--the cornerstone for conducting essential profitability and rate realisation analyses.
The inside/outside exercise is a basic procedure where select team members, the project manager, and possibly one or two from the finance department review the completed tasks carefully by checking the comments for each task and ensuring the task is within scope.
In our experience, companies that do this exercise regularly see a profit boost of about 10% on the bottom line. It requires time, but it's valuable.
Download the e-book: Level Up Your Project Financial Management
This exercise revolves around an old friend of many project managers: The project triangle.
By knowing, reviewing, and adjusting the three sides of your triangle, you can better understand where, how, and what to change if your project is in trouble.
The project triangle can help you answer questions like:
Using this to steer the conversation with the client can help ease the discussion (which might be difficult) if you need to align on budget and/or scope.
Also read: The project triangle: How to balance time, budget and scope
Once you establish solid processes and measure essential KPIs, your next step is to be more proactive regarding price models.
You might have a preferred model in your company or a model you’d like to use more. For instance, a couple of years ago, many professional services organisations moved towards more subscriptions to secure recurring revenue.
No matter which price model(s) you’re currently using, you should know each model's benefits and drawbacks.
Who knows... Maybe a new price model will increase your project profitability.
But which price model is best for you?
It depends...
Scaling consultancy services can be a real headache, so the more you can copy, standardise, and reuse, the more you earn.
But if you can’t standardise or scale, you should avoid a couple of price models at all costs. Learn which in our class on price models for consultants.
Get the first lesson now - Join the Contract College for Consultants.
13 min read
What is project financial management? Learn the processes, techniques, and project management KPIs needed to evolve as a project manager and run healthy projects.
10 min read
What is project financial management? Learn the processes, techniques, and project management KPIs needed to evolve as a project manager and run healthy projects.
6 min read
What is project financial management? Learn the processes, techniques, and project management KPIs needed to evolve as a project manager and run healthy projects.
13 min read
What is project financial management? Learn the processes, techniques, and project management KPIs needed to evolve as a project manager and run healthy projects.
10 min read
What is project financial management? Learn the processes, techniques, and project management KPIs needed to evolve as a project manager and run healthy projects.
6 min read
What is project financial management? Learn the processes, techniques, and project management KPIs needed to evolve as a project manager and run healthy projects.
25 min read
What is project financial management? Learn the processes, techniques, and project management KPIs needed to evolve as a project manager and run healthy projects.
12 min read
What is project financial management? Learn the processes, techniques, and project management KPIs needed to evolve as a project manager and run healthy projects.
3 min read
What is project financial management? Learn the processes, techniques, and project management KPIs needed to evolve as a project manager and run healthy projects.