New in Productive: Unified financials
Managing finances is one of the most important jobs in your company. There’s a lot of data mining involved so getting the right information fast can be a problem. This used to be the case with Productive too (sort of), but not anymore.
What did we change?
Your most important financial information is now aggregated within a single tab. Unified financials put Budgets, Expenses, Invoices and Payments in one place where you can access everything.
Use cases
First things first, you can tailor your view completely by deciding which columns you want to include in the filter. You can also sort the columns by clicking on the column header. This is something we introduced recently with our Table view (also available in Sales, Tasks and Project/Tasks).
Here’s an example of setting up a filter you can use within the Unified financials:
Now for some practical use cases to rile up your imagination…
1. Birds-eye view of your finances
You will appreciate the bird’s eye view of finances across your organisation. You can now see all of the budgets, expenses, invoices and payments in one place!
For example, you can sort your budgets by revenue to see how much money each of your clients brings in. This important piece of info will help you plan your future revenue and cash flow. Combined with our profitability reporting, this can help you decide whether it makes sense to keep working with a client or drop the contract in favor of the more profitable ones.
You can also focus on costs by sorting your projects based on the amount of cost they have generated.
You get to choose which data is important to you and have the freedom of tailoring your views. Your preferences can be saved as custom filters so you can use them all the time.
2. Looking at budgets for a particular client
Sometimes you might want to see how many billable hours should be invoiced to a client in the upcoming period. Maybe you want to compare that information with the amount you’ve already invoiced to your client?
You can also see how accurate your estimates for a particular client were by comparing estimated time with the actual worked time on the projects. This is a powerful insight which will make your estimates more accurate with time.
3. Controlling out of pocket expenses
All of the expenses across all projects are now visible in one place. If you’re putting a markup on your expenses, you can also see the difference between the cost and profit on these expenses.
Due dates on expenses help you plan your cash flow so keep track of them here.
4. Looking at what will be invoiced in the future
The most accurate revenue is the amount of work yet to be invoiced. This means you’ve created the revenue by working on a specific project. You will soon invoice this to the client and get paid.
From now on, you can see how much revenue will be invoiced in the future.
5. Looking at the payments you’ve received
All of the payments you’ve received can be filtered within a specific time period. If you’re interested in payments you’ve received from a particular client, you can use filters to focus on those payments.
Here’s an example of viewing payments for a certain client (Double Trouble).
All of this looks cool, but how does it make my life any better?
Your financial data was kept safely in Productive even before we introduced this change, but if you wanted to dig up some specific information you had to look for it in several places.
Issues this could cause:
- Confusion— switching tabs, budgets, projects…you get the picture
- Waste of time — it wasn’t as fast as it could have been
Advantages of Unified financials:
- Access all of your financial data in one place
- See what’s happening across the board
- Decrease the time it takes to dig up the right information
- Customize your views for ultimate control
This will make your life a whole lot easier and help you manage finances like a boss! Be that boss and sign up for a free trial.
