Unlock the Full Potential of Your Projects with Costpoint Planning

In today's fast-paced and competitive environment, effective planning and resource management are crucial for government contracting success. With stringent compliance standards, strict deadlines, and tight budget constraints impacting the industry, the ability to budget and plan the necessary resources to fulfill a contract is essential.

Effective budgeting and resource planning help contractors allocate the right resources to the right tasks at the right time, ensuring that projects stay on schedule and within budget. This level of coordination is essential for avoiding cost overruns and ensuring that projects are completed successfully.

With the right tool in place, you can better meet the pressing demands while maintaining efficiency and profitability.

Costpoint Planning offers purpose-built capabilities to optimize budgeting, forecasting, and resource allocation so you can better manage your project needs. Read more to learn about the latest forecasting and budgeting features and hear from a seasoned expert who provides advice on how to maximize the capabilities in Costpoint Planning.

A Centralized Hub for Your Budgeting & Forecasting Needs

One of the primary reasons government contractors need to plan and budget their resources effectively is to ensure compliance with regulations such as FAR, DFARS, and DCAA. These regulations require strict adherence to certain requirements while maintaining accurate and up-to-date records. Proper budgeting ensures that contractors can meet these requirements without overspending.

Effective budgeting can also help contractors reduce costs, resulting in a higher win rate for new contracts and more profit upon closeout—both crucial for maintaining financial health and competitiveness. When you combine effective budgeting with purpose-built forecasting capabilities that can help you better plan for opportunities and meet future demands, you can further control and track costs while reducing risk.

Costpoint Planning is a budget and forecasting solution that serves as a centralized hub for budgeting and planning your resources based on real-time insights—with more than 100 standardized, out-of-the-box reports. With the right tool to support your firm, contractors can maintain compliance and automate key processes while avoiding project delays and cost overruns.

With purpose-built capabilities, Costpoint Planning can help your government contracting firm with your budgeting and forecasting needs.

Costpoint Planning is designed to create detailed budgets for new opportunities or existing projects, develop annual operating plans, and generate periodic forecasts to assess progress against goals. This includes the ability to calculate projected indirect rates and gauge risk by comparing organizational and project budgets.

Users also can complete a scenario analysis, which allows you to generate multiple versions of a budget so you can analyze and understand the effects of different scenarios. This allows you to make informed decisions and select the best budget from among various options.

The Costpoint Planning domain can also help you plan and allocate resources more effectively, ensuring you have the right people in place to meet project demands. These capabilities seamlessly integrate with Costpoint Time & Expense so you can easily track and monitor labor costs—helping you compare budgeted labor hours vs. charged hours so you can quickly respond if adjustments are needed.

You can also develop long-term strategic plans to pinpoint resource gaps and ensure you can allocate the necessary headcount before it becomes a problem. With a complete view of all resources linked to the relevant project, you can better ensure proper resource allocation.

Real-time Insights for Continuous Improvement

With more control over budgeting and forecasting, government contractors can make more informed decisions. But how can you learn from a specific project’s performance so you plan better in the future?

With real-time insights and a 360-degree view of your organization’s health, Costpoint can help you leverage up-to-the-minute data on costs and revenue to maintain control over swiftly evolving projects.

These real-time insights enable better decision-making and help you stay ahead of potential issues while providing a complete view of opportunity forecasts, project budgeting, and organizational planning with dynamic reporting—all in one integrated solution.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Investment

Patty Phelps is a leading consultant who exclusively provides training and support services specifically for Costpoint Planning. She leverages her 18 years of Costpoint Planning expertise to help clients successfully implement this domain. Patty combines her Planning subject matter expertise with her 30 years of industry work experience using Deltek’s solutions. She says the budgeting and forecasting capabilities in Costpoint Planning help her customers automate key processes, reduce manual data entry, and increase productivity—which are essential in today’s evolving market.

After leading hundreds of implementations, Patty says she’s seen the transformative impact of Costpoint Planning firsthand. Prior to utilizing the domain, many of her clients relied on rudimentary, manual processes that are both time-consuming and prone to errors.

“People tell me, ‘I’ve got to get out of spreadsheets...because they know they need to increase redundancies and be more productive and reduce errors,” she said. “They realize they need something more powerful that’s a one-stop-shop solution for their projects key metrics such as control of costs, resources (labor and non-labor) revenue, and program profit.”

Patty says many people come to her frustrated because they realize the drawback of manual processes is they don’t have time for more value-added work. “They realize they need to automate to be more productive. Planning helps clients save time to do the necessary and critical analysis of their company’s projects and organizations financials. Planning will provide a user the ability to troubleshoot and be proactive to finding solutions to potential cost and/or resource issues. Planning users fix these issues before they become major problems.”

"The Planning domain has evolved to become a powerful tool for project control and fiscal year organizational planning users,” Patty said. She added that Planning’s ability to automate and streamline processes and provide real-time data significantly improves efficiency and decision-making for users and their business.

When implementing and switching to a solution like Costpoint Planning, Patty said “There are best practices that lead to more successful outcomes. Proper training and a willingness to learn are crucial for successful adoption,” Patty explained.

She’s seen firsthand how much of a game-changer these capabilities are for companies.

“There’s definitely an immediate ROI: Things that would take somebody hours to hand-jam into a spreadsheet can be done in moments,” Patty explained, adding “even before you start using all of the available functionality and capabilities of Planning, the standardized reports that are built in and auto-populated from Costpoint Core provide key insights into projects costs and resources and an organizations financials (such as Profit and Loss and rate analysis). As an integrated solution, Planning provides more knowledge at your fingertips”.

Increasing Competitiveness with Effective Planning

The Costpoint Planning domain is a game-changer for organizations looking to optimize their project management processes. Whether you're looking to enhance your budgeting and forecasting capabilities, improve resource planning, or gain a comprehensive view of your projects, Costpoint Planning has you covered.

And now, thanks to an integration with Replicon Resource Management, government contractors can expand the power of Costpoint Planning even further by leveraging advanced resource planning, intelligent recommendations, and skill-based matching to optimize and track resource utilization.

It’s never been a better time to embrace the power of Costpoint Planning.