Forecasting revenue is a key part of the monthly process for project managers, business managers and controllers in professional service companies. To best align revenue forecasting with the needs of companies, Deltek reviewed customer feedback, conducted polls, delivered usability testing and had numerous conversations with users like you. What we found is that many companies are still using spreadsheet-type tools to manually track revenue, a very time-consuming process where data becomes stale, or outdated almost immediately.
As we reimagined this feature for Vantagepoint, we determined that the Revenue Forecast for a project must appear within the projects hub alongside all the other features that support the management of a project. In Vantagepoint, the projects hub is the command center to manage a project through the entire lifecycle, from pursuit through close-out.
With Revenue Forecasts in the projects hub, when selecting the project, all other key financial and planning calculations are right there at your fingertips. This helps accurately forecast and easily analyze your anticipated revenue for the duration of the project.
Updating Revenue Forecasts in Vantagepoint is simple. You only need to enter your remaining revenue in the total or into the remaining fiscal periods and the rest of the analysis happens automatically. Vantagepoint will compare your remaining revenue in your forecasts against backlog and give you visual indicators if there is a difference. For multi-currency customers, users can see and edit revenue forecasts in the project and the billing currency, using exchange rates to automatically update the currency not entered. Then, users can easily run reports to get a view into revenue across the entire company.
Revenue Forecasts in Vantagepoint is robust, easy-to-use and will eliminate the need for an outside system to track revenue forecasts. This is a big feature that will be packed with powerful functionality, so we have mapped out an iterative approach to the release, allowing Deltek to get something powerful in the hands of users now and then continue to build upon the feature over the next several releases. At that point, users will be able to view and edit revenue forecasts across all projects all at one time with smart spreading features to simplify, streamline and automate the process.
