Why Financially Minded Project Managers Outperform Their Peers

Your project managers are a critical part of your professional services organization’s success. They juggle project execution, staffing, scheduling, change management, and more—which is challenging enough. Project financial management, one of their most important tasks, comes with its own set of challenges.

These challenges multiply if your organization uses a small business accounting application instead of a robust financial management solution that accelerates your path to success and empowers your project managers to make fast, confident decisions.

Here are some tips to help your project managers become more financially minded.

Focus on Behavior and Culture

Your organization’s culture dictates how your project managers conduct their daily activities. Standardizing processes builds a solid foundation for your project managers, which helps your organization be more successful. Implementing programs that reinforce your organization’s values is another way to build up your project managers. For example, consider a mentorship program where high performers coach others in best practices.

Provide Financial Visibility

Rather than just focusing on invoices, your project managers should have fast, easy access to project statuses, milestones, resource availability, and metrics. Give them timely, targeted data at the project level, such as project profit, budget vs. actual, earned value, and transactions over a certain threshold. The easier it is to get this critical information, the easier it is to make confident decisions.

Ensure Real-Time Information

Project managers’ decisions are only as good as the information available to them. If your organization’s small business accounting software requires spreadsheets as workarounds, the copy-and-paste routine is wasting time—and when your project managers finally sort out the information, it’s already outdated.

Halloran Consulting Group, a Boston-based life sciences consulting firm, experienced improvements when they switched from QuickBooks to Sage Intacct. Intacct is a flexible, configurable financial management solution built on a true cloud foundation. Its in-depth financial capabilities and real-time information enabled Halloran to increase project margins by 12% and boost billable utilization by 36%.

Learn More

To learn more about how having the right tools and financial mindset can prepare your project managers to outperform their peers, download the whitepaper below.