We are an architecture and planning firm and are looking for project management software (including project controlling). Ideally, it should be cloud-enabled. We work at two locations and moved our office from our internal network to the cloud at the beginning of the year. In addition, most of our employees work from home and are location-independent. We recently switched all our email correspondence to MS Outlook and would like to keep it that way.
The software should meet the following requirements:
- Project calculation, quotation preparation
- Free fee calculation based on time and materials or flat rates, discounts
- Calculation of partial services
- Recording of special services, ancillary costs
- Interface to Word for quotation creation with custom templates
- Accounting
- Flat-rate accounting (individual invoices)
- Ongoing invoicing according to performance status on a percentage basis
- Recording of complex project structures
- Monitoring of incoming payments and reconciliation with invoices
- Tracking of due dates and open items
- Interface to MS Word for invoicing with your own templates
- Electronic invoicing and storage GoBD-compliant (paperless office) optional
- Time recording, controlling
- Work time recording project and service phase related
- Vacation planning and overtime reduction
- Recording of special services
- Store planned expenditure according to project calculation
- Travel expense accounting optional
- Target/actual comparison of hours and budgets for current project statuses in real time
- Generate more precise hourly rates from the target/actual comparison of projects
- Post-calculation, addendum management
- Various evaluation diagrams (average hourly rate, employee group hourly rates, etc., individual hourly rates)
- Liquidity management (income planning, order backlog and expected sales compared to personnel costs and other expenses and costs
- Subcontractor controlling optional
- Capacity planning
- Store annual hour budgets for individual employees (part-time, full-time, temporary employees)
- Employee deployment planning related to projects and service phases, including hourly budget (also based on experience gained from other projects)
- Overview of long-term capacity utilization development of the office and employees or employee teams
- Control instruments to counteract over- or under-utilization
- Instrument for planning unforeseen work (buffer times)
- If necessary, “traffic light system” to indicate when milestones must be reached and when deliverables are due Optional
- Creation of a project roadmap, including for the client (project structure plan) Gantt chart for project workflow or similar
- CRM system optional (i.e., only if available as an MS Outlook add-in)
- Assignment of persons to projects (list of project participants, clients, companies, specialist planners, etc.) as well as mail & document traffic relating to projects and persons
- Tagging of groups of persons (e.g., clients, garden landscapers)
- Add-in for MS Outlook
- Web-based, cloud-based
- Cloud-based software, location-independent, and web interface for hourly entries
- Data protection in accordance with GDPR (EU server location)
- Miscellaneous
- Interfaces to MS Office (letter templates, invoice templates, etc.)
The planned software workstations will require 20-25 employees to record their hours, which will be incorporated into resource and project planning. In addition, there will be 2-4 administrators.