Dynamics 365 Business Central – Project Management & Fixed Assets
Business Central is a business management solution for small and mid-sized organizations that automates and streamlines business processes and helps you manage your business. Highly adaptable and rich with features, Business Central enables companies to manage their business, including finance, manufacturing, sales, shipping, project management, services, and more. Companies can easily add functionality that is relevant to the region of operation, and that is customized to support even highly specialized industries.
Today we are going to focus on Project Mangement features.
1. PROJECT MANAGEMENT
In Business Central, you can perform common project management tasks, such as configuring a job and scheduling a resource, as well as providing the information needed to manage budgets and monitor progress.
You can track machine and employee hours on the project by using time sheets. As a project manager, you have a good overview, not only of individual jobs, but also of the allocation of employees, machinery and other resources being used in all projects.
Before you can use Business Central to manage projects, you must set up resources, time sheets, and jobs.
The following table describes a sequence of tasks, with links to the topics that describe them.
To: |
See: |
| Create jobs, assign job tasks, and prepare job planning lines. | Create Jobs |
| Allocate resources to jobs and manage resource prices. | Use Resources for Jobs |
| Create a time sheet with integrated job task and planning lines and post time sheet lines to a job journal. | Use Time Sheets for Jobs |
| Budget for resources to be used in jobs and compare actual item and resource usage to budgeted usage to improve the quality and cost efficiency of future projects. | Manage Job Budgets |
| Review and record usage on various parts of your job, which is automatically updated as you modify and transfer information from job planning lines to job journals or job invoices for posting. | Record Usage for Jobs |
| Purchase supplies for a job, either on purchase orders or invoices, and record item and time usage. | Manage Job Supplies |
| Learn about WIP (Work in Process), a feature that ensures correct financial statements and enables you to estimate the financial value of jobs that are ongoing. | Understanding WIP Methods |
| Post the consumption of materials, resources, and other expenses of job work in process (WIP) to monitor its financial value and to maintain correct financial statements even though you post job expenses before invoicing the job. | Monitor Job Progress and Performance |
| Record job costs for resource usage, materials, and job-related purchases on an on-going basis and invoice the customer, either when the job is finished or according to an invoicing schedule. | Invoice Jobs |
2. FIXED ASSETS
The Fixed Assets functionality in Business Central provides an overview of your fixed assets and ensures correct periodic depreciation. It also enables you to keep track of your maintenance costs, manage insurance policies, post fixed asset transactions, and generate various reports and statistics.
For each fixed asset, you must set up a card containing information about the asset. You can set up buildings or production equipment as a main asset with a component list, and you can group them in various ways, such as by class, department, or location. Then you can begin to acquire, maintain, and sell the fixed assets. You can also set up budgeted assets. This makes it possible to include any anticipated acquisitions and sales in reports.
To keep track of fixed asset depreciations as well as other financial transactions related to fixed assets, you set up one or more depreciation books for each fixed asset in your company. Depreciation is done by running a report to calculate periodic depreciation and fill in a journal with the resulting entries, ready to be posted. Business Central supports several depreciation methods. You can set up multiple depreciation books per fixed asset for different purposes, such as one for tax reporting and another for internal reporting.
For each asset, you can record maintenance costs and the next service date. Keeping track of maintenance expenses can be important for budgeting purposes and for making decisions about whether to replace a fixed asset.
Each fixed asset can be attached to one or more insurance policies. You can therefore easily verify that insurance policy amounts are in accordance with the value of the assets that are linked to the policy. This also makes it easy to monitor annual insurance premiums.
Before you can begin to manage fixed assets, you must set up default values, fixed asset accounting, posting groups, allocation keys, journals, and posting types.
The following table describes a sequence of tasks, with links to the topics that describe them.
To: |
See: |
| Create fixed assets, assign depreciation methods, post acquisitions, salvage values, and print fixed asset lists. | Acquire Fixed Assets |
| Record service visits, post maintenance costs, and monitor maintenance costs. | Maintain Fixed Assets |
| Update insurance information, post-acquisition costs to insurance policies, modify insurance coverage, view insurance statistics, and list insurance policies. | Insure Fixed Assets |
| Reclassify fixed assets, transfer fixed assets to different locations, split up or combine assets. | Transfer, Split, or Combine Fixed Assets |
| Adjust values of fixed assets, post appreciation, and post write-down transactions. | Revalue Fixed Assets |
| Calculate depreciation, post depreciation, and analyse depreciation in fixed assets reports. | Depreciate or Amortize Fixed Assets |
| Post disposal transactions, view disposal ledger entries, and post partial disposals. | Dispose of or Retire Fixed Assets |
| Manage fixed asset budgets, budget acquisition costs, budget disposals of fixed assets, and budget depreciation. | Manage Budgets for Fixed Assets |