Project status

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Columns on the status form and their meanings - Lump sum proposal items
• Columns on the status form and their meanings - Rates proposal items
• Non-default nominal account costs
• Colouring of proposal items
• Troubleshooting
  • No staff resources
  • Exceeding budgets

This reference article explains all fields in the project status update window, with worked examples for both lump sum and rate proposal items.

Please make sure you have gone through Record project status tutorial prior continuing.

Columns on the status form and their meanings - Lump sum proposal items

On Lump sum proposal items, the main concept is the percentage of completion of works. It is mainly down to the project manager to define the percentage of completed works. Recorded hours from diary entries can help them define the percentage of completion of works when compared against the budgeted hours.

Carefully review the columns on the example above. You can find their meaning in the table below. We are focusing on proposal item 205166 (Survey Building F5):

Columns on the status form and their meanings - Rates proposal items

On Rates proposal items, the main concept is not the percentage of completion of works or the percentage of hours recorded. Instead we use the term "Units". Some examples of units could be:

• a day's work.
• an hour's work.
• all works and resources required to deliver a single product.
• all works and resources required to deliver a certain service i.e. a drawing, a report etc.
• etc.

Carefully review the columns on the example above. You can find their meaning in the table below. We are focusing on proposal items above in turns:

Note that you can review some extra information by hovering over the "Hours" values as seen below:

On this instance, there are 9.5h budgeted per unit. 46 hours have been recorded which account for (46 / 9.5 = ) 4.84 units. The tooltip also shows a breakdown of Approved vs Undecided hours, the budget per unit, and the percentage or units calculated from those hours.

Non-default nominal account costs

Each proposal item can have staff, equipment and subcontractor/ other costs.

For the subcontractor/ other costs, depending on the setup from your organization, some of these costs might be marked as subcontractor costs (1):

Those are not considered as core nominal account but as a separate one, under subcontractors. It is useful for the project manager to know how much their costs are distributed between those two accounts. That will allow them to more accurately update the project status.

Distinction between nominal accounts can be found under the "Costs" column. © stand for core nominal account and Ⓢ stands for subcontract nominal account. Note that

Colouring of proposal items

Proposal items come in three colours in the status update:

Status update date restrictions

Status updates have strict date validation rules. These constraints are important for project managers to understand, particularly when recording status just before project delivery:

• For lump sum items, the status date must be strictly before the project's delivered date.
• For rate items, the status date must be on or before the project's delivered date.
• Status dates cannot be after a proposal item's closed date.
• Status dates cannot be on or after the project's abandoned date.

Troubleshooting

• No staff resources

Each proposal item can have costs for staff, equipment and subcontractor/ other costs.

The only cost that can be directly linked with working hours of employees is the staff cost.

In case there are recorded hours against a proposal item that does not have staff costs, then Kompass will return a warning.

The exclamation marks at the hours columns below, indicate that proposal item has no hours budget set. A relevant tooltip will appear if you will hover over the exclamation mark. To resolve this, click the affected proposal items (1).

Edit the proposal item and add at least one staff cost in your proposal item. Ensure the price of the proposal item is correct after adding staff costs.

Click Save and go back to the status update of the project.

As seen above, we included one day of CAD Technician and one day of Geospatial Manager per rate. The shift is set on 9.5 hours. Therefore, the 38 total worked hours when the exclamation mark was visible, will turn to 2 rates (9.5 hours for CAD + 9.5 hours for Manager, times 2).

• Exceeding budgets

The automatic rate proposal items have no threshold, manager can keep adding units on the status for as long as the project runs. A lump sum proposal item cannot exceed 100% status. Hours can exceed 100% if the project will overrun but status cannot do so. Kompass will notify you if you will mistakenly attempt to add such a percentage and it will clamp the input to 100%.

Equally, Kompass will notify you if you will attempt to exceed the budgeted rates on a budget rate proposal item. In the example below, you have allowed for 25 units on this proposal item and attempted to add 32 units.

The difference in this case is that Kompass will allow the excessive units but an exclamation mark will notify you that you must issue an updated proposal for your client. WIP will also account for the excessive units.

• Hours shown not matching the hours recorded

A common question from project managers is why the Hours figure shown in the status table does not match the total hours they can see in the project's Hours tab or in employee diary exports. The reason is that the Hours column in the status table shows billable hours only.

What counts as a billable hour?

An hour recorded in the diary counts as billable in the status table when all three of the following are true:

• The Task the hour was logged against has a billable task type.
• The Proposal Item the task belongs to is billable.
• The Project itself is billable (its category is set to billable, and the billing client is not flagged as internal).

If any one of these conditions is not met, the diary hours are recorded normally and will appear in the employee's timesheet and in the project's Hours tab, but they will not be counted in the Hours column on the status update.

Practical example

Suppose a project manager looks at the status for a proposal item and sees:

• Hours tab (all diary entries): 40 hours
• Status table Hours column: 32 hours

The 8-hour difference means that 8 hours were logged against tasks that are not billable. This could happen for several reasons:

What does this mean for your status update?

The status percentage and value are calculated from the billable hours figure, not the total hours. This is by design. The status reflects the billable progress of the project, which is the basis for client valuation and WIP.

If non-billable hours are being recorded intentionally (for example, internal time, admin, or charitable work), this is expected behaviour and the Hours figure in the status table will always be lower than total diary hours.

If the difference is unexpected, for example, hours that should be billable are appearing as non-billable, check the task type, proposal item service, and project category settings listed above.

Seeing the full breakdown

Hovering over the Hours value in the status table shows a tooltip with a detailed breakdown:

• Budget: the hours budget per unit (or for the full proposal item on lump sum items).
• Approved: billable hours that have been approved by a diary approver.
• Undecided: billable hours that have been recorded but not yet approved.
• Total: the combined billable hours (approved + undecided).

Note that this tooltip always shows billable hours in both columns. If you need to see the full total of all hours including non-billable, navigate to the project's Hours tab, which shows all recorded diary entries without the billable filter applied.