You may remember me mentioning Project Management in last month's newsletter. Well it has been suggested that we go into this topic a little further… Pearl Project Management enables effective organisation and prioritisation of workload to a greater level than that of our Event Management.

Structure
Projects are the top-level entity, within which are jobs. All jobs within a project must be completed before the project can be closed. Likewise, you can nest jobs so that certain jobs are completed before others. For example, the project 'Summer Brochure' may contain the jobs 'design layout', 'get client approval' and 'send to printers'. Obviously these jobs need to be completed in a certain order. If different people are responsible for each job, they will get a notification when the previous job is complete so they can start their job.

People
Each project requires a project manager. You can add further people to a project if they are required to do a job or so that they receive notifications (via email or text message) on any progress. Once you have added people to the project, you need to define their level of access. For example, are they an administrator i.e. involved in completing jobs for the project, or are they a manager who will only receive notifications on progress? You can also add clients to a project to keep them informed of progress and enable them to give their feedback on the project.

Costs and Revenues
Adding products (billable items) to a project is useful if you are charging for time spent on the project. A typical billable product may be "labour", or "design". Adding a billable product to a job will allow you to raise an invoice automatically from the job based on the time spent on that job or for the total time budget of the project. If you are using Pearl accounting, then you can see a detailed breakdown of costs and revenues associated with projects. This is due to the fact that every accounting entry can be assigned to a project. The project summary screen will then show a breakdown of the quoted, upcoming and invoiced revenues against the costs for a project profit overview.

Notes and files
Notes can be added to the project itself, or to jobs within a project. Notes can be private (staff only) or public (viewable by the client on your Pearl web portal). With the appropriate permissions, your client can add notes using this online area. Files can be uploaded to job notes or project notes. If the note has been set to "public" then the file will also be available for the project members to download/view online using your project web portal. If we go back to the previous example, the job 'get client approval' is due. The administrator can add a public note to the project asking for design approval; he then attaches a file containing the designs the note. An email/SMS notification is sent to the client that his designs are ready to view. The client can view the note and file online via the web portal and add his own note on whether he approves the designs or not.

Project web portal
The project web portal is an area within your Pearl Website that is used for collaboration. The portal design and branding is totally configurable since it is part of the larger Pearl website system and gives your clients/subcontractors etc. access to designated parts of a project. They can view any notes and files set to 'public' and can also add notes and files to the project.

For further information on Pearl Project Management please contact us. We have also recently enabled this on the public demo, so feel free to browse around these new features. If there is any part of Pearl that you would like featured in our newsletter tips, please let us know. As always, your feedback is appreciated.

Recent Pearl Developments

• PDF invoices are now available with PearlMail.
• We have now implemented our online helpdesk function via our website. If you have any support queries, please log into our website to complete a support ticket. Any of our support analysts can claim your ticket, enabling us to deal with your query quickly and efficiently.
• Auto-complete for accounting codes is now available. Simply type in part of the nominal code you require to bring up relevant options
• When correcting an accounting entry, you now have to put in a reason for the change. Pearl will also remember the old entry, for a more accurate audit trail.