Project managers live in the field. You know what's happening on the ground. What you need is quick access to the numbers that tell you whether that project is tracking to profit—no hunting through reports, no waiting for accounting. Just clear, fast answers to the questions that actually matter.
In our latest Showcase Demo, Cindy Cates and Bryce Crosby walked through exactly how to do this in Deltek Vantagepoint. They showed how to configure your login to surface the numbers you actually need, and how to dig deeper when the situation calls for it. Let's check out a high-level summary of what they covered:
The moment you log in, you should see what matters. Most project managers default to their timesheet or a generic welcome screen. Cindy's recommendation? Choose a dashboard instead.
Dashboards surface the end result of all the work flowing into Vantagepoint—you see the outcome without digging through menus. A well-configured project manager dashboard shows milestones ahead, project profitability, status against budget, backlog and unbilled revenue, AR aging, unposted labor, and recent receipts. Speed is critical when you've got other things to do.
The power here is flexibility. You configure the dashboard to your role. You can set it to show only projects where you're the PM—so you log in, get your numbers, and move on.
Once your dashboard is set, contracts and milestones become your planning tools.
Contracts hold the big picture. They capture what you've won, what you're chasing, and what's approved and signed. When you set up a contract in Vantagepoint, you define its status (awarded, in negotiation, approved) and attach the contract dollar amount. This amount becomes your baseline for everything that follows.
Milestones live inside each contract. They mark the gates: when phases are due, when deliverables land, when invoicing milestones trigger. If your firm operates on phase gates or milestone billing, you set these up once and use them to track progress throughout the project.
The value is straightforward: you know what you committed to deliver, when it's due, and what the contract is worth. Everything else in the system flows from that foundation.
Dashboards give you the quick read. The Project Hub in Vantagepoint lets you go deeper when you need detail and where you can see the full financial picture for a single project:
In Vantagepoint, you don't customize reports by writing queries or hiring someone to build from scratch. You take a provided report and modify it to fit your needs.
What can you change?
Once you set up a report the way you want it, save it for yourself or (depending on your security role) for your whole team. Most administrators create favorite reports for each role, so they run automatically with only relevant data.
Some of the most useful reports for project managers:
Here's what matters: Vantagepoint is configurable. That means you can set it up in a way that works for your firm.
For project managers, that's huge. You're the ones entering timesheets, reviewing costs, watching milestones, and accountable for whether a project stays profitable. The system should work for you, not the other way around.
Vantagepoint lets you configure dashboards to your role, modify reports without building from scratch, set up contracts and milestones that fit your process, and control what data people see based on their security role.
One more insight from Cindy: project profitability starts with good data. If your timesheets are accurate, your expenses coded to the right projects, and your contracts set up with realistic budgets—then your dashboards and reports tell you the truth. And that's what keeps projects on track.
Vantagepoint's dashboards, hub screens, and reporting tools give you the visibility you need. Configure them right, and you log in to exactly what you need.
To hear more detail on what Cindy and Bryce covered—including questions from attendees—watch the Showcase Demo recording.