Full Sail Partners Blog (48)

Full Sail Partners, a Deltek Premier Partner, announces that Jennifer Wilson has joined the firm as a SQL Developer. Ms. Wilson’s hire bolsters the Full Sail Partners’ team of solution developers. Jennifer will collaborate with clients and key stakeholders to help provide enhanced analytical insight into the information that impacts their business.

Jennifer joins Full Sail Partners with a strong background and acumen of database development and management. She brings with her the experience needed to successfully architect, design and populate business solutions that rely upon complex data sources.

“I enjoy the challenge of translating business processes and concepts into reports and visual aids in order to better assist clients with their analytical needs,” said Jennifer Wilson. “Professional services firms face unique challenges and requirements; I look forward to working with Deltek Vision users to streamline solutions.”

With a decade of experience in programming, reporting, product development and designing process automation, Jennifer’s background will provide valuable expertise to Full Sail Partners' customers in meeting their design, process and system improvement initiatives.

“We are thrilled to have Jennifer join the Full Sail Partners’ development staff,” said Peter Nuffer, Full Sail Partners’ Director of Product Development. “Jennifer brings a lot of energy and enthusiasm to the team. Her approach and work ethic has made the rollout of Deltek Vision custom solutions seamless, helping create a better experience for our customers.”

For more information, please contact Full Sail Partners’ Marketing Communications Department. Interested in learning more about the Full Sail Partners' team? Check out our crew!

Using a third party email suite such as Constant Contact or MailChimp to power your email marketing campaigns is a huge step in the right direction. These types of email suites can greatly improve the productivity of email campaigns, while also providing insight into revenue generated from these efforts. The right technology is essential in achieving marketing goals, but technology is not a silver bullet.  Tech solutions must be accompanied with an effective overall strategy that takes into account systems and processes.

Below is a simple 8-step email marketing guide. Follow this list of do’s (and don’ts!) and start crafting more effective email campaigns!

How to Manage Email Marketing Campaigns in Vision

Looking to capture all of your email marketing campaign data in your Deltek Vision CRM? Not sure where to get started? Vision Marketing Campaigns are the go-to place to manage all of your campaigns!

Full Sail Partners and Planifi announced their recently formed strategic partnership. This alliance brings together Full Sail Partners’ world-class consulting services with Planifi’s industry-leading resource planning software “Project Analyzer” to provide architecture and engineering firms with a better way to manage their resources.

Project Analyzer is a visual resource planning software that enables project managers to quickly schedule, budget and staff projects. This graphic project management tool empowers firms to improve project planning by focusing on predictable and profitable delivery.

“We are excited to introduce Project Analyzer to our clients,” said Scott Seal, Full Sail Partners’ Vice President of Consulting. “We believe that Project Analyzer aligns with our core principals of helping professional services firms improve their business processes. Our clients will benefit from the increased visibility needed to make informed decisions around firm staffing, performance and revenue forecasts.”

Additionally, Michael Kessler, Principal Consultant at Full Sail Partners who successfully helps firms implement and utilize resource planning said, "I am looking forward to offering a powerful new planning solution to our customers. The reporting capabilities of Project Analyzer have been on my clients’ wish list for years."

This partnership will focus on enabling architecture and engineering firms to center their business on the project performance analytics that support better decision making by project managers and firm executives.

“This is a big day for Planifi,” said Tom Vandervort, Planifi founder. “This partnership will enable a whole new group of architecture and engineering firms to choose Planifi for their resource planning needs. Customers will benefit from the ability to select the solution that best works for them, all guided by Full Sail Partners’ expertise. Planifi customers will also benefit; as we are now able to offer enhanced consulting capabilities and solutions to our customers through Full Sail Partners.”

Most firms that I work with utilize independent contractors to supplement their workforce. This isn’t a blog about “walks and talks like an employee, must be an employee.” For that, I recommend a good labor attorney. However, what I am going to clue you in on is about the proper way to track and account for independent contractor’s time in Deltek Vision.

Processing Contractor Time in Deltek Vision

In most situations, the desire is for the contractor to complete a timesheet and submit an invoice for processing by Accounts Payable (AP). There are two prevailing methods within Deltek Vision to process these types of situations:

1. Zero Job Cost Rate

The contractor is set up as an employee, but doesn’t have a job cost rate only a billing rate. When time is posted there is no entry to the General Ledger (GL), but both the Time and Materials (T&M) invoice and project ledger reflect a billing dollar value. As a result, the AP invoice creates the GL entry reflective of the true cost of the contactors time

2. Job Cost Variance

For this option, setup the contractor as an employee with a job cost rate. When the timesheet posts, the cost gets booked to a unique GL code reflective of contract labor. Additionally, this cost can also be included in the base for an overhead calculation. The credit end of the timesheet posting goes to Job Cost Variance similar to all other timesheets. As a result, the AP invoice is booked to an overhead project using the Job Cost Variance Account and thereby clearing it.

That Seems Simple…Right?

This is where the accounting can start to go awry. If method one is used and care isn’t taken to ensure the AP doesn’t also create a bill extension (effort) then the potential for exposure can be:

1. Double counting of effort in project reporting leading to an understatement of profit or positive variance.
2. Double earnings of revenue if the method is associated to effort.

To alleviate these concerns, apply the following workaround in Deltek Vision:

1. Create an expense GL code table under Billing/Billing Rate Tables.
2. Enter the AP GL code used above and attach a “0” multiplier.

By following these steps, the AP billing value will not be included in project reporting and you will not experience the effects of doubling down on your effort.

Last week while attending a conference I had the chance to talk to dozens of Deltek Vision CRM users. These advanced users wanted to discuss everything from user adoption to InDesign integrations with custom proposals. I was stoked, these Vision rock stars were making my job easy. However, very few of these users said that they use Deltek Vision Marketing Campaigns. WHAT?! I couldn't believe this:  How are all of these marketers surviving without utilizing Marketing Campaigns? Marketing Campaigns are the lifeblood of my marketing efforts!

So when I got back to my room I quickly did a google search, "Deltek Vision Marketing Campaigns". Results were limited. Well… what better place to get the conversation started than this blog?

Let’s jump right in!

What are Deltek Vision Marketing Campaigns?

Any marketing effort can be created in to a Marketing Campaign. From client mailers to sponsoring a trade association event - these efforts are all marketing campaign worthy!

Think of Vision Marketing Campaigns as the central repository for all of your marketing intelligence. Campaigns enable you to:

• Document pertinent campaign information ranging from critical dates to revenue targets
• Track lead and customer involvement with your promotion
• Assign activities to team members or document interactions with contacts
• Organize document and track critical event specific tasks
• Store campaign documents and graphics
• Schedule contact follow-ups with members of your organization

Looking for a way to track your marketing pipeline and track your customer lifecycle? Associate leads, opportunities and projects to your Marketing Campaigns to better understand the value of your marketing efforts.

3 Examples of Marketing Campaigns for Professional Services Firms.

The targeted list | Let’s say you want to go after a targeted list of municipalities to target in an upcoming content marketing effort. Utilize Vision’s advanced search functionality to drill down in your CRM system to identify the pertinent contacts for your campaign. Track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts among this group. Doing so will allow you to refine your messaging over time and identify opportunities generated from your efforts.

Throw a world class client appreciation event | Building on top of the previous example, why don’t we target our top clients and throw a special event for them? It can often be crazy to plan this type of event – You’ll constantly wonder if your staff has followed up with their clients, and your staff will constantly wonder if their clients have responded. Eliminate all the unneeded confusion by creating a central information hub for your event! By creating a Marketing Campaign for this type of effort we are able to track our labor and expenses tied to the event.

Become a conference super star | Do you ever wonder what to do with all of those business cards you collect at conferences and networking events? Enter these contacts directly in to your Deltek Vision Marketing Campaign. Enroll these contacts in a lead nurturing campaign to start creating further interest among this group.

Pro tip: If you create your marketing campaign before the conference, you can start with a leg up on the competition and start reaching out to attendees in advance. Schedule meetings, send out a pre-event email and start creating a game plan before the conference begins!

Ready to Learn More?

Now that you are familiar with the basics of Deltek Vision Marketing Campaigns, it’s time to go out and start equating more value to your marketing efforts! I hope by utilizing these campaigns you are able to concentrate on the efforts that move the needle for your professional services company.

Interested in learning more? Register for our webinar The 411: Deltek Vision Marketing Campaigns.

Employee engagement is currently a hot topic in the realm of Human Resources. As a result, the enterprise software industry has responded and created a plethora of solutions to address this growing demand. The era of Talent Management Systems is upon us, and these systems are becoming a vital role in supporting business growth and increasing employee productivity.

Talent Management Systems enable the automation of the recruitment process, performance monitoring, and implementing employee training and development. Additionally, they also enable the performance tracking of your Human Resources department. So how can your firm benefit by implementing a Talent Management System?

Click the infograph below to download the whitepaper on the "Top 10 Recruiting Metrics HR Should Care About." 

Did you know you can quickly update data in seconds with Deltek Vision’s Search & Replace feature? The search and replace utility makes it possible for you to update fields globally for multiple records. Some examples of using the search and replace utility might be:

• Making project records dormant on all levels
• Inactivating contacts that have bounced emails 
• Moving data from one field to another

The possibilities are endless and great for data clean-up. Be sure to check out our video demonstrating an example of using the Search and Replace Utility in Deltek Vision.

Ready to learn about the much-anticipated release of Deltek Vision 7.5? With each new version of Vision, Deltek strives to include new features and enhancements to help your firm know more to do more! Let’s take a look and see what’s new with Deltek’s newest version of Vision.

Deltek Vision 7.5 Features and Enhancements:

• Focus to Client Nurturing | The new Client Activity Status Report allows users to quickly and visually identify clients that need attention. Add a touch of color! The new feature allows you to highlight your activities by color to easily identify clients that need follow-up.
• Proposals Made Easier | Sometimes it’s the small things that make a big impact. Deltek has made the proposal process easier. The improved proposal module allows users to apply the selection criteria to all projects and employees at the same time. Users can also choose default graphics and have an easy-to-select graphic option. Even more, users can select project experience based on actual hours worked and merge service estimates totals. Lastly, InDesign users now have the ability to display multiple records on one page. All of these little enhancements save time during the proposal creation process.
• Newly Created Asset Management Module | Now all of your fixed assets are in one place to increase tracking and decision-making. The New Vision Asset Management Module is integrated with the purchasing and accounting functions within Vision to enable you to create, track, manage, depreciate, and dispose of your fixed assets in one central location. Be sure to inquire about Q1 2016 incentives.
• Manage Employees with Ease Across Multiple Companies | Vision Multi-Company just got way better! In 7.5, Multi-Company Employees can be associated with more than one company with a designated “home” company. More importantly, employee specific data carries over to each company allowing for company-specific and system-wide reporting. Find out more about the new Multi-company features here.  
• Approvals Simplified | Stop with the endless email chains full of approval requests. In the version of Vision, absence requests and accounts payable invoices can be approved by designing simple or complex workflows to automate the approval process.
• Better Forecast Revenue and Expenses | In Vision 7.5, the general ledger (GL) enhancements allow users to consolidate budgeting into a single view allowing for better insight into your business. This new functionality allows you to create, manage, review, edit, and approve multiple GL budgets from a single view. Learn more about these enhancements here.
• Save Time Reconciling Bank Statements | In this latest version of Vision, users can import bank statements, automatically match records, and review records to manually match any remaining transactions.
• Smarter Project Planning | Building on the power of task dependencies in 7.4, project managers now can effectively manage project schedules and closely track a project’s critical path and identify schedule risks. Additionally, color-coded predecessor tasks, expanded right-click functionality, and better integration with iAccess are just a few highlights to enable your project managers to make smarter decisions.
• Keep Up with Project & Business Development On-The-Go | Obtaining the information you need on-the-go just got better. iAccess 2.2 enhancements now provides users the ability to create saved custom searches on any field, including custom fields. With an improved interface and screen designer settings enhancements, iAccess is becoming the go-to tool to access project metrics and business development updates anywhere at any time.
• Improved Touch Capabilities | Deltek Touch now supports iPhones & iPads with iOS 8+, Android Phones and Tablets with OS 4.1+, and Windows Phones with OS 8.1. Building upon timesheet and expense capabilities, users now have timesheet auditing available on their mobile devices.
• Much More | Deltek Vision 7.5 provides even more enhancements for accounting and project management with greater connectivity and better user interfaces.

Have questions about the newest enhancements and features included in Deltek Vision 7.5, or looking for information on how to upgrade to 7.5? Reach out to us, and we will be happy to help you get a grasp on all of the new functionality available to your firm!

 

You know you have spent your whole workweek devoted to a specific project, but you’re only showing 35 hours being billed/charged to the project. Where did the value of those 5 hours go? In many cases, these missing hours can be attributed to non-billable labor, and many AEC firms overlook the importance of documenting how this time is spent. However, accurately accounting for non-billable labor is extremely important to track accurate project performance.

How Can My AEC Firm Track Non-billable Labor?

If your AEC firm utilizes Deltek Vision, then tracking non-billable labor is relatively simple. Before we get started, it is important to make a distinction between the labor we are billing clients and the labor that contributes to the cost of our project. With cost in this case being the “burn” or “retail” value of this labor. Within Vision, users are able to remove the labor from both the invoice and the project ledger in two ways:

1. A non-billable labor code under billing configuration
2. A zero billing rate attached to a person, code or category in the billing tables

Keep in mind that best practice states that the only time we would use either of the above is if the labor is invoiced and costed through a Unit for activities such as surveying or lab testing.

What Are Reasons for Non-billable Labor?

There are several possible scenarios that would warrant not invoicing a client for time charged to a project such as:

1. On-the-job training
2. Rework
3. Discounts

While all of these are valid reasons, the costs associated with this effort should be included in the project sub ledger. This is missed opportunity cost or potential lost revenue. If labor cost is nullified using any of the above, the true performance of the project becomes misstated. When reviewing project financial reports the missing cost is not there to net against revenue thereby creating a false and overstated profit amount.

What Happens to Non-billable Labor?

Ah ha, the Million Dollar question and you won’t even need to phone a friend. There are actually at least two ways to accomplish removing time from an invoice while ensuring it remains as cost for project metric measurement:

1. Write-off the hours/cost in Interactive Billing. This removes it from the invoice, but appears on the billing status in the Project Detail Report. This allows missed opportunity cost to be valued into the overall project profitability or more commonly known as a loss.
2. Allow the labor hours/cost to be included on the invoice. Then using an Add-On, create a discount to remove the amount. This will provide your client with the visibility of the benefit you are providing them. Additionally, it will ultimately be reflected accurately in project reporting since the overall impact is a reduction in revenue.

Following these simple rules will create accurate reporting and prevent any misunderstanding in regards to the projects true performance.

Sometimes it’s the simple things in life that excite me, but the improvements to the Multi-company feature in Deltek Vision 7.5 are exciting. If you’re not familiar with Vision Multi-company, let me provide you some background and here’s a link for more information. Multi-company is part of the Vision Core Financial Application. Vision Multi-company allows a firm to manage more than one company in a single database and streamlines the process of managing accounting functions between companies when resources are shared. By utilizing Multi-company, each company operates as a separate entity, but data sources such as clients and contacts can be shared across the enterprise.

However, employee data was managed differently in prior versions of Vision. If an employee belonged to one company and moved to another company, a new employee record with a unique employee number would need to be created and assigned to each company the employee was associated with. This made record keeping and reporting cumbersome and time consuming. The good news is that with version 7.5 this is no longer the case!

What Changed in Deltek Vision 7.5?

In version 7.5, a single employee record can now be associated with multiple companies. As a result, associating an employee record to other companies in the enterprise is now easier with the addition of the “Associate with New Company” option in “New” dropdown on the toolbar of the employee info center.

How Does This Work?

When a new employee record is created, the employee is assigned to a home company, which is the current active company. You can then associate the employee record with other companies. There are a number of fields in the employee record that are company specific and can be modified on a company-by-company basis. For example, an employee may have a different cost rate, pay rate or may accrue PTO hours at a different rate in each company. Additionally, you can change the home company and the status of an employee if they transfer to a new company and terminate in another.

There are also fields that are non-company specific such as the employee’s name, licenses, experience, and resumes – just to name a few. Therefore, this information is shared across all companies and can be used by the CRM and Proposal functions within Vision.

Even more, a list of companies the employee is associated will display after an employee’s user name and password is entered. The employee can then select the company they will be working in at the time of log in. If an employee is associated with more than one company, timesheet and expense reports can be processed for the active company. If an employee needs to complete a timesheet and expense report for another company, they can switch between companies under Utilities by selecting “Change Company.”

Why Is This So Great?

Aside from the additional functionality of Multi-company, employee reporting is now easier in version 7.5. Prior to Employee Multi-company, reports for one employee would have to be run by selecting all of a single employee’s records across the enterprise. This is no longer the case in version 7.5. In addition to running reports for an employee in a single company, like the accrued time report or time analysis report, an employee record for multiple companies can also be selected. When sorted by company, the data can be displayed on the report by company. Furthermore, Deltek also added additional operator filters to reporting to reduce customization for unique reporting needs.

Sometimes just making life simpler is exciting and the new features in Vision 7.5 are designed to increase productivity and make your life simpler! This just happens to be one of my favorites.