We have a big release out this week. The headline is our new Business level forecasting feature. We also have new items in project budgets and a forecast report, plus updates to projects and accounting add-ons.
New — Forecasting
Forecasting is the process of making an educated guess about the future health of your business. Directors, practice managers and project managers need to answer two important questions:
- Will I have enough revenue to run my business and pay my staff?
- Will I have enough capacity to service the projects I expect to win?
Synergy’s Business level forecasting feature helps answer both of these questions. It allows you to see an estimate of revenue and an estimate of your team’s capacity by role. And it all comes together in a beautiful drag-and-drop Gantt chart with a visual graph, dynamically showing whether you’re over or under capacity and/or revenue at a glance.
The Business level of forecasting estimates how many staff you need per project using the primary staff rates for each staff member (e.g. director, project manager, architect, etc). Each project has a likelihood percentage which weights the revenue in the reports and graph — 100 percent likelihood for confirmed projects, and an adjustable percentage likelihood for project opportunities — all of which combines to help you estimate whether you are making more money than the cost of your team and if you have enough people for the work.
Forecasting is currently out as a preview release — this effectively means we’re still looking for any final issues to resolve by testing it live.
Read more about forecasting on the website or login to Synergy to read the help files to find out how to use it fully.
New — Project budgets
When you create a new project, an automatic budget is created by the project forecast. The automatic budget is a great way to get your project budget started.
You can switch to custom budget mode to add more detail to your budget and define the staff required for the project and the expense estimates for each stage.
Login to Synergy to find out more about project budgets in the help files.
New — Forecast report
Synergy lets you report on everything. (Well, almost everything.) And now you can download a report for forecasts. We’ve made the forecast report simple by adding a button to download the forecast report from the forecast screen. The report is summary of all the projects with a forecast downloaded to Excel.
The report lets you review the estimated forecast value per month for all the projects in your organisation. Use the Excel report to add filters and grouping.
New — Refer a friend
Do you absolutely LOVE Synergy and desperately want to refer it to a friend of colleague? Now we’ve made that simple by adding a refer a friend link in your profile menu. This lets you add your friend of colleagues details to a form so our customer success team can get in touch to show them Synergy for their business and projects.
Updates
We’re continually working on updating Synergy. Below is a summary of the updates in this release.
Project status settings
Proposal status options now include a proposal likelihood percentage used when forecasting.
QuickBooks Online (QBO) add-on
Improved QBO sync process and updates to default accounting add-on settings.
MYOB add-on
Improved MYOB sync process. Use filters to control what data is exported.
Xero add-on
Support added for long project names synced as inventory items.
Project changes
Various changes to project numbers, project contacts and project invoices.
Transmittals
Additional transmittal delivery option to download the ZIP package.
