Projects opening balance

A project opening balance represents the financial starting point of a project at the go-live of VOGSY. It includes key financial elements such as:

Beginning Costs are costs that have already been incurred before the start of the current period. These could include initial planning expenses, preliminary designs, or any other costs associated with the project's initiation.

Beginning Revenue: Any revenue generated before the start of VOGSY is included in the opening balance. This occurs if some early deliverables have already been completed and billed. For instance, if early deliverables were billed, the corresponding revenue would be part of the opening balance.

Why is it important?

Accurate Tracking: It provides a clear and precise picture of the project's financial position from the outset.

Budgeting and Forecasting: This helps create realistic budgets and forecasts for the project, as it considers any pre-existing financial commitments or gains.

Performance Measurement: A baseline for measuring the project's financial performance throughout its lifecycle.

VOGSY's Opening Balances feature allows the entry of historical costs and revenue (invoice amounts) for these in-flight projects.

Before you can create the opening balances, some preparation is needed.

Create projects

First, the projects need to be created, for which we need the opening balances. That means creating the projects, deliverables, and calculations with activities and calculated hours. The article about the work breakdown structure (WBS) of projects in VOGSY explains how to set up projects in VOGSY.

Create invoicing schedules

For fixed projects, it's necessary to create the entire invoicing schedule from the start of the project.

Uncheck the checkbox

Each department in VOGSY has a checkbox titled "Opening balances for projects are done." This checkbox needs to be unchecked to enter the opening balances. After all opening balances are entered, this checkbox can be checked.

Ending balances.

The last step of your preparation for entering the opening balances is gathering the data of the ending balances. You need to know the ending balances of the in-fight projects that need to go into VOGSY. How many hours, costs, and expenses have been spent already up until the go-live moment of VOGSY, and how much has been invoiced.

When all projects that need an opening balance are created and all the billing periods are in place, it is time to start populating the opening balances.

Balance items

For each activity in each deliverable, the following data should be entered:

• activity

• amount of hours

• cost rate

• sales rate

Billing periods

There's a checkbox for each billing period, which you can mark as invoiced.

Done

When you're ready to enter the project opening balances, the "Done" button will save and process all the opening balances. This data will now appear in your projects, charts, and reports.

Mistakes happen. Therefore, it's possible to revert an already processed opening balance.

On the left side of the screen, select "Done" from the dropdown menu. This will show you a list of all processed opening balances. You can now select and revert any of them.