(exciting music) - Hello, everybody. Dan Lisbony here. Today we are going to talk about forecasting in HeavyJob. So a lot of times we have customers that use different tools to do that.
We really want to focus on how to utilize forecasting within HeavyJob itself. The reason we want to do that is because we have good integration pieces with that, and so we can look at some of the HeavyJob data as we do our forecast. We're going to start off in HeavyJob on our dashboard. And I'm just going to move on over to the forecast here and talk about the Forecast dashboard for a second.
On my Forecast dashboard, you can see that I have all of my projects listed. I can filter this list down. So if I needed to use a job tag like me as a project manager, I can do that to get to just my projects. I do have some totals across the top.
Now these are job totals that are focused on, hey, if we perform this forecast, it's gonna calculate those and put this on this sheet. One of the other things here is once I get all my forecasts complete, I can then export this to Excel by clicking the download button. So really cool things there. We'll come back to this as we wrap up, but I want to jump right into the forecast and just show you a little preview on how easy it is to use some of the data that we already have in our time cards in our transactions to help us get to the numbers that we need to get out of our project management hands and into any accounting or financial hands to basically get that work in progress.
So I'm going to click into the Glen Haven Project over here. I'm going to click on the details. It's going to pull up my forecast details. You'll notice at the top I have some totals here.
These totals are showing me my current forecast cost, forecast revenue, and profit. So you'll notice that there is a cost tab up here. And to the right of the cost tab is a revenue tab. We're going to focus on the cost part of this just because it gets a little more detailed as we think about how we want to calculate the final cost on our project.
You'll notice that we have a filter here for our cost codes, reviewed and un-reviewed. And how that relates is as I go through my list of cost codes, I can say, hey, I've reviewed this, and check it off. This will be saved. So if I have to get up and leave and come back, I can say, hey, I just need to look at my un-reviewed items.
So it's a really handy feature here. Ways to do that, maybe a little bit different than maybe what you're doing in your spreadsheets. So just a really good tool to basically say, these are the ones that I've completed. These are the ones that I need to go back and look at.
So now I'm going to go down into my cost codes and I'm going to look for a specific cost code here. And as you can see, I've got some different things on here, but I'm looking for my 24 inch RCP. So as I see it here, you're going see some different things up at the top of the screen. So anything with the header that is in the yellowish color is going to be total cost.
Anything that is in the blue is going to be per unit cost. And the great thing about this screen is there's many more columns that I can choose from, but I have a column chooser here that I can go in and say, I want to include certain values, basically all of my cost types and then different totals, my to date, to complete, at completion, my budget variances, those types of things. So you would need to be able to look at different aspects in different ways, and this is how you filter those out in different views. So just to give you a quick glimpse of that, here's how we look at it with a dollar per unit.
So instead of me selecting all of these, I have created some templates and I'm just going to flip back and forth between a couple of templates and then talk about when and why I might use those. So I'm going to hit this dropdown and if I've already created, I have a total cost template that's here. I'm going to flip over to the unit cost and you'll see that the colors change at the top of the column to let me know, hey, this is a dollar per unit that I'm looking at. And now I want to focus on this furnish and install 24 inch RCP.
You can see that I have a budgeted quantity of 360 feet. My forecasted quantity is 360. So if I need to take that up or down, I would adjust it here. So as you can see, I can click in and make an adjustment.
That will say, hey, to date from what's been completed on time cards or out in the field and been reported on time cards is 140. So now I have a remaining quantity of 220. So the next step is, hey, well what is my cost? So I know my quantities now, and here's my cost.
The total dollar per unit that I am forecasting is $51.78. So I wanna look at a couple of other things here. You can see my budgeted dollars per unit's $53, but maybe I want to see more detail about this particular cost code. So I'm just going to scroll down and say show details.
And now I can see the to date values, previous means since previous forecast, I'm sorry, previous forecast since previous, my budget, my to meet budget. And then it shows me the to date totals to complete and act completion. So I can see some more information here about that cost code. Now I need to start using my project management skills to come up with what am I actually going to complete the remaining 220 linear feet?
What dollar per unit do I think that's going to complete at? So I can use a to date value, I can use my budgeted value if you know a different value. This is where we expect you as a project manager to come into this item and then change that total dollar per unit. So what I'm going to do now, I'm going to go ahead and raise it and I'm gonna say 60, just so we can see this cost at completion go up a little bit.
So as I change that to 60, you're going to see this number go up. You can see it went from $126,000 to $128,000. So it added $2,000 to the cost at completion. So really we want to go through these cost code by cost code, and some of you you may not need to utilize, but if you need to look at those and make those changes, as you make those changes, they're saved.
You can go out of the system, come back in and then finish your un-reviewed cost codes. One of the things to keep in mind is you have this used filter here. And so if you don't want to see any cost codes that maybe you've already completed, you can say filter anything less than 99% complete. And so now I can see none of the a hundred percent complete items, the totally complete items are in this list.
So those are good tools to utilize. So to kind of wrap up, as we go into the forecasting tool, you want to build templates of things that you focus on, total cost, unit cost, go through your items, look at your quantities, either forecast quantities up or down, and then tell us what that dollar per unit or that total dollar is gonna be for that particular cost code. As we do that and we finalize, we can then click on the finalize button in the top right. And the key thing here, one of the things we wanted to focus on is that now that we have new forecasted dollars, we want to share that with our field users.
So there's a button right here that says, make this forecast the active source for performance targets. So now when your foreman goes into their timecard analysis, they no longer see that 51 as the target. They see 60 as the target. So as conditions change, they can now see where they actually need to hit on that dollar per unit.
I will save this now. My forecast is complete. As I go back to the forecast dashboard, we can now look at the Glen Haven Project. The forecast status down here is now finalized.
Now my operations manager or some of my executive team can see that I've completed my forecast for the month, and we can pass that information on to whoever needs it. Click the link in the description below for more information. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music concludes)
