Mavenlink Now Supports Fixed Fee Billing and Master Planning

Mavenlink online project management distinguishes itself by offering features that go beyond managing projects. Aside from its advanced PM tools, it also has financial and resource management features that are usually available only with expensive and sophisticated management systems. With its mission to level the playing field by providing enterprise-grade growth management software to all, the new features reflect added capabilities to help service businesses manage their billing and resource issues.

Fixed Fee Billing

Before, Mavenlink users can track project costs on a time and materials (T&M) basis only. Although fixed fee items can be billed, it is possible only as additional items. Now, users can choose how to bill their clients, whether by time and materials or by fixed fee. They can even blend the two together, so that some components of the project are billed T&M and some components are on a fixed fee basis. There are cases that the billing of a project comes under negotiation after the project has started. With this new feature, users can create several types of billing in advance and still come out profitable.

Now, when a new project is created, the user is asked what type of billing will be used. For existing projects before this feature was released, the default is T&M, and the choices for billing will only affect new tasks created. However, more controls are provided for new tasks, deliverables or milestones. Regardless of the default billing type selected, a project task, for instance, can be billed as T&M or fixed fee, thus the blended options. Another application for this would be the ability to track time on tasks even if billed as fixed fee. This can provide project expense information and other costing data that may be useful in future quotes or projects.

Master Planning

Resource management through personnel planning is another great feature of Mavenlink online project management. Knowing which staff can work at what particular date and for how long on a project is essential information to be able to deliver projects successfully and keep clients happy. Sometimes, not being able to see the bigger picture creates over or under allocation of resources. A Master Plan of resources across all projects will provide the all-important visibility to match project schedules with the resources’ schedules. Master Planning automatically gets every team member and their actual task allocation on specific dates.

Staffing resources to projects is easier just by adding each member to a list of projects found under each name. Hours for the week can be entered quickly, and with an under and over number-of-hours setting, the software can automatically highlight anyone who falls in those ranges. Thus, over or under allocation can easily be seen. As the project manager completes a particular plan with tasks, milestones, deliverables, and the associated resources and hours per project, the Master Plan is also automatically updated. An important practice in completing the Master Plan is to have Admin privileges to be able to have access to all projects.

Ready for Growth

Mavenlink online project management software still has many plans for advanced financial and resource management features. In the pipeline, for example, is having a new project-centric view of the Master Plan instead of this people-centric view. Aside from having a choice of billing in one invoice, it is now possible also to combine multiple client projects in one invoice or modify the terms of a project with one click through an integrated change order system. Know more about Mavenlink through their social pages: Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.

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