How Prime Digital tracks their projects and budgets in real-time

Prime Digital is an agency offering and developing full solutions in the areas of web development, public relations, advertising, corporate publishing, and branding. Their team consists primarily of communication specialists and developers located in Zurich, Switzerland.

We were very happy to be able to have a chat with Christian Paredes, CEO, and learn more about how they use Tempo Budgets and Timesheets by Tempo on top of Jira for both their communications and development teams.

Discover how they tried other tools, even attempting making their own, but eventually found the perfect cominbation through the combined power of Timesheets and Budgets.

All information in this case study was accurate as of date of publishing on June 1st, 2016.

The search for a project portfolio management solution for Jira

Prime Digital is using Tempo Budgets for project and portfolio management, simple costs management, and team budget management.

Paredes, the portfolio manager, and project managers are primary users of the tool, which is used to track the costs for development, marketing, and sales. They went through an extensive search for a budgeting add-on for Jira and tested out many options before deciding on Tempo Budgets.

Challenges

Prior to implementing Tempo Budgets, Paredes had no control over real-time costs of projects across the organization. Cost tracking was a tedious task, which consisted of many spreadsheets and exporting a lot of time sheets.

They were primarily using Excel for their financial project portfolio management and tried out many add-ons for Jira, but none of them fulfilled their expectations. They even attempted to develop their own reporting tool, but it ended up being too costly and inflexible.

Prime Digital either were having to waste their valuable employees time on data-entry tasks (which also run the risk of error, even when just copy and pasting) or burn time and money testing and trying dozens of different tools to solve the issue. Something had to solve their tracking troubles soon, and thankfully, it came along.

They found Tempo Budgets and are now able to track every single project within their organization.

Benefits

Paredes and the other Tempo Budgets users at Prime Digital now have an accurate financial overview, including costs and revenues, of the organization in real-time.

Paredes said: "Tempo Budgets is the best available tool for Jira, besides Timesheets.”

They are able to track the efficiency of their resources by creating folios and sync them with worklogs from Timesheets, so they have an accurate depiction of the costs of their operations. Paredes says that Timesheets cannot be replaced by any other tool; it offers nice reporting and is easy to use.

Budget tracking made easy

Prime Digital’s accounting department enters expenses and external invoices, while the account management enters planned costs according to the offer made to the customer. Project managers track the actual costs of services and development, then group folios into portfolios to track account management and project management responsibilities.

Using Tempo Budgets allows project managers to provide an overview of the current state of their projects to management, including both planned versus actual revenues and costs.

Paredes and the team finds the flexible reporting capabilities to be very handy to do just that and Paredes loves that he can get granular information, including being able to visualize the cost rates and prices for each person and project.

Increasing cost efficiency

Apart from having a smoother tracking process, Prime Digital has also drastically reduced the number of projects that result in a negative income, simply by using the forecasting capabilities built within Tempo Budgets. They can now anticipate ahead of time if a project is behind schedule or over budget and make changes before it’s too late.

This leads to a direct impact on their customer satisfaction. If they know in advance that something is not going as planned, they are able to inform the client beforehand and give them clearer estimations of the project end date as well as the overall end cost.

Using Tempo Budgets combined with Timesheets has enabled Prime Digital to become much more efficient with their resources. They now know exactly where their time goes and what money is spent on, and not they are earning more from all their projects.