Project cost reporting for project managers

A project manager wants to know what their project has spent and what is still unpaid. An accountant does not want to carry ten more analytics codes in the ledger just so somebody else can have a report. Both positions are reasonable, and the standoff almost always ends the same way: a separate spreadsheet somebody fills in by hand from PDF copies of invoices. This article is about resolving that — the project manager gets their numbers, while the accountant's screen and the export to the accounting system stay exactly as they were.

Why analytics codes always start an argument

A project manager needs finer detail: not just the project, but the stage, the client, the site. For the accountant, every new dimension is a field somebody has to fill on every invoice, a value that can be wrong, and one more reason an export can stall. So the answer is usually no — and that is not stubbornness, it is a rational call.

The cost gets paid anyway, just somewhere else. Either the accounting data stays clean and the project manager works blind until month-end, or the ledger fills up with codes nobody maintains and nobody reconciles. The third option — a parallel spreadsheet — is the most expensive of the three, because the same data gets keyed in twice.

A dimension that exists only for the project manager

In Ezura a dimension can be marked as being for project managers only — for analysis. Such a dimension behaves differently from every other one:

• •The person submitting the invoice — the project manager — sees it and fills it in
• •It does not appear on the accountant's invoice page, so no column is added there
• •It never reaches the export to your accounting system, so it is not in the ledger
• •It can never block the accountant from editing or exporting an invoice

The practical consequence is simple: adding one more analytical cut costs the accountant nothing. So the question 'can we add another one?' stops being a negotiation.

What the project manager actually sees

The project manager gets their own page — not the accountant's invoice list with extra filters, but a separate view built around their questions:

• •A summary by the dimension they choose — project, site, cost centre
• •Total net amount, and the overdue amount separately
• •The nearest payment deadline for each value
• •Filters by date — invoice date or due date — and by dimension value
• •The invoice itself one click away, with no need to ask accounting for the PDF

Amounts are shown net of VAT, because what the manager is managing is the cost, not the tax the company will reclaim. And the filter lists offer only the values their own invoices actually carry — not the company's full catalogue, where the project list can run long and only a few entries are theirs.

Exactly what they see depends on their role: their own submissions, or every employee submission if they also review them.

One invoice, two projects

An invoice rarely belongs to a single project. A building-materials supplier puts everything delivered to three sites on one document; office supplies cover the whole company. If an invoice like that lands whole on one line of the report, one project looks more expensive than it is and another looks cheaper.

So the amount is split across the invoice's lines rather than dropped whole onto one project. With a filter active, only the lines that match are counted — the report describes the slice you asked for, not the entire document that happens to contain it.

None of this makes the accountant's job harder

This is the part worth stating plainly. No new column appears on the accountant's invoice page. No new field appears in the export to your accounting system. An empty project-manager dimension cannot stop an edit or an export — even when it is marked as required.

And when such a dimension is required, the invoice goes to the submitter's queue so that the person who knows the answer fills it in. The accountant no longer has to chase anyone to ask which project a cost belongs to; it stops being their job.

When you do not need this

This report is built on invoices that employees and managers submit themselves. If every invoice arrives straight into the accounting inbox and nobody in the company submits anything, the analytics page has nothing to show — self-service comes first, the report second.

It is also not a project profitability tool. It shows spend and payment deadlines, not revenue or margin. If you need a whole project result, this is one side of it, not the full answer.

What to prepare

• •The list of projects, sites or cost centres you actually use day to day
• •An agreement on which cuts belong in the accounts and which stay with the managers
• •An agreement on who submits invoices and who reviews them

You can change your mind later: if a cut turns out to be needed in the accounts after all, the dimension becomes an ordinary one and travels to your accounting system like all the others from then on.

Frequently asked questions

Does the project manager see every invoice in the company? No. They see their own submissions, and — if they have been given the review role — the ones other employees submitted. Invoices that simply arrive in the accounting inbox, submitted by nobody, are not in their view.

Will this dimension end up in Rivile, Odoo or our other system? No. That is the whole point of it — it exists for analysis only.

Does a project manager need a separate licence? They use the same system as any other employee who submits invoices; pricing is based on the number of invoices, not the number of people.