Unit Tracking and Forecasting
Unit Tracking and Forecasting at a glance
It’s designed for contract research organizations. Often it’s used by project managers, project analysts and finance managers who use Certinia. PMs denote units completed and update forecasts based on trial progression in the project unit tracker. FMs approve units for billing to sponsors.
If a CRO is using individual spreadsheets to track units completed, it can get complicated for global multi-year trials. It takes valuable time for project managers and finance teams to determine what’s been completed and what’s left to deliver. It’s also prone to errors. With the project unit tracker, teams will save time and gain accuracy.
Nope! It’s primarily used to track units. However, it’s all tied together behind the scenes to the budgets, tasks, resource requests, revenue transaction lines, and more.
Because units are associated with the underlying roles, rates, and hours required for each unit, when you update a unit, it is automatically updating related records to support:
- project cost reporting
- resource management and demand planning,
- billing
- revenue recognition processes.
Scroll down to see all that it can do.
Like most of our components, this component requires Salesforce. It’s also designed to work with Certinia (formerly FinancialForce) PSA. It works best with PSA Projects, although with some modifications, it could be modified to work without PSA if your organization does not use Certinia.
Features
- Initial data populated directly from the bid workbook
- Inline editing with spreadsheet-like tools — Spread Remaining, Default Actuals, time period locks
- PM, lead, and PA review workflow built in — units approved by the PA automatically create billing milestones
- Switch between units, revenue, or cost view
- Pass-through costs and grants tracked in the same period-by-period view as services
- Internal and customer-facing notes per unit — customer comments flow directly into sponsor reports
Smart Unit Tracking
The unit forecast drives the expected hours calculation that feeds directly into overburn/underburn reporting
- Units are associated with the underlying roles, rates, and hours required for each unit
- Unit forecasts drive resource demand, so staffing needs are visible across the full project timeline
- Unit forecasts feed directly into cost-based percent complete revenue recognition
- Units approved by the PA automatically create billing milestones — no manual re-entry into a separate billing system
- The Costs tab tracks pass-throughs and grants with the same period-by-period view as services
