Best Practices

You should start tracking the cost of COVID

Anterra provides Business Intelligence and reporting for Construction and Real Estate companies.  We are helping our clients determine the best practice to track the cost of the COVID outbreak.  There are several reasons you want to isolate these costs (no pun intended).

  1. If there is a government relief program you can identify costs and get your application in early
  2. You are ready for an audit if you get program money
  3. You can report on your net income excluding the direct costs, then show COVID costs as an adjustment to net income for your board / bank / owners
  4. You can measure the cost impact objectively, the revenue and gross margin impacts are more subjective

Methods to track COVID Costs:

  1. Set up a COVID job in Job Cost. You can set up one-time cost codes for
    1. Management time
    2. Meeting time
    3. Turn away time – record staff time that are unable to work on a job site due to closure or if a service technician goes to inspect / repair a customer location and it is closed
    4. COVID Idle time – staff unable to work
    5. Doctor / hospital appointments
    6. COVID testing time
    7. Paid sick time
    8. Protective gear
    9. Facility cleaning
    10. Facility cleaning supplies
    11. Other COVID Costs
  2. Set up GL Accounts for COVID Expenses

GL accounts can be used for direct and indirect costs associated with the virus and lockdown

  1. Salary Idle time (if not job costed in 1d above)
  2. Office / warehouse rent for idle facilities
  3. Health insurance costs for furloughed employees
  4. Other benefit costs

Please let us know if we can help you with improved reporting, we will continue to send out best practice updates based on what we are seeing in our broad base of customers.

We wish you and your family continued good health and success.

Regards,

Bruce Vanderzyde, CPA, CA
President
Direct (832) 342 1575
moc.h1586263523cetar1586263523retna1586263523@edyz1586263523redna1586263523vb1586263523
www.anterratech.com

See our AR Collection Management Tool at https://anterratech.com/arcollectionmgmt

By |March 25th, 2020|Best Practices, Blog Post|0 Comments
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Anterra releases Financial Ratio /Covenant Management

Anterra’s latest version includes an exciting new feature – financial ratio management. You can now build a financial ratio graph with any financial ratio and its covenant to see your performance over time. When you click on a graph you drill down to the calculation components, drilling on any component takes you to the underlying transactions.

Click on this image to see a 2 minute video on how financial ratios work in Anterra

 

 

For more information, call us at (832) 539 1400 and press 1 for information or fill out our contact us form form for more information.

By |July 27th, 2018|Best Practices, BI/Reporting, Blog Post, Construction, Real Estate Development, Real Estate Owner, Specialty Contractor|0 Comments
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TechRepublic is a great resource for Construction and Real Estate IT Managers to keep up with technology

We work with construction and real estate companies every day to improve their reporting and provide an over-arching reporting system.   I’ve talked to many IT managers about their technology and what resources they use to stay on top of ever changing technology.  Several of them mention TechRepublic.  It’s a site I scan every day and often find reviews of new hardware and software along with IT trends and best practices.

As an example here are some topics from today’s home page that would help construction and real estate IT managers and directors keep up with technology changes:

By |February 6th, 2013|Best Practices, BI/Reporting, Construction|0 Comments
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Financial Consolidations Across 2 Accounting Systems Without Excel

Many companies end up with more than one accounting system. It happens all the time – you acquire another company, merge with another company or end up with a division that is in different line of business that needs a different accounting system to function. Examples we see include:

A) Acquisitions or mergers that lead to 2 similar core systems
Construction companies end up a combination of Timberline Office, ViewPoint Software, Dexter Chaney, Sage Master Builder, etc.  Real Estate companies end up with a combination of Yardi Software, MRI Software, RealPage or Timberline.  Depending on the sizes of each company / division on each system converting to one of the systems is expensive, time consuming and results in huge productivity losses with historical data gone and people taking time to learn the new system.

B) Companies with subsidiaries in different businesses:

By |January 22nd, 2013|Best Practices, BI/Reporting, Construction, Real Estate Development, Real Estate Owner|0 Comments
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Anterra FREE best practices guide for improving construction reporting

Anterra has published a free best practices guide for improving construction reporting.

This guide is intended to help CFO’s, Controllers and IT managers look at their reporting in 5 key areas.

  1. Report design improvement
  2. Data Quality
  3. Reducing the use of Excel as a reporting tool
  4. Using dashboards to quickly convey information
  5. Mobile availability of reports

This guide is free and can be downloaded by clicking here.

By |January 21st, 2013|Best Practices, Construction|0 Comments
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Good Reporting Breaks Down Walls Between Finance and Project Management Teams

Anterra’s growth is built on our customers’ success using our software.  As we prepare a for a big marketing campaign we are interviewing our clients to see how we have helped them and what impact Business Intelligence has had on their organization.  We’re seeing clients bring up a benefit we never anticipated – closer teamwork between the finance/accounting and project management groups.

By |October 27th, 2012|Best Practices, Blog Post|0 Comments
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Top 5 Construction and Real Estate Report Design Best Practices

We wrote a blog article a few weeks ago about reporting worst practices to help you evaluate current reports, the purpose of this post is to provide guidance when you are starting a new report.

1.  Report purpose is immediately obvious, important information leaps off the page

When we work with clients on business intelligence we review reports currently in use.  In many cases reports are “dumps” of information and the reader then has to wade through hundreds of numbers per page to find important information.  One of the key performance indicators of a report is how many numbers you are putting on a page – simply multiply the number of columns by the average number of rows per page.  For example a 8.5 x 14 report with 15 columns and 30 rows has 450 numbers per page.  Consider reducing the number of columns to make the report easier to read.  Also consider the purpose of the report and use red / yellow / green indicators or a bold font on the key column to make the most information leap off the page.

2.  Intuitive sorting, possible multiple sorts

When you design a report think about how the reader will look for information.  Would they know job numbers if there are hundreds of active jobs or would they know unit numbers if there are hundreds of tenants in a property?  If readers have to flip through multiple pages of a report to find a particular job or tenant you are reducing the effectiveness of the report and the productivity of the reader.  Consider what field the report should sort by and if it makes sense add a sort option to the report parameters to empower the reader to choose how the report appears.

3.  Clear report title

A full title immediately tells the user what the report is for.  Without a useful title, you are asking the reader to spend time reviewing the columns to interpret the report’s purpose.   A report that is sorted by AR balance over 60 days titled “Delinquent Tenants” or “Delinquent Customers” tells the reader exactly what the report is designed for, “AR Report” does not.

4.  Beautiful Design

Most of the time spent building reports is spent in formula creation and testing to ensure the numbers are right.  As people are generally pressed for time they often publish the report as soon as it is working.  Add a step to your report construction process before you start building the report – formatting.  It only takes a few minutes to put sections in  a report, bold totals and section headers, put page breaks in, add your logo and use a nice font.   Readers appreciate a nicely formatted report and you can take pride in a beautiful report.

5.  Add Date / Time Stamp

Ensure all of your reports have a date / time stamp – otherwise people rerun reports many times not knowing if the information is current enough for a decision.  For example a commitment status report run yesterday afternoon is often okay to review today but an AR listing run 2 days ago isn’t current enough to review.

We’ll be writing more posts about report design, as always we appreciate any feedback or ideas you can share.

By |October 11th, 2012|Best Practices, BI/Reporting, Blog Post|0 Comments
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