Managing Investment Projects in Dynamics 365
Project Management and its methodologies are rapidly evolving to account for various types of projects that can be executed and Microsoft consistently improves Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations to address various business scenarios.
Here’s a quick summary of the Project Types available in D365FO:
- Time and Material
- Fixed-Price
- Investment
- Cost Project
- Internal
This blog is based on a recent customer assignment to track costs against a budget as well as work in progress for managing internal projects, including machinery and manufacturing equipment installation, deployment and upkeep. This was accomplished using investment projects within D365FO.
An ideal use case for investment projects would be an internal project that lasts anywhere from several weeks to months where the end result will be either a fixed asset or another project itself. For example, a manufacturing plant that is installing a new production line that involves multiple sources of costs such as items, hours, expenses etc.
One can start managing this type of a project by heading to the Project Management and Accounting area and creating an investment type project.
Start recording all of the hour transactions, item journals and expenses against the project similarly to a time and material project. The process continues till one is ready to recognize the completion of this project and convert the costs incurred into a new fixed asset acquisition.
Initially a new fixed asset should be created to be used for this process. – Then Go to Estimates under the manage tab.
Click new estimate and set the date of the estimate to include all the transactions that have been recorded up to date and set the cost to complete method as “Set cost to complete to Zero” which indicates that project has been fully realized.
Once the Estimate has been created, go to the general tab and set the fixed asset that has been created to be capitalized.
Review the consumed costs and the total value of the project that is to be capitalized.
Now confirm that the data is accurate by proceeding to post and eliminate the estimate.
This will in turn take the calculation estimate and eliminate it from the project WIP accounts into the selected fixed asset as an acquisition transaction.
In case of any errors with the estimate or the elimination journal, the application allows users to reverse the elimination or estimate posting to make any corrections
This example shows how streamlined the process of converting an investment project into a fixed asset can be within D365FO while allowing an end user to maintain and track costs incurred as well.