Subcontracting

By completing the subcontracting plan, you will have an overview of all external work on the project. You keep an eye on their deadlines, see how much money you have set aside for subcontracting and how much you have already spent. The process of receiving invoices and matching them to projects will also be streamlined.

You will see the status of all external work on the project at project plan, you can also track the status of each individual subcontract. You will find out early on that you are at risk of going over your budget or missing your deadline.

Information from subcontracts contributes to the automatically generated cashflow of the company and also in the list of important deadlines.

Contents

Subcontractors
What parameters we monitor for subcontracts
Subcontracting budget
Pairing sub-deliveries with received invoices
Maturity of invoices
Dates
Subcontracts and orders
Status of completion of sub-deliveries
Termination of subcontracts
Categories of subcontracts
Selling price
Overview of all sub-deliveries
Filtering subcontracts and subcontractors

Planning and monitoring the execution of subcontracts are among the cornerstones of project management. A subcontract is any work, service or product that we do not obtain through our own work but buy from external suppliers. The more accurately and comprehensively you plan your subcontracts, the more control you have over the project during its implementation.

Subcontractors

In Navigo you can keep track of all contacts to subcontractors. You store them in Contacts and, if you are setting up a sub-delivery, you can select from this list. If you are planning a subcontract and you know the subcontractor but do not have him listed in your contacts, you must first add him to Contacts.
You can plan a subcontract without a specific subcontractor, and you can add him at any time, including the specific person who will work for the supplier on the subcontract. You can estimate the price of the subcontract or enter the price you have pre-agreed with the subcontractor.

What parameters we monitor for subcontracts

For subcontracts, budget and deadlines are important. We track budget and compliance on thermometers, time data in deadlines and Gantt.

Subcontracting budget

We plan the sub-delivery budgets individually for each sub-delivery, the sum of which appears in the sub-delivery overview and also in the thermometers of the whole project.

Where on the thermometer do we find subcontracts?

• overall project thermometer
• thermometer on each wbs element
• summary thermometer for all subcontracts on the project
• thermometer for each individual sub-delivery

How to read the sub-delivery thermometer

Sub-deliveries, whatever their colour (determined by their status, see below), are always dotted.

The planned sub-delivery budget will appear as a light blue dotted line on the thermometer. This amount can therefore be spent on the subcontract without the implementation of the subcontract adversely affecting the final result.

The financial plan is always shown as a triangle on the sub-delivery thermometer and on the aggregate sub-delivery thermometer. This marks the boundary of your plan, showing where the imaginary mercury of your budget ends and you should not cross it. You can see whether you are on or off schedule for each subcontract. The same applies to the overall thermometer on the sub-delivery overview.

When planning subcontracts, it is important to make sure that the schedule fits the overall project budget so that you don’t run into losses, you are left with a profit and enough money for your own work.

As soon as an invoice is attached to a sub-delivery, it shows up on the thermometer as a dark blue dotted color that takes away from the light blue.

If the thermometer still remains light blue, it means that the actual price for the subcontract was lower than originally planned or that part of the subcontract remains to be executed.

If the subcontract ends up in surplus, the remaining funds can be used to cover other costs or be treated as profit. If you close the subcontract, the light blue dotted line disappears, the triangle shifts to the actual price spent, but the overall project/element WBS budget plan as a rake remains the same. This means that you can allocate the remaining amount you saved on the subcontract to another subcontract or your own work. If you don’t, it will be your profit that shows up green on the thermometer when the project is closed.

If the invoice price for a sub-delivery exceeded the plan or even if the sub-delivery was not planned, we see it as an orange dotted line in the thermometer. A red line always appears above this orange line because the cost of the subcontract has exceeded the planned budget.

This line also appears if you have not paired a scheduled sub-delivery with an actual cost, i.e. an invoice received. Then the sub-delivery plan remains light blue and an orange line appears. You can check that you have not paired a sub-delivery with an invoice in the sub-delivery overview. There you will see information that there is an expense in your project that is off schedule. After pairing with the received invoice or cash register item, the orange and red lines on the thermometer disappear and change to dotted dark blue.

Pairing sub-deliveries with received invoices

In order for the thermometer to begin to show changes when a sub-delivery is made, i.e. light blue giving way to dark blue, it is necessary to match the sub-deliveries with the invoices received or items in the cash register.

Attention! The pairing is always done on the received invoices or cash items, which can be found in the project in External costs or in the Economy section under Received invoices. Not from subcontracting. Therefore, always open the invoice or cash item first and assign the sub-delivery to it. This is because invoice items may belong to different subcontracts and there may be multiple invoices on a subcontract.

Maturity of invoices

For each sub-delivery you can also fill in the invoice due date. You can then view invoice due dates in the Invoice Plan vs. Invoice Reality comparison and also in Cashflow.

Dates

For each of the sub-deliveries, we can plan the timetable, i.e. its start and end. If sub-delivery dates are not scheduled, Navigo automatically considers the start and end dates of the sub-delivery to be the start and end dates of the project or WBS element in which it is embedded.

We can also link subcontracts with other subcontracts, planned revenue, WBS elements and milestones using time references. They can run concurrently or build on each other. For detailed information about creating time references, see Time References.

Dates set for sub-deliveries are automatically displayed in the list of dates, once the sub-delivery is closed, the date disappears from the list. Dates are also important for displaying Cashflow and Schedule and Invoice Reality.

Subcontracts and orders

You can link each sub-delivery to an order in Navigo. In the sub-delivery overview you then have control over the agreed price in the order and the price plan. One subcontract may have multiple orders, but always has one supplier. You can create an order from the sub-delivery menu and a sub-delivery from the order menu.

Sub-delivery completion status

You can record the completion status of each sub-delivery as it is being executed. You will then see this for each sub-delivery and also in the sub-delivery overview.

If you need an overview of how you arrived at the sub-delivery price, you can fill in the type of units and their number. For example, hours and an estimate of the number of hours required to complete the subcontract.

Termination of subcontracts

An established subcontract can be cancelled at any time. If the sub-delivery is complete, it can be closed in the sub-delivery overview. This will remove its terms from our Term Sheet and if the entire plan is not used up, those funds will be available again for replenishment throughout the project. You can then view completed and cancelled subcontracts in the subcontract overview.

Categories of subcontracts

For subcontracts, you can use categories to search between subcontracts according to individual parameters or to tag them by category.

Selling price

For each sub-delivery, we can plan its selling price. This entry is for information only and will be meaningful to you if you are reselling a subcontracted service or product and want to keep a record of what the price should be. The sales price is not included in the total project revenue and will not appear in any thermometer, you will only see it in the subcontract report.
If you do not want the option to fill in the sales price when scheduling subcontracts, turn it off under the cog in the system settings under Subcontracts.

Overview of all sub-deliveries

The subcontract overview is displayed automatically from individually scheduled and executed subcontracts. You can find it in the project plan and get from it to the plan of each individual subcontract.

All scheduled sub-deliveries are visible in the project plan. First, a summary thermometer is available for all subcontracts of the project, followed by an overview of each subcontract.

For each subcontract listed in the report, you can see its supplier, the name of the subcontract and whether there is an approved or unapproved accepted invoice for it, the end date, the scheduled price, a thermometer showing its reality compared to the plan, the expected due date and the Category. The subdeliveries overview can be exported to an excel document.

Filtering subcontracts and subcontractors

In the project overview you can filter projects by subcontractor. And vice versa – in the supplier’s contact it is possible to trace which projects the subcontractor was involved in.

Where sub-deliveries appear everywhere