DMC Accounting + Technology

Deltek Vision Profit Planning + Revenue Recognition: got the Hatter Shakes

My hands are shaking drafting this note.*   While consulting yesterday on Deltek Vision I felt it was time for me to own up.  Certain features in Vision just drive you blubbering nuts to get working.  

Check this one out:

It’s fair to say that 20% (tops 30%) of Deltek Vision clients use the Revenue Recognition feature for measuring project effort and percent complete.  Of those, 2% are using the project info center compensation field fee to synchronize with the Profit Plan module compensation field (FYI the old budget worksheet just did this).  

Vision has an option to enhance/ease revenue recognition: the user synchronizes profit plan fees with project info center fees to avoid double input and reduce errors.  The idea is that as a firm’s project manager  updates his/her plans and at the same time accounting gets updated.  Revenue recognition on fee compensation jobs as a percent complete is more accurate.  Great.
There are three key tick boxes spread across several info center tabs, help info and configuration screens that need addressing to get it working.  Herein lies the challenge.  I am shaking again…get me some chamomile tea…!

One needs to tick one of two boxes in the profit planning configuration screen.  Of those two boxes one is pretty clear how it works, sort of.  ”Synchronize fees from plan to project”, tick that box and the fees from the plan will sync with the fees/compensation field in the project info center when the plan is saved.  The second tick box is scarily labeled “compensation values by row by period,” where if you dig into the help screen deeply you find that you must enter the phase/task fees on the labor tab of the project plan.

Should you tick this box, a new action toggle shows up on the project plan that must be pressed to manually refresh the plan fee to project fee/compensation field.  Sometimes the fields are labeled fee and sometimes they are labeled compensation – depending on where you are in the software.  I can visualize project managers pressing an accounting action button! :-[)

Oh, one more thing is you have to make sure “not” to tick a box in the accounting configuration screen that contradicts your choice or drive the sync in the other direction.  I never found the box that you are not supposed to tick.  I did find help instructions in 6.2 sp1 that explained about tabs that don’t exist in the project info center.  Not sure what do about that.  Whew!   Almost there…no laughing, more tea!
Thought I was set, but not yet.  I needed to locate on the profit planning labor tab the phase/task fee field to fill out phase fee.  Grrr… more digging.   So I found the missing boxes, which reside under configuration\planning\planning grids, and you can again tick the compensation fields for the labor tabs to show.   At the same time I clicked all the summary tick boxes too, couldn’t hurt.  There is a feature to accordion the planning view, I totally understand why that it there.

Not ticking the appropriate boxes is pretty ugly.  Correctly I suppose, Vision zeros out the fees at the task level or project level if you miss any of these steps, thus revenue is wrong.  My job is often to redo all the missing or mis-ticked boxes.  

A “tick,” excuse the pun, is more like the “shakes”.

*Author note:  To remove the fur from animal pelts the earliest manufacturers of hats, as the tale goes, found that the mercury concentrate in a worker’s urine made the process more efficient. Poor ventilation, thus inhalation and general exposure to the mercury based solution resulted in poisoning.  The medical symptom became commonly known as the hatter shakes and produced delirious rants by its victims (think Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland).