Project Profitability & Budget Variance Dashboard
A done-for-you architecture and engineering automation built for the AE Firm Principal, connecting Slack and Google Sheets so the work below happens on its own.
What this automation does, step by step
Every week, this automation pulls billed hours by project and phase from the project accounting system, compares them against the contracted fee and the percent-complete estimate, and updates a live profitability dashboard the principal can review in minutes.
Projects where fee burn is outpacing percent complete by more than 10% are flagged for a project manager conversation before the budget is exhausted.
Projects approaching the contracted fee threshold trigger an automatic prompt to evaluate whether a supplemental services request is warranted, turning budget management from a monthly accounting exercise into a weekly operational decision.
- AE project accounting software (e.g., Deltek Vantagepoint, BST Global, or Ajera)
- Zapier or Make.com
- Google Sheets or a BI tool (profitability dashboard)
- Slack (weekly fee burn alert to PMs)
- Email (principal dashboard delivery)
Using different software? We build around what you already have, so you never have to switch tools to automate.
The manual way vs. the automated way
Without automation
Left unautomated, an ae firm principal spends hours on the parts of this job that don't require judgment: copying data, sending reminders, and tracking status by hand. It's the kind of work that quietly eats hours every week.
With this automation
- Daily and weekly digests delivered automatically
- Threshold alerts when a key number moves
- Dashboards fed directly from your systems
- Client and owner reports assembled without copy and paste
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