Let's take a look at Rave's Financial Management System (FMS)

RAVE’s financial management system (FMS) is designed to help you manage all the financial aspects of your projects including budgeting, bills, and invoices with ease.

Rave Build’s project’s Financial Management Systems workflows – are laid out in an easy and logical order, starting with:

• Creating a preliminary budget or feasibility study
• Sending your quote and tender requests out
• Managing your quotes and tenders received in
• Building up a full client estimate or proposal
• Creating purchase orders - if you use them
• Receiving bills in
• And sending client invoices out

As well as a suite of powerful, real-time, project reports including:

• Project back costing reports
• Profitability reports - displaying expected and real-time gross profit reports
• A cost centre report - to see if you are over or under budget by your cost centres (chart of accounts)

RAVE's financial management system (FMS) simplifies managing your project's financials, from budgeting to billing and invoicing. Let's dive into the different sub tabs within Rave's FMS and explore their functionalities.

PRELIMINARY BUDGET

This is where you would go to create a very quick project budget with the option of margin or markup. This is not a QS document or a client estimate/quote but basically a way for you to create a quick budget to give either yourself or your client an idea of what this job will likely cost. Numerous clients utilise this tool both as an internal feasibility assessment and as a means to set a budget for entities like Kainga Ora. Here, you might price the job and finalise the contract, even though the actual work may not start for a while, often requiring you to re-quote much of the job later on.

QUOTE REQUESTS

This is where you go to request quotes and tender submissions from your suppliers and contractors. Contractors have free access to Rave Build and can also access the Plans and Specs folder in your FILES Tab. This means you don’t have to add plans when sending out for a quote - you can just click the plans/specs box to give the contractor access.

You can easily create message templates in Rave to streamline your quoting process, with one template to load up for a ‘Supplier’ quote request, and another template to load up for a ‘Contractor’ quote request.

QUOTES

This is where we manage our quotes or raw costs (pricing excluding any margin). You will find all you need here to add pricing, edit existing pricing, add a margin for charge-up jobs, add a scope of works for clients or contractors, and much more. You can add a quote manually, via a template or by uploading a CSV file. Many of our clients (and our client's suppliers) use a QS service or excel spreadsheets to formulate their pricing - using RAVE's CSV file upload process you can upload one, or more, prices into your job quickly and easily.

CLIENT ESTIMATE

This is where we have multiple options to add profit, edit a welcome message, add attachments, T’s&C’s, manage variations and send clients proposals to accept or reject.

You can duplicate estimates and make changes to new versions if the client decides to change anything. You can also create a payment schedule based on your client estimate.

PURCHASE ORDERS

This is the tab where we create and manage all purchase orders for a project. There are various options to template the purchase orders, save, send and manage orders from this tab. The easiest way to create a purchase order is from an accepted quote. All the information has previously been added so with the click of a button you convert the quote to a PO.

BILLS IN

The RAVE FMS's 'Bills In' sub-tab is where you add and manage all your supplier/contractor invoices which RAVE refers to as Bills. As with our Quotes and Purchase Order pages, there are multiple options to add a supplier bill to a project. The most common way is by clicking on the project's RAVE FMS 'Bills In' sub-tab, and scrolling down to the 'Purchase Orders Ready to Convert to Bills' section.

The Supplier/Contractor name will populate from the Purchase Order automatically, along with the Category and Line item information. From here you can fill in the other fields and details and attachments to accept the bill in. This will then send as a draft invoice to Xero (once connected).

We also have a feature called BRANCH BILLS - this is where one bill can be split over multiple jobs, ie a power bill or excavation bill for multiple lots.

CLIENT INVOICES

Progress Payment Invoices: The 'Convert to Invoices' feature allows you to select multiple invoiceables from the various sections of the progress payment sub-tab, choose specific percentages or $ amounts to charge for each invoiceable, and then create single or multiple invoice(s), or credit note(s), for them.

Charge Up Invoices: These are created via the ‘bills in’ sub tab - you can tick the box next to each invoice you’d like to on-charge and then click on the create client invoice button. It really is that simple. You can add or adjust anything you need to before you approve the client invoice.

VARIATIONS

Creating Client Variations via the FMS Estimate sub-tab is a great way to ensure you are correctly accounting for your increase (or decrease) in costs. Also ensuring that you have up-to-date purchase orders for the client's changes. Once a client’s estimate has been accepted it then opens up the ability to create variations from the same page. Just like the estimate you can send  the variation to the client to accept or decline either by email or within the client portal.

You also have the ability to push the accepted Variation to the Progress Payment sub-tab as an invoiceable item to request payment from the client.

CHARGE UP REPORT

The 'Charge Up' report displays your project's 'Estimate Total' vs what has been 'Invoiced' to date, and the 'Balance' still to be invoiced - including any variations. This is then displayed by category - so you can easily view and compare the categories estimate total vs what has been invoiced out, and is still to be invoiced.

PROGRESS PAYMENT FORECAST

Cash flow is King for all construction companies. Progress payments help companies recover a portion of their costs along a project's way, and are crucial to maintaining a steady cash flow. They can also help protect companies in the case of client nonpayment. RAVE's Progress Payment Forecast Report is a great way to see a snapshot of expected, paid, pending, requested, overdue and outstanding payments.

BACK COSTING REPORT

The Back Costing sub-tab breaks everything into two very easy-to-navigate options. One being by your Categories and the other by Supplier. The default view for the back costing page is by category as this is how we have grouped all of your Quotes, Budget, Purchase Orders and Bills. To the left, you will see your current Running Profit, the Variance between Bills & Quotes, and the Variance between Quotes and your Budget (if using a preliminary budget). Then over to the right-hand side, we show your Budget total, Quotes total, Purchase Order total, Bills-In total,

Project Value (agreed client price), total Client Invoices, and Expected Gross Profit.

COST CENTRE (Chart of Accounts) REPORT

If you want to track your Budget via your Cost Centres, then your Cost Centre Report is the one to use. We take all of your Quotes and/or Bills-In and order them by your cost centre codes. You can expand each one to see what has been coded to that particular code, and easily see if any are left unassigned.

TRANSACTION REPORT

Easily view ALL of your project's bills (and credit notes) in one place.  The transaction report displays the bill (or credit note) description, quantity, line price, cost centre, and more - with simple search functionality and filters to help you quickly find the information you need.You can export your project's transactions report to a CSV file for manual manipulation, or use the on-screen display to quickly reference the line items back to your back costing report - ensuring all bills and credit notes are correctly accounted for, for accurate financial reporting.

It can be challenging to keep track of all your business expenses and fully comprehend your complete financial situation. To help you stay on top of your finances and avoid issues like late payments or unpredictable supplier chains, it's essential to set up effective systems to make things run as smoothly as possible.

As well as a complete financial solution, Rave Build offers a Project management system which gives you the ability to easily track build progress and provides clarity to everyone involved in the project.