Projects and Resources in Business Central

ERP systems like Business Central are associated with manufacturing and retail, but they work just as well for professional services and education businesses. At D365 Training, we use Business Central to manage our training business through projects. Resources are how we track trainers' and consultants' time and costs against specific projects and how we invoice for them.

What a Resource Represents in Business Central

A resource in BC is a person or a machine with two rates: a unit cost that measures what that resource costs you per hour or day, and a unit price, which is what you charge your customers.

Organisations that want to use resources can arrange these into groups that are typically structured by business area, such as engineers, surveyors, or consultants. The grouping decision is a configuration item that determines how utilisation, availability and cost report roll up. For example, consultants, engineers and coaches can be separate groups.

Resource Groups

Each resource has a working pattern template with working days and available hours, which represents their available hours per calendar period and is set in the resource capacity settings. BC allows users to set up resources with an unlimited number of hours per day.

Resource Capacity

Setting Up Resource Costs and Charge-Out Rates

When a project manager assigns a resource to a project task, the unit cost and unit price are copied to the project planning line. But professional services organisations rarely charge one rate for everything; overtime, weekend work, and specific engagement types all carry different rates. BC handles this through alternate prices configured per work type on dedicated price lists. When a matching work type appears on a time sheet line or project journal, BC applies the alternate rate instead of the default.

Beyond the resource card, BC also supports project price lists where you can set up special resource prices for specific projects. This setup allows companies to change resources at different rates for a particular client, without creating duplicate resources.

Time Sheets: Recording, Approving, and Posting Time

Time sheets in BC work in weekly increments, where each resource submits one time sheet per week, covering all projects they worked on. Before the first time sheet can be created, each resource needs three things configured on their resource card: Use Time Sheet enabled, a Time Sheet Owner User ID, and a Time Sheet Approver User ID.

Resource Card

Project planning lines can be copied into time sheets using the "Create lines from project planning" action. This pre-populates the time sheet with the projects and tasks the resource is expected to work on that week.

After approval, time sheet lines are registered and serve as the basis for resource journals or project journals. A project manager uses the "Suggest Lines from Time Sheets" action from the journal page, and BC populates the journal lines based on registered time sheets.

Project Journal

Entries posted in a resource journal create resource ledger entries but do not affect the general ledger. Entries posted via a project journal create project ledger entries and update project planning lines.

Work Types and Alternate Rates

Work types categorise time for billing purposes. Standard hours, overtime, travel and review are common examples. Each can carry a different cost and price through the alternate rates on the resource card. When a work type is assigned to a time sheet line, BC uses the matching alternate rate for that resource. This is how a company charges different rates for different types of work without creating a separate resource for each rate.

Work Type Code

Work types should be structured according to project phases, following WBS practices. This is a project management decision, not a BC configuration exercise. The system accepts whatever categories you define, so the structure has to come from how the team plans and reports on project delivery.

From Recorded Time to a Client Invoice

The chain from time entry to invoice runs through five steps. First, a resource records billable time on a time sheet against a project and task. The approver approves it and registers the time sheet lines. After that, a project manager runs "Suggest Lines from Time Sheets" and populates the project journal. The project journal is posted, creating project ledger entries and updating the GL. Lastly, a user runs Create Sales Invoice from the project card, and a sales invoice is then created from posted usage.

Next Steps

If you run a professional service business and want to learn more about how using resources and projects in Business Central can help your company be more productive, book a call to learn how we can help you set up resources and run professional services billing with projects in Business Central.