Introducing Projects in HeroBM

We are excited to announce the release of the Projects module in HeroBM!

Whether you manage client engineering engagements, field service operations, or custom fabrication jobs, delivering successful projects requires aligning your team's day-to-day execution with warehouse inventory and financial accounting.

The new Projects module brings planning, budgeting, resource staffing, warehouse staging, customer invoicing, and live financial tracking together into a single, cohesive workflow.

Projects are the ultimate integration challenge

When running client projects and service jobs, operational execution is frequently disconnected from inventory and accounting systems. Teams routinely run into six core challenges:

• Scope Creep & Ungated Milestones: Deliverable phases and tasks are tracked in separate project boards, making it difficult to distinguish billable work from warranty rework or gate customer sign-offs on milestones.
• Inaccurate Budgets & Disconnected Pricing: Project quotes built in external spreadsheets fail to reflect customer-specific contract discounts, standard item costs, or labor rate cards.
• Fragmented Timesheets & Labor Tracking: Employee and contractor hours are recorded across separate spreadsheets, making it tedious to verify unbilled labor and calculate true project costs.
• Untracked Materials & Lost Return Credits: Parts taken from warehouse shelves disappear onto job sites without attribution to specific tasks, and surplus materials returned to storage are rarely credited back.
• Slow, Disconnected Customer Invoicing: Finance teams spend days manually consolidating timesheets and supply receipts, struggling to support varied contract models like milestone billing or Time & Materials.
• Delayed Profitability Insights: Project margins are only known weeks after completion during month-end closes, making it impossible to catch cost overruns while work is underway.

HeroBM is natively integrated

1. Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) & Milestone Tracking

Solves: Scope Creep & Ungated Milestones

Decompose projects into structured phases, deliverables, and subtasks:

• Task Hierarchy: Build multi-level parent-child task trees with structured codes (e.g., 1.0, 1.1, 2.0).
• Milestone Delivery Gates: Flag milestone tasks to enforce formal customer sign-offs and unlock phased contract billing.
• Billable vs. Non-Billable Tasks: Clearly designate tasks as billable or internal. Internal tasks (such as warranty rework or scoping) capture incurred costs without exposing them on customer billing queues.

2. Budget Estimation with Automatic Customer Discounts

Solves: Inaccurate Budgets & Disconnected Pricing

Establish comprehensive cost baselines and target revenue directly inside the project:

• Pre-Filled Cost & Price Rates: Labor rates auto-populate from resource profiles, while material costs and list prices pull directly from your product catalog.
• Automatic Discount Inheritance: When creating a project for a customer, their negotiated discount matrix is automatically applied as the project default, with full support for line-level overrides.
• Live Variance Tracking: Budget lines continuously aggregate actual database transactions in real time, highlighting cost overruns before they impact delivery margins.

3. Resource Staffing & Direct Time Logging

Solves: Fragmented Timesheets & Labor Tracking

Manage your workforce seamlessly across two integrated layers:

• Global Resource Catalog: Maintain centralized profiles and rate cards for internal personnel, equipment, and subcontractors (with linked supplier pricing).
• Project Staffing Rosters: Assign qualified personnel directly to the project team, tracking cumulative hours logged and costs incurred per worker.
• Direct Timesheet Logging: Team members log hours directly against specific WBS tasks. Logged time immediately records actual labor costs and billable value to the project subledger.

4. Dedicated Staging & Return Inventory Management

Solves: Untracked Materials & Lost Return Credits

Track materials from the warehouse rack to the job deliverable with complete inventory transparency:

• Dedicated Staging Bins: Assign a designated project staging bin to keep job stock physically and logically organized.
• Immediate WIP Recognition: Stock transferred to the staging bin is immediately attributed to the project at cost.
• Task-Level Material Issues: Issuing stock to a WBS task draws down physical inventory and reallocates the cost directly to that deliverable.
• Automated Return Credits: When unused parts are returned to warehouse storage, the system automatically posts compensating credits at original cost, cleanly netting surplus expenses out to $0.00.
• Live Pipeline Visibility: Monitor counts across Staged, Arriving (inbound transfers), Returning (open returns), Available, and Consumed inventory.

5. Multi-Model Invoicing & Financial Integration

Solves: Slow, Disconnected Customer Invoicing

Generate official Sales Invoices directly from the project workspace with support for four flexible billing models:

• Time & Materials: Select unbilled labor, materials, and expense entries. Billed lines are automatically marked and linked to the resulting sales invoice.
• Fixed Price: Invoice agreed contract amounts through percentage progress drawdowns or fixed sums.
• Milestone Based: Invoicing unlocks automatically when deliverable milestone tasks reach Completed status.
• Cost Plus: Invoice actual incurred costs plus your contracted markup percentage.

If a sales invoice is cancelled, linked time and material entries automatically revert to unbilled status, restoring unbilled balances immediately.

6. Real-Time Profitability & Margin Analytics

Solves: Delayed Profitability Insights

Get instant financial visibility without manual spreadsheet calculations:

• Budget vs. Actual Variance: Track labor, material, and expense variances in real time as work progresses.
• Live Gross Margin %: Compare actual costs against billable value and invoiced revenue dynamically.
• Billed vs. Unbilled WIP: Maintain continuous visibility into revenue earned versus revenue invoiced.

Result: Projects you’re in control of

• Complete Visibility: Keep planning, labor, materials, and billing synchronized in one platform.
• Zero Inventory Leakage: Know exactly what inventory is staged, consumed on site, or returned to the warehouse.
• Faster Invoicing: Bill customers accurately in seconds directly from verified timesheets, stock issues, and completed milestones.
• Proactive Margin Control: Identify cost overruns as they happen, not weeks later during month-end closes.

Availability

As with all of HeroBM, the entire system is available via APIs for integrations and use with AI agents. More than that, you can look at and extend the code as suits your use case.

For full configuration guides, workflow documentation, and REST API references, explore the HeroBM Projects Documentation.