Skip to main content

How to Use Project Tracking And Reporting

See more videos and subscribe to the Proposal Kit YouTube channelProposal Kit How-to Videos

This video shows how to use Proposal Pack Wizard's Project Tracking and Reporting feature. This feature is used to help you keep track of the status of your proposals and contracts. You can mark projects as they are being submitted, accepted, rejected, resubmitted, completed and so on. You can also create Excel reports of your projects and what status they are in.

Proposal Pack HelpWatch this related video: How to Write a Proposal that Wins

In this video I'm going to show how the project tracking and reporting system works in the Proposed Pack Wizard software. This is an Expert Edition feature not available in the Novice editions. Every time you're going to create a document as you probably should know by now you click the Document Projects button.

This creates a project, then you create the files for that project and the tracking system helps you keep track of where in your overall proposal or contract process that project is. This tracking is just for your own information and has no bearing or impact on the actual documents. It's just for you to keep track of the status of each project.

We have a database of a few projects in here and we've just added one new one called our New Project #7 and by default every project starts in this Work in Progress. These different statuses are just where in your overall process they are now. In the Novice Edition of the software every project's in Work in Progress and you don't have access to the tracking so this is kind of irrelevant.

To actually make changes to the tracking statuses and output reports you'll use this Manage Projects button. By default, it's going to show all projects that are in the Work in Progress status. If you want to look at projects that are in different statuses just select them from the drop down.

If you want to see every project in the database regardless of what status it's in just click the Show all Projects option. When you use the Show all Projects it will show you the status of each individual project off on the side here. You can see our new project we just added is in the Work in Progress stage.

To do reporting on the statuses of projects you'll use this Output to Report button. When you use the Output to Report only projects you've selected in the list will be output to the report so if you want to show all projects in your report that are a Work in Progress you just select that. Select whichever projects you want or all of them if you want to show a report of every project in your whole database regardless of the statuses.

Then just Show all Projects, Select All, click Output to Report and that will output all your projects. That will just show you what the starting report will look like before you've made changes to the statuses and you'll see all of our projects listed in this Excel spreadsheet. So the tracking statuses, our internal proposal number, the proposal name in each project, the amount column, this will be a field for you to fill in in the tracking project screen we'll show next.

The dollar amount of the proposal and your probability. This is just a setting for you to keep track of your confidence level in whether they'll be accepted or not. Comments, and so on and then the list of statuses.

You'll see the project starts out in a Work in Progress state. Now to make changes to the status we'll use the Change Status button. You can actually make changes to multiple projects at once.

You have to be careful that if you're going to make changes to multiple projects that you don't overwrite values that you may have previously set in statuses so we will just unselect everything, select only the project we're going to update, click Change Status and this screen will be filled in with whatever status values we had set previously. In this case we haven't changed anything yet. Now if you are going to change multiple project statuses at the same time say if we selected two or three or more projects in the list and click this button.

If all selected projects have the same value for any one of these fields that field will be loaded and you'll see that data here. If any one of the selected projects is different from any of the others the field will be blanked out and when you apply this screen only a field that you have changed on the screen will be applied to the one or more records that you've selected. In this case we've got one project selected.

We want to change a status to Submitted. Say we've finished writing that proposal or contract, we've sent it to the client, we haven't heard back yet. It's in the Submitted state and hasn't been accepted or rejected yet.

Give it a dollar amount, say this was a ten thousand dollar bid and we submitted it today and just give it any random comment you want. Click Ok and you can see the status has been changed to Submitted. We'll just output this one row to the report.

You can see the amount's been put in the column, our comment has been added and you can see it's been unchecked from Work in Progress and it now shows up in the Submitted column with the date it was submitted. Let's say some time goes by, a few days, a week, and this project was now rejected. We'll just increase this by a couple days and change the status.

We'll check the report again and now you can see it's got our Submitted date but now it's under the Rejected column. Every time you go into the Project Status screen and set a different status if you don't put in a date it'll just be a an X in the column. If you give it a date it'll show the date.

As you change the status we can say we'll set it to Resubmitted and then if it got accepted, if you sign the contracts you've got a column for that once the project's been completed. So you've seen the project was accepted, you've finished all the work, set the Completed date. The batch columns, those are internal use for if you're using the batch system to batch create documents.

The Wizard database can be modified. You can add your own status tracking columns. That's a way to configure this report with your own statuses.

That's pretty much how the tracking system works. It's just a system for you to keep track of the dates of specific events that may have occurred in the process of submitting your proposals and contracts and then outputting reports to keep track of all your work. That's really all there is to using this screen.

You have the preset list of all the statuses you can use, the three batch ones here are special case use ones for the batch system. You can modify the Wizard database to add your own statuses if you need to extend these. The Probability of Success, that's just for your own personal use and the dollar amount, comments.

That's all there is to using the proposal status tracking and reporting system.

Proposal KitPublished by Proposal Kit, Inc.