Financial Management Software for Environmental Consulting Firms

Are you tired of manually entering expenses in Excel to know where your budget stands? Does your team waste time tracking billable hours in spreadsheets? Having trouble getting invoices out the door because of all the time it takes to organize what you’re billing the client for this month? 

We understand your pain. We think it's about time you ditch the financial chaos and embrace a simpler, more efficient way to manage your finances.

Introducing Aldoa’s financial management software - purpose built for environmental consulting firms. From real-time budget tracking to customizable invoices and reporting, Aldoa is built to solve the unique challenges of managing the finances of an environmental consulting firm. 

The Financial Challenges of Environmental Consulting

Environmental consulting businesses face unique financial challenges including tracking complex T&M budgets, understanding if lump sum projects are profitable, optimizing labor utilization rates, and invoicing clients for different tasks and phases of work.

To make matters worse, the prices for some services are getting so competitive that you can only profit if you have the most efficient processes in place. 

You handle everything from simple site assessments to long-term remediation, and every project has a unique set of variables that inform the way you perform your work. Whether it’s dealing with a new contaminant or deciding whether the geological conditions of the site necessitate a different remediation technique, you face countless permutations of potential processes every day.

Having the right business management tools can make an enormous difference in simplifying the administrative burden so your team can focus on the real work at hand: maintaining the health of our planet and those who inhabit it. 

This is where specialized financial management software like Aldoa comes in handy. With features built specifically around the challenges of managing an environmental project, Aldoa is the perfect solution for consulting firms that want to stop spending time and money on non-billable, administrative tasks. 

Complex Project Costs & Changing Budgets

Projects can vary significantly in terms of scope, duration, and cost. It’s common for a project to start with a clear scope of work, such as a Phase 1 Environmental Site Assessment (ESA), but expand into a much more complex remediation project that can last years or even decades. 

One of the unappreciated aspects of environmental work is the uncertainty of what you may find. Clients are often surprised when you present them with a Change Order, but you know that it’s just part of the job. You don’t know what you’re going to find on the site until you start sampling, and this poses challenges when it comes to budgeting.

The ideal financial management tool should allow you to easily edit or add to an existing budget, and let your employees seamlessly track time & expenses against these changes. 

Estimating, budgeting, and allocating resources effectively for these dynamic projects can mean the difference between running over budget or generating a profit. Managing the financial aspects of an environmental consulting business requires a robust system that can handle diverse project types and ever-changing budgets, while still ensuring accurate tracking and reporting.

Time Tracking, Expense Tracking, & Reporting

Tracking time and expenses at environmental consulting firms is not as simple as having your employees enter their hours or receipts, and then assigning them to the projects they’re working on.

Whether it’s for internal reporting reasons or because your clients need to have more information on invoices, the process of entering and tracking time and expenses needs to be thoughtful, and business owners need to consider all of the additional information that may need to accompany these entries.

Because you prepare budgets that are broken down by tasks and phases, assigning hours and expenses to projects alone may not be enough. Clients often want to see time entries separated by budget task, and they may ask for more information about what was being done to justify the hours spent by each employee.

For reimbursable expenses, it’s a best practice to include a receipt and a description of why the expense was warranted, but this is incredibly difficult to track without a streamlined system in place. If your business doesn’t need to provide detailed information to clients, it’s still critical to track this information so that you can run reports to understand which tasks are profitable, which tasks take too long, or which employees are best at performing specific functions.

By having all of your data in one place, and by being able to query upon this data, you can make better-informed decisions about how to budget future tasks and which employees should be performing certain aspects of the project.

Time and expense tracking systems may seem simple, but the expectations placed on environmental consulting businesses are greater than those put on other professional services firms. The right financial management tool understands the nuances of environmental timesheets and reimbursable expenses.

Invoicing and Cash Flow Management

Accurate and timely invoicing is a necessity for environmental consulting firms. Your team needs to ensure that they’re billing for all of the costs that have been incurred during the life of the project, and that you can receive payment as quickly as possible in order to get money through the door and pay out subcontractors and vendors. 

When it’s time to invoice, consulting firms need to compile employee time, reimbursable expenses, chargeable expenses, subcontractor payments, associated markups, and any fees, which can be a lot to keep track of if you don’t have a dedicated financial management platform.

Because these cost items often need to be associated with different budget tasks and phases, getting invoices out the door to all of your clients can take weeks, especially if your firm tracks costs using Excel spreadsheets or generalist software packages that aren’t built to accommodate billing to phases of work.

After considering the time it takes to compile the draft of costs that go on the invoice, approve certain items and transfer or write-off others, and perform a final review, it isn’t rare to not be able to invoice clients until the 15th of the month. These delays can cause real liquidity problems for environmental consulting businesses, especially if you are feeling pressured to pay subcontractors before you receive payment from your clients. 

It’s critical to invoice clients as quickly as possible to improve your business’s cash collection cycle. The best financial management tools streamline invoice creation, but even more importantly, they organize all of the financial data your accounting team needs to get invoices out the door as close to the end of the month as possible. 

How Financial Management Software Can Help

Aldoa is an easy-to-use financial management software purpose-built for environmental consulting firms. It’s designed to accommodate all of the variables that can surface throughout a project, whether that be a short-term lump sum fee or a multi-year T&M budget.

If you’ve ever struggled to make timesheet, expense tracking, or invoicing software seamlessly work with all of the nuances of your projects, it’s not because your processes are broken. Rather, it’s due to the fact that modern software companies have never built solutions with your industry in mind. We thought it was about time for that to change. 

Here’s how Aldoa can transform your financial management processes to ensure that your projects are completed within budget, you’re billing for every cost you’ve incurred, and you’re getting paid as quickly as possible. 

Budgeting and Estimating

Accurate budgeting and estimating is the first step to making sure that projects are profitable. With Aldoa, you can quickly build simple or complex budgets, break down your budgets into phases and tasks, and estimate project costs accurately with dynamic rate tables. 

Keep in mind that creating a budget is only one piece of the puzzle. The next challenge is ensuring that your team stays within budget once a project is live. Throughout the life of a project, Aldoa enables project managers to see in real-time how incurred costs deduct from the remaining budget.

If the scope of work expands, or if costs are higher than expected, it’s critical for your team to be aware of potential overages as soon as possible so that they can get a Change Order signed by the client before it’s too late. 

Aldoa’s budgeting and cost estimating features include:

• Lump Sum Budgets: Create lump sum budgets by entering a single dollar amount, or by granularly building up towards a total cost estimate with a bottoms-up approach. Once that lump sum budget is live, track incurred expenses and run real-time reports to see how profitable the project actually was.
• Time & Material Budgets: Create granular T&M budgets broken down by labor, subcontractor spend, direct costs, and other fees. Use pre-built templates to automatically create common tasks associated with certain project types.
• Tasks, Phases, and Subphases of Work: Break down budgets into Tasks and Phases, and enable your team to add time & expenses towards particular budget Tasks. Run reports to see budget overages and profitability not just by project, but by Task or Phase. Easily add additional Phases to your budgets when you sign a Change Order.
• Dynamic Rate Tables: Create rate tables for hourly rates, laboratory tests, company-owned equipment, subcontractor pricing, and more. Seamlessly adjust these rate tables for client-specific pricing, or push company-wide rate increases at the end of the year.
• Real-Time Dashboards & Notifications: Monitor cost expenditures in real time to know how much of your budget is remaining. Send email notifications to project managers when budget thresholds are exceeded so that your team is never caught off-guard. 

Invoicing and Payments

Generating invoices when work is completed and getting paid on time is essential for running a profitable environmental consulting business. Aldoa helps you create and send customized invoices, track accounts receivable, accept electronic payments, and bill across multiple projects at the same time. 

In order to get invoices out the door as quickly as possible, your financial management software needs to track incurred costs in real-time, streamline any approval/transfer/rejection processes, and make the generation of invoices as easy as possible while still adhering to tricky client preferences.

Aldoa was designed with hands-on testing from environmental consultants and project managers to do exactly that. 

Aldoa’s invoicing and payments features include:

• Create One-Off Invoices: Select a project and a time frame, and view all of your incurred costs broken down by labor, subcontractor spend, and direct expenses. Choose what you want to bill for and generate a branded invoice with a few clicks. Perfect for intra-month invoices or irregular billing cycles.
• Create Bulk Invoices: View incurred costs across all projects in one single screen. Mark items as ready to bill, or perform write-offs and transfers for errors that made it past the approval stage. Generate invoices for every project at once.
• Customizable Templates & Branding: Choose how your invoice looks with easy-to-use toggles that include your logo, add custom fields or a footer, break down the cost summary into budget phases, show remaining credits or deposits, and much more.
• Include Back-Ups: Attach time entries and associated notes, subcontractor invoices, and expense receipts with one click, so your clients know exactly what you’re billing them for.
• Send & Collect: Email invoices directly to your clients from the platform. Include payment links to easily accept electronic payment through credit card or ACH. 
• Track & Monitor Accounts: View all outstanding invoices by project or by client, track A/R aging, and run customizable reports to see revenue by client type, revenue by project type, and more. 

Integrating Financial Management Software with Project Management Tools

Integrating financial management software with your project management tools greatly enhances overall firm efficiency and profitability. Aldoa offers a single solution with both project management and financial management features, so that all of the work your team performs can easily be captured and billed.

By monitoring tasks and deadlines in the same system that tracks costs and bills clients, your scientists and engineers can stay on the same page as your administrative staff, eliminating any disconnect between project work and managerial oversight.  

From task tracking to invoicing, Aldoa simplifies every aspect of project and financial management for environmental consulting businesses. 

Why Choose Aldoa’s Financial Management Solutions?

Aldoa is designed to meet the unique needs of environmental consulting firms. The software streamlines common workflows, reduces administrative time, and improves project profitability, allowing you to grow your business efficiently.

Explore Aldoa today and see how it can transform your firm’s financial management processes. Contact us to schedule a personalized demo and take the first step towards more efficient project management.