The Internet and international trade mean that many organizations now do business with partners worldwide. ProjectPartner lets you take advantage of your marketability and easily manage projects in multiple currencies.

Perhaps your software development team’s QA department is halfway around the world, or your manufacturing business exports to other markets. With ProjectPartner, individual resources, entire workgroups, tasks or clients can be associated with any currency, and you can specify exchange rates between them to suit any hedging you may use or compare budget impacts even where no official exchange rate exists.

This functionality makes it a breeze for, as an example, a US-based business to outsource work for a Canadian customer to a Japanese contractor, and remain in complete control of all costs and charging throughout.

You can even manage your taxation obligations by recording applicable tax rates and/or exemptions for any kind of transaction – domestic or foreign – and having those costs reflected in your profitability reporting.

A major advantage of subscription-based software is the ability for users to access it where ever they are and whenever they need it. ProjectPartner can be used at the office, at home, in a hotel room or Internet café – anywhere with Internet access.

Customers who choose to install ProjectPartner on their own networks and deliver it to users’ desktops over an intranet can use a VPN to give access to remote sites or travelling executives, in the same way that corporate email or document servers can be made available.

This ease of access makes ProjectPartner ideal for businesses with multiple sites, and the “always on” nature of our service or your VPN means that even those employees in other time zones can collaborate on projects effortlessly.

A role is a general type of work to be performed, such as “research”, “design” or “maintenance”. Resources (human or material) can have multiple roles assigned to them so that they can be allocated to perform tasks assigned to those roles.

It’s not necessary to define and assign roles to minute degrees. If, for example, your photographer shoots on location, it’s obvious that driving will be a role he plays in carrying out the location shoot task, but it is not a “job” as such. You would usually only define “driving” as a role if it is integral to the task, such as in transporting goods.

Certain tasks may require resources with specific skills in a role, and you may have several resources that can perform that role but which have varying skill levels. For example, you may have many drivers on your transport company’s staff, but only a few are qualified to operate your largest trucks. And the trucks themselves may have “skills” defined by their load capacity.

While not every role within your organization will require skill levels to be set, there are myriad ways you can use skill levels to optimize resource allocations for the best return.

You can set cost and charge rates for each role and skill level. For example, you may employ several programmers with different levels of experience or qualification. These levels will be reflected in the amounts you pay them (your cost), and you’ll probably charge their time out at different rates.

By applying rates to each skill and role, you can measure the relative efficiency and profitability of assigning a task to a lower-skilled worker who might need longer to complete a task than a faster worker whose time is more valuable. Resources that are capable of multiple roles can, of course, have different rates applied for each role, and for their skill levels within those roles.

If the timeframe for a fixed-price quote is less critical than other projects’, you can easily assign inexpensive but slower resources, freeing up specialist workers or equipment for high-priority or more lucrative work. This ensures maximum profitability on both jobs.

It’s also easy to set different rates for different customers, even when using the same-skilled resources in the same roles. This allows you, for example, to charge a charity a lower rate than you would a corporate client for the same project – while continuing to measure them on equal terms.