UniPhi 12 - Calculated Budget Derivatives

The focus on UniPhi 12 has been to make it as feature rich and attractive to those in the Cost Management industry and developers managing cash flows on new property developments. We've developed a raft of new features which allow for more detailed data analysis, and to generally simplify tasks of building estimates or capturing them from other systems. Our aim in developing these new features is to remove admin burden for cost managers and development managers and we believe that the Budget Derivatives calculation feature lives up to that goal.

This blog, and tutorial YouTube clip explains how the budget derivatives features works to enable you to automatically derive the the cost of an item, or multiple items, based on its relationship to another item. A simple example of this concepts use would be deriving the tax payable on a land purchase, or cost of preliminaries as a percentage of the construction costs or contingency as a % of project costs.

On its own, this is a very handy and useful feature, but when coupled with other UniPhi 12 features such as :

• Project Specific chart of accounts 
• Ability to import budget data from Excel or 3rd party cost estimating applications 
• Create and compare snapshot versions of budget data
• S-curve phasing algorithm
• Project custom fields and calculated columns
• Comparing budgets with benchmark data
• Adjusting budgets to factor in seasonal productivity fluctuations
• Moving the start date of a project budget, and thus shifting the expected draw downs

..with more features still to come driving home the efficiency gains targeted.

In the lead up to the official release of UniPhi 12, we are seeking feedback from clients who would like to get in early and upgrade ahead of the scheduled July 1 launch. Your valuable feedback will assist us in further refining and enhancing the features. The benefits for you will be that you can have direct input to the final release of UniPhi, and as an early adopter you will reap the efficiency benefits sooner.

As with most of the features and enhancements in UniPhi, it is our community of users who recommend or suggest ways to improve the product that continues to drive our innovation. Why not visit our forum and propose your own ideas for our consideration into the next release of UniPhi

UniPhi 12 - Cash Flow Adjustments of Time

The ability to instantly create reliable cash flows from your cost budget phased according to the anticipated project duration is a great feature of UniPhi 12. At the press of a button, cost managers can know and actually see with a high degree of certainty the expected rate at which their project will draw down on their funds or earn their value. As per this blog post, we have even built an algorithm which phases your costs in an s-curve manner according to the earned value profile of your closed projects.

But what happens when there are date changes that impact the commencement, or which occur during the construction phase of your project? Well, it just so happens that we have solved that little issue too with the release of UniPhi 12.

Introducing the project cost auto phasing Adjust Start option.

As its name suggests, this feature allows you to push out, or draw back the phased cash flow for your projects. Key here is the cash flow profile stays the same, just its start and end date change. Although as a feature this is not as revolutionary as some of the other recent features that are targeted at those in the construction and cost management industry, it IS an improvement that just makes life easier.

It's worth mentioning that this enhancement was made possible due to the feedback that we have received from you, our clients. As you know our intention is to always build on the success and innovative features of UniPhi so that it is increasing efficiency, and making life easier for our user community.  We develop our software in an iterative manner (sprints would be the latest term for it but having been using this method since 2003, we'll use iterations - kind of like how we still call it hosted instead of cloud). This method allows us to incrementally improve our product and occasionally, a small change like the one above leads to something big....Watch this space!

On that note, if you have a process that is causing you or your company inconvenience, or that you think down right annoying, why not raise a new topic in our Forum.