Projects & Departments

Your chart of accounts tells you what you earned and spent. Projects and departments tell you who for and where — without inventing a separate revenue account for every client or a parallel chart for every branch.

The two work differently, and the difference is what decides which one you want:

• A project is assigned line by line. One vendor bill can be split across three engagements, a line each.
• A department tags the whole transaction. Everything on that document belongs to one team, branch, or cost centre.

So: projects for work you win, bill, and cost per engagement; departments for the standing structure of the business. Nothing forces you to use either, and you can use both at once.

Projects#

Creating a project#

Go to System → Projects (requires the projects permission). Add Project opens the form; Edit on a row opens it for changes.

The dates decide when a project can be used#

This is the one genuinely surprising thing about projects, and it’s the source of most “the project isn’t in the list” questions.

The project dropdown is filtered against the transaction date — not today’s date. A project is offered only when the transaction date falls inside its window:

• No start, no end — always available.
• Start only — available on transactions dated on or after it.
• End only — available on transactions dated on or before it.
• Both — available only inside the range.

Change the date on a half-finished transaction and the list re-filters underneath you. So when someone reports a missing project, check the transaction date first; it’s almost never a permission.

Leave both dates empty for open-ended work. Set an end date when you want a project to stop being offered on new transactions — that’s the closest thing to closing a project, because projects can’t be deactivated.

Deleting a project#

A project that has never been used can be deleted outright. Once it appears on a transaction or an invoice, neoo refuses — deleting it would quietly strip the project off history you’ve already reported on. Give it an end date instead.

Departments#

Creating a department#

Go to System → Departments (requires the departments permission).

Cost centre or profit centre#

A profit centre earns revenue: a branch, a shop, a business line. It can be tagged on anything — sales invoices, vendor bills, journal entries.

A cost centre only consumes: IT, facilities, admin. neoo takes that literally — a cost centre is never offered on the customer side. You won’t find it on a sales invoice, a customer transaction, or a payment reminder. It appears only on vendor documents and journal entries.

That single rule explains the most common surprise here: if a department is missing from your sales invoice dropdown, it’s usually a cost centre, and that’s by design. The other possibility: it was saved without a role at all — see below.

Two things to know before you commit:

• The choice locks itself. Once a department carries transactions, the Cost/Profit control is disabled. Changing your mind afterwards means creating a second department and re-tagging.
• Neither option starts selected, and neoo will save a department without one. A no-role department shows no tick in either column of the list and — like a cost centre — is never offered on the customer side. Always pick one; when unsure, choose Profit Center, which works everywhere.

Deleting a department#

Same principle as projects: once a department has transactions, the delete action disappears. Unlike projects, the button hides itself rather than letting you try.

Using them as you post#

On the itemised documents — sales and vendor invoices — the per-line project sits behind the chevron that expands a line, next to the item notes. Sales invoices additionally carry a Project (all lines) field in the header: pick it before you add lines and every new line starts with that project — a shortcut for the common case where the whole invoice belongs to one engagement. It isn’t a separate document-level field; it only pre-fills the lines, lines already on the invoice keep their own project, and you can override any line afterwards.

Neither selector appears until at least one project or department exists — which is why a fresh dataset shows no trace of the feature until you set one up.

On Batch Update, a department always applies to the whole transaction, even when you have selected a single line. Changing the department on one line of a multi-line entry retags the entire entry.

Reading the results#

Income statement — where projects earn their keep#

The Income Statement is the report projects were built for, and it’s worth understanding why: a profit & loss is made of revenue and expense lines, and revenue and expense lines are exactly what carries the project. Filter by project and you get that engagement’s own P&L — what it brought in, what it cost, what it left.

Two things to keep in mind:

• Only tagged lines count. Untagged lines are left out entirely, so your project P&Ls won’t add up to the company P&L unless everything is tagged. That’s not a fault — it’s the honest answer to “what do I know about this project?”
• Use the Overall column when comparing projects side by side. It puts the unfiltered total next to them, so the gap between “all projects added up” and “the whole company” is visible rather than assumed. That gap is your untagged work.

Filtering by department works the same way and is equally sound — it just answers a coarser question.

Balance sheet#

The Balance Sheet offers the same two filters, but they behave very differently, and it’s worth knowing which is which before you present the numbers to anyone.

By department: reasonable. A department tags whole transactions, so filtering pulls every line of each tagged transaction along with it and the slice stays internally consistent. The caveat is that anything untagged — typically opening balances and equity brought forward — drops out completely.

By project: don’t. A project lives on the revenue and expense lines of your documents, and a balance sheet doesn’t show revenue and expense accounts at all. The lines that do belong on a balance sheet — the receivable, the payable, the VAT, the bank — never carry a project. So a project-filtered balance sheet shows you almost nothing, and what it does show is only whatever you deliberately booked to a balance-sheet account through a journal entry.

One warning, because it’s the trap: the report will still present a tidy, balanced total. That’s arithmetic, not confirmation — the equity side is derived from the asset side, so the totals agree no matter what the filter did. A balanced-looking project column is not evidence that the slice means anything. For projects, use the income statement.

Which reports take which filter#

Account transactions has no filter controls of its own — the department and project carry over automatically when you drill into an account from a filtered income statement.

Your dashboard also carries a Projects & Cost Centers widget — it switches between Projects and Cost centers once both have bookings: every row shows Revenue, Profit Margin 1, EBITDA and Profit, each with its margin as a percentage of revenue. It ranks by revenue and shows the top 25.

A custom field called “Project” is not a project#

Worth separating these, because custom fields can hold a project number and the two look identical on screen.

A real project is a reporting dimension: it sits on the ledger line, filters your reports, and drives the dashboard widget. A custom field is a piece of text on the document. The AI can fill a custom field from an incoming invoice, which is genuinely useful — but a custom field named “Project” will never appear in a project filter or in the projects widget.

If you want to report on it, use a project. If you want to record what the supplier printed on their bill, use a custom field.