Lawson AC: Bring your Projects out of the Shadows

Join RPI and learn Lawson AC while watching this webinar. Learn how Lawson’s Project Accounting (AC) can help your organization keep track of project expenditures and project budgets including PO and RQ commitments. Review all the cool things organizations have done with Activities.

Keith Wayland: Our webinar today on project accounting, being projects to light. I’m very excited to have one of our very best consultants here today, Ms. Cindi Brackins, doing this webinar. It’s going to be a fantastic presentation. Before I hand it off to her, I have a couple of housekeeping notes. I’ve also promised to start the “About RPI,” so very quickly we will be recording this webinar. It takes us about a week or so to get it edited and uploaded into YouTube. Once we do, we will forward you that link that you may rewatch it or share it with your colleagues. Definitely appreciate your support on these.

Also, we encourage questions. Sometimes it’s a little bit challenging when talking to a camera. When you guys ask questions it sort of helps us break up the flow and liven it up a little bit. Mr. Bill Getty is manning the GoToMeeting module, just type in questions as you go. Real quick here, talking about RPI, we’ve been in business since 1999. We’re a full-service loss and consulting firm. We have over 70 consultants on staff at this point, and we cover the full gamut, including Financials, HR, Supply Chain, all the technologies. Here we’re highlighting some of our financial consultants that have worked to help customers employ activities. Without further ado, I give you Ms. Cindi Brackins.

Cindi Brackins: Hello, everyone. Today we’re going to cover what is Activity Management and what can it do for you. We’re going to go over AC integration and the functionality. We’ll go through how to track commitments, exactly what that means in the AC world, and the different applications of activities. We are also going to try to save the world from the shadow projects, and show you some case studies. We’ll also throw in best practice information at the end.

Many people say, “Why implement Lawson Activities?” In the absence of AC projects, they live in the shadows. You typically have projects that are being tracked, either through Excel, off-the-shelf, on paper (heaven help us), and we also sometimes see them tracked in the General Ledger. We want to help you fight the world of the shadows.

Some pain points from those shadow systems and tracking activities, is we have to pull the information out of your AP system, your PO, and your requisition system. That means there’s double entry of data, there’s manual entry typically into those shadow systems. Typically, you have a lot of keying errors, the information’s old, and it could either be missing or incomplete. Also, if you track those in the GL, it also must conform to your fiscal year calendar and your GL processing rules.

Unmasking A Lawson Superhero, “AC:” You’re going to hear me refer to it probably as Activity Management, as an application that has many, many names. It started in Lawson a long time ago, called Project Accounting, became Activity Management, then now I think it’s called Project and Activity Accounting. I’m going to always call it Activity Management, because I’m old and stuck in my ways.

Keith Wayland: You’ve earned it.

Cindi Brackins: It’s an application that’s designed to meet multiple different needs of an organization. It’s kind of a blank slate. You can use it to track many, many different things. It gives you a single data source for your project reporting, as well as it’s fully integrated with other Lawson applications.

This is an example of the AC integration with the other Lawson applications. You can see payroll talks to it, inventory control, PO, AP, all of your Lawson modules talk to it, as well as it talks to some of them as well. You can see the billing and revenue management piece of it. Th