Example App: Project Capitalization Reporting System

New low-code and no-code (LC/NC) tools make it possible to quickly create custom apps designed to tackle the unique challenges of your business. If you haven’t seen these tools in action, it can be difficult to fully understand the time and cost savings they provide. The example below shows what’s possible for one challenge around project capitalization reporting, and you can see additional examples from a variety of industries. If you’d like to explore how these tools can help with your specific business, please share one of your own challenges below.

Challenge

A company uses a monthly capitalization assessment process to determine which project expenses should be capitalized or expensed. To complete the assessment, the finance department sends out a shared spreadsheet to managers, asking them to enter the number of hours each of their reports worked on a given project. This process is problematic for several reasons. Managers often submit their entries late, leading to repeated follow-ups from finance. Additionally, multiple managers working on the same sheet can interrupt each other’s progress, further delaying the work. The rough estimates provided by managers are also not as accurate as finance would like, resulting in suboptimal financial reporting.

Solution

A LC/NC solution could address these issues by automating the data collection from the company’s existing work tracking system (e.g., JIRA). Rather than relying on manual input, the tool would pull project data automatically and assign capitalization categories as needed. The tool would convert story points (an engineering measure of effort) to actual hours and generate a detailed spreadsheet report based on the finance team’s preferred format. This report would group time spent on each project by capitalization category, allowing finance to easily generate the necessary documentation without requiring manual entry from managers.

Benefits

This solution would save the finance team significant time each month, allowing them to focus more on critical tasks like forecasting. By eliminating the need for manual input from engineering managers, their workload is reduced, and the accuracy of the reports is improved. More accurate financial reporting would also help the company manage expenses more wisely, contributing to better long-term financial health.