For real estate developers and investors including special purpose vehicles (SPV) created for Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) projects, the cost of delivering a capital construction project is one of the many financial components needed to manage, monitor, evaluate and report on the viability of real estate investments. To have a complete financial model for any type of real estate investment, those developers and investors need to consider the costs associated with the site acquisition, design, construction, refurbishment, renewal, operation, maintenance, and end of life or assets disposition as well as the revenues generated from operations, assets sales, leases, etc.
This requires having a cost account or cost breakdown structure (CBS) that maps all those types of costs and revenues. The International Construction Measurement Standards (ICMS) developed by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) sets out how to classify, define, measure, record, analyze, present, and compare construction project life cycle costs in a structured and logical format. This structure also appends with the different types of real estate investment revenues and incomes that can be generated when the project is handed over to operations to go live as well as the revenue that can be generated during the project’s delivery stage such as the revenue from off-plan sales.
This cost breakdown structure (CBS) becomes the basis for developing the cost and revenue estimates for the real estate investments for which when approved become the basis for developing the budget for the real estate investment as well as the commitment and revenue contract agreements. For commitment contracts, the approved cost estimate also becomes the basis for managing the procurement process to select the successful bidders for the outsourced scope of work. Those commitment and revenue contracts could be revised depending on the approved changes made to those contracts. In addition, invoices for incurred costs and earned revenue are issued against those contracts as well as capturing the details of payments made or received against approved invoices.The availability of the total costs and revenues associated with the real estate development or investment including the dates for spending those costs or earning the anticipated revenues also enables determining the net present value (NPV) and calculating the internal rate of return (IRR) for the investment. This provides the real estate developer or investor with a better and faster insight needed to make informed decisions on the real estate investment.
Using a Project Management Information System (PMIS) like PMWeb, the business processes for cost estimates, procurement bid packages, online bidding, commitment, and revenue contracts, change orders, progress invoices and requisitions and payments made and received are all readily available out of the box. Nevertheless, the cost breakdown structure (CBS) structures, consolidates and aggregates the financial data captured in those business processes. PMWeb cost account module allows creating up to 16 levels of CBS levels to provide each real estate developer or investor with the level of control they want to implement on their real estate investments.
PMWeb cost estimate module allows creating separate estimate documents to ensure that each estimate is done by those individuals who can best come up with the most estimates for the associated scope of work. For example, separate cost estimate templates can be created for site acquisition, construction, operation, maintenance, leases, sales, operation income, etc. Those estimates, which can be done in different currencies, must associate their estimated cost line items with the relevant cost breakdown structure (CBS) level.
The approved cost estimates becomes the basis for generating the commitment and revenue contracts that helps manage the cost of outsourced scope of work as well as revenue generated from sales, leases, and operations. The cost or revenue items detailed in those contracts need to be associated with their relevant cost breakdown structure (CBS) level.
In addition, those contract agreements help manage all approved and pending changes that could affect their value and duration. All those changes to commitment or revenue contracts need to be detailed to the level that enables associating them with their relevant cost breakdown structure (CBS) level.
Further, invoices received against commitments and those issued against revenue contracts as well as payments made and payments received against those are also captured. As those invoices are automatically generated from their relevant commitment or revenue contracts, all line items are automatically associated with their relevant cost breakdown structure (CBS) level.
To provide complete transparency on all business processes required for the cost and revenue management business processes managed in PMWeb, all supportive documents need to be attached to each record. PMWeb attachment tab in those templates is used to attach all those supportive documents. It is also highly recommended to add comments to each attached document to provide a better understanding of what the document was for. The attachment tab also allows the user to link other records for business processes implemented in PMWeb as well as associate URL hyperlinks with websites or documents that are not stored in the PMWeb document management repository.
All those supportive documents also need to be uploaded into the PMWeb document management repository so they can be stored and used. Those documents can be uploaded into folders or subfolders, so they are better organized and secured. PMWeb allows setting access rights to each folder to identify the users who have access rights to view documents stored in a folder. In addition, PMWeb allows setting notifications for individuals to receive emails when new documents are uploaded or existing documents are downloaded or deleted.
To enforce accountability for all business processes required for managing cost and revenue management, the PMWeb workflow module helps to create a workflow to formalize the review and approval tasks of each business process. The workflow maps the sequence of the review and approval tasks along with the role or user assigned to the task, duration allotted for the tasks, rules for returning or resubmitting a document, and availability for each task. In addition, the workflow can be designed to include conditions to enforce the authority approval levels as defined in the Delegation of Authority (DoA) matrix. It should be noted that those involved in these workflows can include other members of the organization that are not part of the project management team.
When any of those cost or revenue management business processes are initiated, the workflow tab available on the template captures the planned review and approve workflow tasks for each transaction as well as the actual history of those review and approval tasks. PMWeb captures the actual action data and time, done by who, action taken, comments made, and whether team input was requested.
