Designing project accounting around business needs

The challenge

Project accounting has been a recurring part of my work across three industries. The requirements differed: allocating costs among joint-venture partners in real estate, accounting for work in progress and revenue in construction, and tracking project costs for business analysis in financial services. Each called for a different accounting and system design.

My contribution

In real estate, I designed the accounting arrangements for consortium and joint-venture projects, covering partner contributions, financing, capital calls and cost allocation based on contribution proportions. A key design question was whether to account for each partner separately or pool project costs before allocating them.

In construction, I set up a project module to account for work in progress (WIP) separately for each project and support revenue recognition under New Zealand financial reporting standards.

In financial services, I assessed NetSuite's project module against the business requirements. Where its limitations left those needs unmet, I built a custom-segment approach to track project costs systematically and developed reporting dashboards for business analysis.

The outcome

The work produced different solutions for different needs: joint-venture contribution and cost-allocation arrangements, project-level WIP and revenue-recognition setup, and custom-segment cost tracking with reporting dashboards. The approach followed the accounting and reporting requirements rather than assuming a standard project module would fit every business.