Project Management & Budgeting

Manage projects, budgets, resources and invoicing in one system – from proposal and project plan to timesheets, expenses, earned value and billing.

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1 click

budget → project plan

24/7

Real-time earned value & margin

3-10wks

to go live

100+

life sciences teams

A Tuesday, before vs. after

~~The proposal budget gets retyped into a plan, then again into invoices~~
Budget converts into a project plan and invoicing rules – invoices are triggered by task delivery or milestone completion

~~Completion of study activities lives in a manually maintained Excel tracker~~
Completion, earned value and budget consumption are calculated from project data

~~Resource conflicts come to light only after people are overbooked~~
Existing allocations are visible while work is being planned

"We have been using Excel for many project management and budget-related activities so far. With an increasing number of projects and customers, this approach does not scale well and makes reporting difficult — so Metronomia chose Flex Databases as its Project Management & Budgeting solution provider."

Metronomia Clinical Research

on selecting Flex for PM & Budgeting

"We have been working with Flex Databases for our internal project management and budgeting — and their eTMF solution also convinced us. The Flex Databases team was incredibly helpful with setting the system up in no time."

Cheryl Marron

Manager Clinical Operations, Calian

"One major advantage is the ability to create specific reports ourselves. Additionally, we value that our feature requests are taken seriously by Flex Databases and added to their development roadmap."

Ulrike Schorr-Neufing

Director Personnel & Qualification, ABX-CRO

A Project's Health Shouldn't Be a Matter of Opinion

Flex Databases Project Management & Budgeting brings everything you need to manage within a clinical project – scope, timelines, budgets, workload and financials – into one workspace. Teams see what was promised, what has been delivered, what it costs, and where attention is needed next.

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Key Project Management & Budgeting Benefits: Three Recurring Headaches, Removed

These map to what the platform actually does day to day — not abstract feature names.

✕ Milestones in one file, time spent in another, status in someone’s head

Project & Portfolio Planning

Assumptions and milestones stay captured and visible, tasks live on an interactive Gantt chart with dependencies – and a portfolio view shows status, timelines and key indicators across all projects and clients.

✕ Every budget amendment starts a new spreadsheet nobody reconciles

Budgeting & Financial Control

Budget templates by country and contract type, unit-based, milestone-based or combined budgeting, version comparison across amendments – and invoicing triggered by rules, without emails and reminders from finance.

✕ Who's free, who's overloaded and who's double-booked is guesswork

Resource Planning & Utilization

Roles, rates, locations and scopes in one place, FTE planning per time point, allocation conflicts visible during planning — and workload review within a project or across the whole company.

Every Part of Project Management & Budgeting in Plain Terms

Everything a project and finance team needs from proposal to final invoice — each area validated independently and connected by default, so nothing has to be stitched together later.

Project & Portfolio Planning

Plans that stay connected to reality — because progress calculates from real project data, not from a tracker someone remembers to update.

Project assumptions and milestones captured and kept visible
Portfolio view: status, timelines, key indicators across all projects and clients
Project news to keep the team aligned
Interactive Gantt chart with dependencies and milestone tracking
Built-in business analytics and custom outcome reports

Budgeting & Financial Control

From proposal draft to change order – track what’s planned, scheduled, delivered, paid, and left to be achieved.

Budget templates by country and contract type – reuse existing budgets to issue new proposals
Unit-based, milestone-based or combined planning and budgeting
Draft, update and amend budgets; compare versions over the project lifetime
Invoicing based on milestones, project performance, units or ad hoc – no re-entry
Earned value analysis: ahead or behind, on schedule and on budget

Resource Planning & Utilization

How many people you actually need, and when – answered from data instead of debated in meetings.

Roles, rates, locations and scopes captured once, tracked forever – ready for budgeting and allocation
Workload and FTE planning per time point
Assign budgeted activities to employees, countries and timelines
Allocation visibility: see existing assignments while planning
Workload review within a project or across projects – who’s overloaded, who has capacity

Time Sheets & Utilization

Timesheets simply feed actual effort directly into project and resource reporting.

Easy entry: calendar and table views, copying, last-used tasks
Project and non-project activities in one timesheet
Approval by task and project subordination
Planned versus actual FTE tracking; hiring planning based on FTE use
Country-specific holidays and working week settings

Expense Reporting

Pass-through expenses, receipts and approvals stay in one workflow and transfer to finance without a bunch of emails.

Project-based expense management – projects reused from the Project Management and Budgeting module, no re-setup
Receipt scanning: upload images from mobile devices or scanners
Automatic exchange rates and foreign currency handling
Configurable approval workflows, alerts and reporting
Possibility to integrate with external finance applications to fine-tune the cross-system workflows

Reporting & Analytics

The questions leadership actually asks — answered without asking IT to build anything.

Ad hoc reporting tool: graphs, widgets and tables, built by business users
Cross-project and cross-module reporting
Project performance analysis and custom outcome reports
In-scope and out-of-scope activity reporting
Overall company review – one picture across everything

Why Flex Project Management & Budgeting

We have built clinical trial software since 2011. Flex PM&B applies that experience to project finance, with budgets designed around clinical contracts rather than a generic PM tool with a currency field. More than 100 teams in 30+ countries use Flex, supported by teams in the US, Europe and Asia.

The proposal you had gets rebuilt manually into a plan, then again into invoices

From proposal to live project, without re-entry

Draft complex study budgets and turn them into operational plans and invoicing rules in a few clicks – one flow from bid to billing.

Project health is whatever the last status meeting decided it was

Real-time view of project health

Milestones, scope, workload, planned vs actual effort and cost, earned value, risks and margin in one view — on time, in scope and financially healthy, or not, at a glance.

Percent-complete and budget consumption live in home-made Excel trackers

No more home-made trackers

Activities, percentages done, earned value, budget consumption and FTE are calculated from real project data — not manually maintained files that drift from reality.

Which clients and projects actually make money is an end-of-the-year surprise

Profitability visible by project and client

See profitability and margin by project and client, alongside resource demand and FTE-based hiring plans.

Resource conflicts are identified too late

Allocation conflicts visible at planning

While assigning work you immediately see if a person is already allocated to other projects — overbooking gets prevented, not discovered.

Finance re-enters project data to raise every invoice

Invoicing without re-entry

Invoices triggered by milestones, project performance, units or ad-hoc rules – straight from project data, with nothing repeated by the finance team.

The PM tool knows nothing about the clinical trials it’s supposedly managing

One platform with CTMS, eTMF and more

Timesheets feed project actuals, expenses reuse the project list, and trial operations remain connected through the same platform and data model.

Enterprise-grade usually comes with an enterprise-grade invoice

Enterprise capability, sensible cost

Enterprise-grade planning, budgeting and reporting without enterprise-suite complexity or cost. You pay for the modules you use.

Weeks of vendor training before a PM can build a plan

Intuitive from day one, with people behind it

PMs plan in a familiar Gantt, teams enter time through simple calendar and table views, and customer care remains available beyond onboarding.

Time to implement
Excel & home-made tracker
Immediate to start, manual to maintain
Flex PM&B
Typical go-live in 3–10 weeks
Legacy enterprise PPM
6–18 months
Budget → plan → invoicing
Excel & home-made tracker
Manual handoffs between stages
Flex PM&B
One connected flow
Legacy enterprise PPM
Separate modules, manual handover
% done & earned value
Excel & home-made tracker
Maintained by hand, drifts
Flex PM&B
Calculated from real project data
Legacy enterprise PPM
Available, setup-heavy
Resource overbooking
Excel & home-made tracker
Found after the fact
Flex PM&B
Visible during planning
Legacy enterprise PPM
Separate resource module
Custom reports
Excel & home-made tracker
A pivot table per question
Flex PM&B
Ad-hoc tool, built by business users
Legacy enterprise PPM
Report request to IT or vendor

	Excel & home-made tracker	Flex PM&B	Legacy enterprise PPM
Time to implement	Immediate to start, manual to maintain	Typical go-live in 3–10 weeks	6–18 months
Budget → plan → invoicing	Manual handoffs between stages	One connected flow	Separate modules, manual handover
% done & earned value	Maintained by hand, drifts	Calculated from real project data	Available, setup-heavy
Resource overbooking	Found after the fact	Visible during planning	Separate resource module
Custom reports	A pivot table per question	Ad-hoc tool, built by business users	Report request to IT or vendor

One Platform That Grows With You

Add projects, clients and hundreds of employees, and it's still the same login, the same data model, the same platform — no migration project waiting at the other end of growth.

Your whole portfolio, not one project

Status, timelines and key indicators across every project and client in one portfolio view — with profitability visible per project and per client, not just company-wide.

Connects to what you already run

Flex supports integration with common accounting, banking, HR, finance and BI systems, so project and financial data can move without repeated entry.

Access built around your org chart

Who can view, edit or invoice is controlled by project, client, region or department — PMs, finance, leadership and team members each see exactly what their role needs.

Onboarding that scales with your team

A named implementation lead brings a team of 10 or 500 up to speed in 3–10 weeks — with your budget templates, rates and approval workflows configured, not just installed.

Fits Into Your Stack, Live in Weeks

Keep the systems your team already knows – Flex supports integration and data exchange so project and financial data can move without replacing established tools.

Every system you already depend on

Flex PM&B supports common integration and data-exchange patterns across project, finance and resource systems.

Common accounting packages – approved expenses can flow to finance
Exchange-rate feeds from external sources
Banking systems – import transaction data for reconciliation
Every other Flex module, on the same data model
HR, finance and BI tools – exchange project and resource data

Accessible anywhere

Cloud by default, on-premise if your policy requires it — either way, your team just opens a browser and works. No client software to manage, no manual updates to schedule.

HOSTING

Cloud or on-premise, your choice

ACCESS

Any browser, any device — plus a mobile app

SUPPORT

Named implementation lead

Setup

Kickoff to go-live in 3–10 weeks

3–10

weeks from kickoff to go-live

Five PM&B Problems That Erode Project Margin

These problems usually appear as small gaps between planning, delivery and finance. Over time, they reduce visibility, delay billing and erode project margin.

The budget gets rebuilt three times

Once for the proposal, once as a project plan, once more as invoicing rules – each a manual retype, each a chance for the numbers to quietly disagree.

Percent-complete is a work of fiction

A tracker shows 60% because someone entered 60%, leaving earned value dependent on a manually maintained estimate.

Invoicing lags the work by weeks

Finance waits for milestone confirmation by email, then re-enters the data in the billing system, delaying invoicing and cash collection.

Resource conflicts are identified too late

One person is overallocated while another has capacity because assignments are spread across separate project plans.

Profitability becomes visible too late

Project and client profitability becomes clear only during period-end reporting, after many corrective options have passed.

Recognize more than two of these?

That's usually the point where a unified Project Management & Budgeting pays for itself before the next inspection.

Talk to a Specialist

How Flex Project Management & Budgeting Fixes Each One

Each problem above maps directly to something the platform does differently — not a feature list, a fix.

The Problem
Budget rebuild manually for proposal, plan and invoicing
What Flex does about it
One budget converted to plan and invoicing rules in a few clicks
The Problem
Percent-complete typed into a tracker by hand
What Flex does about it
% done, earned value and budget consumption calculated from real project data
The Problem
Invoicing waits on emails and re-keying
What Flex does about it
Invoices triggered by milestones, performance, units or ad-hoc rules automatically
The Problem
Overbooking discovered
What Flex does about it
Existing allocations visible while planning – potential conflicts identified before assignment
The Problem
Profitability known only at year-end
What Flex does about it
Current margin and profitability by project and client

The Problem	What Flex does about it
Budget rebuild manually for proposal, plan and invoicing	One budget converted to plan and invoicing rules in a few clicks
Percent-complete typed into a tracker by hand	% done, earned value and budget consumption calculated from real project data
Invoicing waits on emails and re-keying	Invoices triggered by milestones, performance, units or ad-hoc rules automatically
Overbooking discovered	Existing allocations visible while planning – potential conflicts identified before assignment
Profitability known only at year-end	Current margin and profitability by project and client

What Actually Changes in Week One With Flex PM&B

What a switch from another PM or PPM platform feels like in day-to-day work.

Task	Typical PM / PPM platform	Flex Project Management & Budgeting
Getting a new PM building plans	Formal vendor training, weeks to proficiency	Planning in a familiar Gantt within days
Processing a change order	New budget file, manual reconciliation	Amend the budget, compare versions side by side
Building a custom profitability report	Report request to IT or the vendor	Ad-hoc tool, built by your own team
Getting timesheets completed	Chasing by email every Friday	Entry in minutes — calendar view, copying, last-used tasks
Support during rollout	Standard vendor support channels	Named implementation lead throughout rollout

Task

Getting a new PM building plans

Typical PM / PPM platform

Formal vendor training, weeks to proficiency