The answer to this is how can you manage without? As staff come and go retrieving information about projects only a few years old becomes difficult.

Staying on top of current project contacts, past and potential clients, collaborators and suppliers is a full time job and documenting drawing issue and 3rd party drawing approvals essential.

In tough economic times efficient project resourcing and cost monitoring is essential. You need to know which projects are profitable and take steps to address those which are not. Projecting future workload has become a survival skill. A database can't predict the future but it can track your project predictions and help them be realised.

Of course much of this can be done by the seat of your pants or with spreadsheets. The former can be misleading, however and with spreadsheets a huge amount of time is wasted in manually entering information about the same staff, projects etc that is probably held and certainly required elsewhere.

A properly designed system of databases will ensure that each project, company, contact, employee, time record, expense, drawing etc is entered only once by the right person in the most appropriate system but is cross referenced and used wherever management information is required.

There are plenty of powerful project planning, resourcing, timesheet, print accounting, document management, image libraries, IT, HR and marketing databases available. You probably have some. However many of these systems are designed in isolation making no use of information held elsewhere. Others, combining several of these functions tend to have huge price tags, hefty training and support requirements and expect you to work the way they want.

Whilst an off the shelf Accounts system such as Sage together with the Planchest and Moneybox databases can meet most of the data requirements of a small company, the Planchest database or Planchest ltd consultancy can also serve to integrate and make best use of third party systems. You may already have a popular timesheet system, but now have 4 office systems which have projects lists. Planchest can ensure that Projects are created and maintained in one place with file system, exchange public folders and all other project dependencies being seamlessly updated. Change a project name and even have it updated in your image library.

Planchest databases are modestly priced and consultancy very good value. You can hugely improve the reliability and availability of vital management information at very modest cost, letting you get on with winning work and undertaking it profitably.