SaaS Program to Measure Customer & Product Profitbility

Edward
From what you outline above, it seems like your needs are really around project or job cost tracking, except that unlike a consulting firm, you are not billing the costs.
If you need to track engineering costs by product, and marketing/sales costs by customer, this may be doable through the addition of a few modules to your existing system (if available), a redesign of your processes and the enhancement of your chart of accounts to enable the data to be reported on.

Feel free to contact me if you would like to chat more.

Len

A module specifically designed for inventory or project cost accumulation will work best, but many features to collect specific cost elements will get the job done by using them [and titdling them if possible] for uses not originally intended. The software just needs two "collection identifiers besides the ledger account.

My experience is this challenge requires business trade-offs and realities combined with available solutions. While everything is possible, the benefit received from your information needs to be business reasonable to collect and it needs to fit with your culture and company realities.

Take the product cost for example. The challenges of tracking time for engineering to a combination of end customer and product line for a specific sale are large – unless your company does only very large sales to very few customers. The challenges include accurate time capture for employees, timing differences (time lag between events and labor cost and the revenue to be recognized), as well as matching challenges. Some of the expenses will be COGS – matched by definition to revenue. Some of them will not be tracked as COGS – and would be challenging to track as COGS (both from a GAAP and a management perspective).

A solution that provides value while considering some of these challenges is a product line P&L. Revenue, COGS, engineering time, marketing time are all tracked to a P&L by way of an account code or other financial dimension. The period of time considered is usually 3-5 years for analysis – allowing for R&D or other engineering and marketing costs to be captured along with the overall revenue and margin created.