Top 7 Financial Tips for Project Managers

by Daniel Raymond · February 21, 2025

Running a project is a multi-faceted task that requires you to keep track of various metrics, features, and data. Managing the project’s finances involves being up-to-date with the new trends in the financial industry and using some of the latest programs and tools to streamline all operations. This helps not only the project managers but also makes the project more coherent to other departments while bringing collaboration to a whole new level of efficacy.

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Leading the project involves continuous improvement in all fields. Investing in your personal and professional development should be a top priority, as well as maintaining a proper work-life balance. When it comes to finance-related projects and businesses, self-discipline also plays a crucial role. As a project manager, you have to determine and manage all the risks and know how to utilize the resources that are available to you and your organization. So, you must not only have all the necessary skills, but you should also be able to carefully monitor your work and complete the project on time.

A skilled project manager can greatly boost the efficiency of the whole team by providing timely insight and dealing with arising issues on the go. This involves a certain amount of flexibility and readiness to face challenges and learn new skills when they’re needed. So, what skills does a financial project manager need? Here are some of them:

Interpersonal skills. You need to connect with people from different departments, so a strong presence and assertiveness is a must.
Communication skills. You need to be able to communicate with both team members and executives as well as various departments on a wide range of finance-related topics.
Team coordination. Any type of project demands proper collaboration within the team that involves setting goals, building budget plans, keeping track of everyone’s progress, and other project-related activities.

When it comes to building a coherent budget, using project management tools is a must. They help streamline the workflow of the project, allowing one to sift through large amounts of data while creating reports on the go. In general, you should make automation your new best friend because it will free up a lot of time for you and your team members to focus on other non-repetitive tasks. In this article, we will talk about tips that will help you manage your finances better, avoid risks while planning the budget, and the tools you can use to make project management as stress-free as possible when it comes to finances.

1. Stay Up-to-Date with the Latest Trends

Keep up with the latest financial news and trends to make better-informed decisions and offer unique solutions to budget-managmenet issues. Whether your project needs some extra financing or not at the moment, you need to be aware that right now online lending is trending big, offering better interest rates and faster application review time. If you need lending services, look at platforms like LendUp.com, SoFi, Upstart, LightStream, Avant, and others. By applying for a loan to digital lending companies you get access to funds in just one business day.

2. Prioritize Budget Planning

It’s crucial to get your project timeline in check and calculate different types of costs. If it’s applicable, take care of direct costs like equipment, staff, raw materials, and then indirect ones like overhead and contingencies. You should forecast unexpected expenses that usually arise at some point, as well as potential cost overruns. It’s always a good idea to get as many metrics and other financial data relevant to your project as possible. Compare all that data to past similar projects to predict costs more realistically. You can use predictive analytical tools that will give you access to large data sets that can help you uncover future trends by exploring past trends and tendencies.

3. Project Pulse Checks Are a Must

You should always pay attention to your project management triangle and do pulse checks to evaluate the budget. This financial auditing involves:

Cost/budget.
Project scope.
Time.

Think about doing real-time financial shots using various tools like FreshBooks, Zero, QuickBooks, OneUp, Wave, and YNAB, or, alternatively, you can use some financial tracker templates. This will allow you to assess the financial health of your project and mitigate potential risks on the go. It’s always easier to correct the course of your financial journey rather than start anew if there are too many irreparable budget issues.

4. Build a Safety Net to Deal with Unexpected Costs

As a rule, 5-10% of your costs should include a contingency fund that will allow you to take care of unforeseen expenses. Creating a safety net involves several elements. Let’s look at some of them:

Examine market volatility and revisit your financial plan to avoid money loss.
Reassess the risk tolerance of your project.
Consider all kinds of delays.
Conduct a risk analysis that involves various factors like employee illness or stuff departure.
Think of possible cost overruns.

5. Use Automation and Financial Management Software

Automation is the future of project management. It can streamline many processes and help you track all the expenses and billing, freeing up the time you can spend on strategic planning and analysis. Use the automation software wisely as it can handle all the data for you, making the job easier for investment managers, accountants, and the whole finance department. Writing reports will also become much easier as you’ll have all the necessary information gathered in one tool or a few different programs. Here’s a list of automation project management software that can improve your workflow and help keep track of all the finances and budget changes.

Microsoft Project. Use it for comprehensive project management that involves budget planning, team collaboration, and streamlining all financial operations.
Productive. It’s perfect for agencies and professional service companies. You can track all business operations and metrics, automate repetitive tasks, and see all project costs in one tool.
Financial Cents. Accounting has never been easier. Use this software to get client responses fast and track all client work. It has useful features like time tracking and billing, as well as email, document, and project management.
ProProfs Project. This tool boasts an easy-to-use interface and lots of features that allow you to collaborate with your team.
Harvest. Use this tool to save time while tracking all your operations, be it payments, invoicing, or getting instant reports. it also has budget monitoring and cost tracking features.

6. Establish a Baseline

All projects have a lifecycle and you need to be aware of the cost performance baseline over a certain timeframe. Creating comprehensive true-to-life benchmarks allows you to prevent overspending and to track all the generated revenue with more understanding of the project’s performance in general. Take the budget you’ve already calculated and focus on a few elements to get a better grip on your future spending. These include:

Allocated resources such as materials, staff, and tools you’ll need to complete different tasks.
Project scope. Consider all the work that the team members will complete in a certain timeframe and how it corresponds to the budget. You can have a few milestones to get a better understanding of whether the budget is relevant to the amount of work that needs to be done.
Contingency funds. These include all the extra expenses that might happen during the course of the project.

7. Communicate Effectively

Having all the metrics in check is great, but your team as well as the stakeholders need to be on the same page in terms of the project’s details and scope. Make sure you inform the stakeholders about the progress of the project by providing regular reports and updates. This will help maintain the transparency of your work while making the communication smooth and easy-going.

Project managers should devote around 70% of their time to establishing communication with everyone, including the team members, using open channels where they can provide feedback and raise issues if they arise. This approach boosts problem-solving and streamlines the workflow of the whole team.

Conclusion

In this day and age, being a project manager requires you to take on many roles at once. Managing finances is one of the biggest responsibilities of the project manager because you don’t have the luxury of making mistakes when it comes to budget planning. In this regard, various factors need to be taken into consideration such as staying up to date with the latest trends in the finance industry and using new tools that can ease up the whole work process. They can also help you keep track of the project’s progress and boost collaboration between all the team members.

Automation is key when it comes to utilizing your resources to the best of their potential. It allows you to free up time for other tasks that require more attention and creativity. A knack for detail is yet another skill any project manager has to have to be successful in this role. This skill allows one to successfully keep track of finance reports, budgets, and income statements. Budget planning needs to be done properly and you need to develop a habit of pulse checks that will help you detect possible risks and solve issues before they can cause actual damage to the project.