What Is Deltek Maconomy? A Guide for Professional Service Firms

Deltek Maconomy is an ERP system built for project-based professional service firms: architects and engineers, consultancies, agencies, and audit and advisory firms. Where a general ERP starts from products and stock, Maconomy starts from projects, people and time. This guide explains what Maconomy does, which firms it fits, how it runs, and what to think about before choosing it.

Where Maconomy comes from

Maconomy started in Denmark and has been part of Deltek, the US software company that specialises in project-based businesses, since 2010. Today it is sold as Deltek Maconomy and used by firms across Europe, North America and beyond, many of them running several companies, countries and currencies in one system.

What Maconomy does

Maconomy is built around the life of a project, from the first opportunity to the final invoice. The main areas are:

• Project management: budgets and estimates, project plans, work in progress, and follow-up on hours, costs and margin per project.
• Resource management: planning people on projects, seeing capacity, and following utilization.
• Time and expenses: registering hours and expenses on projects, with approval before they reach the accounts.
• Billing: invoicing time and materials, fixed prices, milestones and on-account amounts, straight from what is registered on the project.
• Finance: general ledger, accounts receivable and payable, several companies and currencies, and consolidation.
• Customer management: accounts, contacts and opportunities that become projects when they are won.
• Reporting: analyses of projects, people and finance.

The point is that it all sits on the same project. An hour registered on Monday shows up in the project's budget follow-up, on the invoice and in the accounts, without being moved between systems.

Which firms Maconomy fits

Maconomy is usually a good fit when:

• you sell time and expertise, and the project is your unit of work
• you have many people to plan across many projects
• you run several companies or countries and want one shared setup
• you need project finance, such as work in progress, revenue recognition and margin per project, and not only bookkeeping

The industries where it is most common are architecture and engineering, consulting and IT consulting, agencies, audit and tax, and legal.

It is less of a fit for a small firm with a handful of people and simple invoicing. There, Maconomy can be more system than the business needs.

Maconomy compared with a general ERP

Most general ERP systems were built for trade and manufacturing. They can be set up for projects, but the project is added on top of a system designed around items and stock. In Maconomy the project is the centre, which shows in the details:

• time registration and approval are part of the system, not an add-on
• work in progress and revenue recognition are handled per project
• people are planned against projects, not only against calendars
• invoices are built from what is registered on the project

The trade-off is that Maconomy is specialised. A firm whose main business is selling physical goods will usually be better served by a general ERP.

Cloud or on-premise

Maconomy can run in Deltek's cloud, where Deltek hosts and operates the system, or on servers the firm runs itself. Many firms are moving to the cloud so they no longer have to run servers and plan technical upgrades themselves. Customizations and integrations still have to be moved and tested, which is where most of the work in a Maconomy cloud migration lies.

How Maconomy is implemented

An implementation usually runs from analysis and design through setup, data migration, testing and training to go-live. How long it takes depends on how many companies, countries and integrations are involved, and on how much of the setup has to be built from scratch. Starting from a best-practice setup shortens it. Read more about Maconomy implementation and Maconomy Power Launch, VOLI's packaged setup.

What usually sits around Maconomy

Few firms run Maconomy on its own. It is typically connected to CRM and HR systems, banks, e-invoicing networks, reporting tools such as Power BI, and Microsoft Teams, through Maconomy's APIs. VOLI builds those integrations and makes software for the most common needs:

• VOLI Data for e-invoicing, vendor invoice scanning, master data and bank reconciliation
• VOLI Work for registering time, expenses and mileage from a phone
• Power BI dashboards for reporting on projects, people and finance
• VOLI Projects for resource planning, which also works without Maconomy

Frequently asked questions

Who owns Maconomy?

Deltek, which acquired Maconomy in 2010.

Is Maconomy a cloud system?

It can be. Maconomy runs either in Deltek's cloud or on servers the firm runs itself.

Is Maconomy only for large firms?

It is built for firms with many people and projects, often across several companies. It is used by mid-sized firms as well as large international groups.

Can Maconomy be connected to other systems?

Yes. Maconomy has APIs that other systems can read from and write to. See Maconomy integrations.

Who can help with Maconomy?

Deltek works with partners that implement, extend and support Maconomy. VOLI is one of them, based in Copenhagen.