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Title: Rancho Biosciences Replaces Spreadsheets, Prevents Cost Overruns

See how Rancho Biosciences uses Beebole to replace spreadsheets, prevent project cost overruns, and improve decisions across 100+ data projects.

URL Source: https://beebole.com/customer-cases/rancho-biosciences

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## From spreadsheets to real-time insights: How Rancho Biosciences avoids project cost overruns

"Beebole allows us an easy way to maximize value and make sure we are doing our jobs."

Brad Farrell - Rancho Biosciences Senior Project Manager Team Lead


Rancho Biosciences is a global scientific data company supporting pharma, biotech, foundations, and governmental organizations with end-to-end expertise across data consulting, data engineering, curation, bioinformatics, and data science. Their team of PhD and PhD MD scientists works across single-cell, spatial, genomics, imaging, clinical, and multi-modal datasets with scientific rigor. Rancho also provides AI-ready biomedical data products and leads collaborative consortia that deliver harmonized, analysis-ready datasets for research and AI development.

Given the scale of their team and projects, staying on top of project budgets and timelines is critical. Since 2016, they've relied on [Beebole's project time tracking](https://beebole.com/project-time-tracking) and budget management capabilities to replace spreadsheets, prevent cost overruns, and improve decision-making.

- Overview

Faced with the challenge of managing over 100 simultaneous projects across a global team, Rancho Biosciences needed a centralized solution to track hours, monitor budgets, and provide clear, real-time project visibility. Beebole delivered that solution, offering powerful reporting, API integrations, budget tracking, and a bird's-eye view of projects, enabling the company to make proactive decisions and avoid costly overruns.

- KEY features

[Project Time Tracking](https://beebole.com/project-time-tracking)[Reporting](https://beebole.com/employee-timesheet-reports)

[Budget Tracking](https://beebole.com/project-financials)[API](https://beebole.com/help/api)

INDUSTRY - Research Services
COMPANY SIZE - 51-200
HEADQUARTERS - San Diego, California

## The challenge of scaling project budgets and oversight

As Senior Project Management Team Lead, Brad Farrell oversees a large portfolio of over one hundred ongoing projects, while managing his own assignments and communicating nuanced project updates to senior leadership.

Before Beebole, [Rancho Biosciences'](https://ranchobiosciences.com) project tracking relied heavily on spreadsheets and a combination of tools like Excel, Microsoft Project, and Jira. While these tools helped manage deliverables, they lacked the integrated view needed for monitoring hours against budgets in real time. With so many projects running in parallel, it was challenging to identify problems early, and potential budget overruns were often detected too late to take corrective action.

The growing complexity of Rancho Biosciences' operations required a system that could:

- Track hours worked against set budgets with precision
- Provide instant status updates for 100+ active projects
- Show actionable alerts before budgets are exceeded
- Integrate with financial processes for more accurate invoicing
- Give leadership the detailed and nuanced insights they need for strategic decisions

""I've been challenged the past few years to communicate project nuance to senior leadership. The ability to add that nuance was really powerful and allowed for more focused discussion when talking to senior leadership about projects.""

Brad Farrell - Senior Project Manager Team Lead @ Rancho Biosciences

## Real-time control and visibility across all your active projects

Beebole quickly became Rancho Biosciences' central hub for tracking project hours, [budgets](https://beebole.com/project-financials), and project health. Brad Farrell now has a clear, bird's-eye view of all ongoing projects and subprojects, including costs, rates, and hours worked. This visibility makes it easier to identify issues early and keep projects on track.

Farrell says Beebole is a place he can go to see exactly what hours have been worked against the total budget, as well as project status.

""It sure beats spreadsheets. I love the snapshot view it gives me. I can log in and easily see the status of 130-140 active projects. I can easily see where they are all at, and if I want to dig deep, all the data is there.""

Brad Farrell - Senior Project Manager Team Lead @ Rancho Bioscienecs

Furthermore, Rancho Biosciences' project budgets are set in hours, making it easy to translate a purchase order into an hour-based amount with Beebole. "Every purchase order is translated into a Beebole project where we can track hours used against total budget, and that's also where our accounting department pulls data from to invoice," says Farrell. "It does a lot of things really nicely."

## Turning project data into actionable intelligence with Beebole's API

Farrell noted that Beebole is great for project managers looking for answers to quick questions at a glance. For deeper insights, he uses Beebole's [open API](https://beebole.com/help/api) to feed time tracking data into Rancho Biosciences' internal program using Python scripts. The internal dashboard uses data on projects, subprojects, costs, rates, and budgets to create burndown reports. Reports are updated in real-time to provide insights into the completed and remaining work for any given project.

Farrell says that thanks to Beebole's wealth of primary data and robust API, their reports clearly indicate whether projects will finish on time and within budget, and if work is being done consistently or sporadically.

Apart from internal [reporting](https://beebole.com/employee-timesheet-reports), Beebole's data is also used for invoicing, in conjunction with other financials-focused systems in place at Rancho Biosciences. Cross-referencing invoices with time tracking data helps keep budgets accurate.

## What could your team achieve?

Join thousands of companies that have transformed the way they track time and manage projects.

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## Preventing overruns with budget status indicators

This comprehensive reporting, combined with the budget alerts in Beebole, is key to Rancho Biosciences' project management. When a project or subproject reaches 80% of its budget in Beebole, the budget status changes to yellow. If it turns red, you know that you have exceeded the project budget. These at-a-glance indicators are a clear sign to Brad and his team when they need to take a closer look and adopt remedial measures to accelerate a project or reallocate resources.

""We're communicating about these things every week; I'm talking to the PMs. But if something is going wrong, they communicate that and we figure it out then, versus waiting until the end of the project when suddenly we have an overrun. Beebole allows us to do that at a glance.""

Brad Farrell - Senior Project Manager Team Lead @ Rancho Biosciences

## Helping Rancho Biosciences focus on its mission

In the big picture, it is now easier for senior leadership at Rancho Biosciences to pinpoint what's in their control to advance projects and what's not. This leads to strategic discussions on the exact levers they can pull to speed up projects or find ways to maximize output.

"Beebole allows us an easy way to maximize value and make sure we're doing our jobs," Farrell said.

Rancho Biosciences is making significant contributions to scientific data transformation, biomedical AI, and research acceleration, and continues to work towards its mission of saving lives through data-driven solutions. Beebole supports the operational discipline needed to deliver this work reliably at scale.


## Other customer stories

- InData Labs ensures accurate payments and profitability insights with time tracking - This AI-powered solutions provider utilizes Beebole to track project hours, costs, and payments more accurately. - [Read full story](https://beebole.com/customer-cases/indata-labs)
- How Taptu automated project workflows with a custom integration - Learn how Taptu used Beebole's open API to build a custom integration for more accurate billing and invoicing. In doing so, they streamlined their project management, time tracking, billing, and invoicing. - [Read full story](https://beebole.com/customer-cases/taptu)
- HungaroTrial monitors project workload with Beebole and Excel - How HungaroTrial used our add-ins and API to integrate Beebole with a resource planning template on Excel.  - [Read full story](https://beebole.com/customer-cases/hungaro-trial)
- Olsys chose Beebole because of its flexibility and advanced reporting options - Olsys used Beebole time tracking data to boost PM performance, and it all started with better timesheets. - [Read full story](https://beebole.com/customer-cases/olsys)
- SIS achieved better budgeting and human resource management - Beebole provides Sports Information Services with clear insights into budgets, costs, staff availability, and PTO, saving time, money, and headaches. - [Read full story](https://beebole.com/customer-cases/sports-information-services)
- Umanova built a custom client portal and streamlined timesheet processing - The software consultancy used Beebole's robust API to create a client portal, while also achieving faster reporting, better forecasting, and scalable operations. - [Read full story](https://beebole.com/customer-cases/umanova)
- Simplify time tracking and get full visibility into project costs and budgeting - Cevotec, which once depended heavily on Excel and macros, has made Beebole the central pillar of its reporting infrastructure. - [Read full story](https://beebole.com/customer-cases/cevotec)


## Ready to take control of time and resources?

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