Job Costing

The Job Costing module allows assigning customer jobs to sales orders, purchase orders, and other transactions, to more easily track job progress, revenue and expenses and gauge profitability.

Job List

This screen shows a list of all customer jobs, their respective statuses and accumulated revenue and expenses. It has all the standard toolbar buttons available to create or edit jobs, filter or search for jobs, and export the list to an Excel or CSV file.

Job Entry – Create an ad-hoc transaction for a selected Job and sub-account, assigning a date, hours, income and expense amounts not linked to some other purchase or sales transaction.

Job Maintenance

When editing a job, there are a number of tabs that display information about the job and the transactions posted so far. Regardless of which tab is displayed, at the top of the screen is the unique job number and the description used for easy identification. Jobs can have a status of Active while they are in progress, Hold if no transactions should be posted against this job, and Completed when the work is done and no transactions should be posted.

The Address tab simply stores the billing address of the customer for whom the job is being done.

Details

The Details tab allows storing overall information about the job and a summary of transactions to date.

Start Date – Date that job starts. Transactions older than this date are not prevented.
End Date – Date that the job is estimated to end. Transactions later than this date are not prevented.
Ranking – A number to allow for reporting and filtering, based on how you want to use this.
Reference – Information to describe the purpose of the job.
Contract Number – Contract number
Contract Date – Date of contract

Job Summary

A grid is displayed showing the job totals for all transactions posted to the job, what was originally estimated, and the variance between these amounts. This is useful to track how much of a job has been completed, how close to the original estimate did the job transactions compare, and how profitable the job was.

Hours – Sum of all hours posted from timecards for all accounts.
Income – Total income amount posted from sales for all accounts.
Expense – Total expense amount posted from purchases or timecards for all accounts
GP$ – Total Gross Profit amount from all accounts
GP% – Total Gross Profit percentage calculated from the Total Income and Expenses

Accounts

The Accounts tab is where the separate stages of jobs are set up. You can create as many accounts as you required, where each one will be estimated for separately, and are also individually selected on transactions along with the job number. The more accounts you create, the more detailed you can analyze job performance, but also the more accounts you are responsible to maintain and choose from.

Account – Job account number, which must be unique within a job
Name – Job account name to best describe for selection and reporting.
Start Date – Date that this job account starts. Transactions older than this date are not prevented.
End Date – Date that this job account is estimated to end. Transactions later than this date are not prevented.

Estimations

Income – The amount you expect to bill for this portion of the job.
Cost – The amount you expect to expense for this portion of the job, including both labour and purchases.
Gross Profit – The calculated difference between the estimated Income and Cost.
Hours – The number of labour hours you expect to spend on this portion of the job.
Estimated By – The person providing the estimate, either the full name or initials.

Reference – Information to describe the purpose of this job account portion.

Job Account Summary

A grid is displayed showing the job account totals for all transactions posted to this job account, what was originally estimated, and the variance between these amounts. This is useful to track how much of this job account has been completed, how close to the original estimate did the job transactions compare, and how profitable this job portion was.

Hours – Sum of all hours posted from timecards for this account.
Income – Total income amount posted from sales for this account.
Expense – Total expense amount posted from purchases or timecards for this account.
GP$ – Total Gross Profit amount from this account.
GP% – Total Gross Profit percentage calculated from the Income and Expenses.

Entries

The Entries tab displays all transactions that have been posted with a reference to this job and any account. Here is where you can see the detailed breakdown of the Actual hours, expenses and income for each job account. You can also export the grid contents to an Excel or CSV file, or create a new ad-hoc Job Entry for this job to record any income or expenses that didn’t go through another module.

Job No – Job number, which will be only for this job being edited.
Account No – Job account number.
Date – Invoice entry date. If the date was changed on the Job tab of AR or AP invoices, this value is not sent to Job Costing.
Source – The module where the transaction was posted from. This could be Sales Order, Purchase Order, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Payroll, General Ledger, or JC (Job Costing entry).
Hours – Number of hours posted for any transaction type.
Expense – The amount from a Sales, PO, AR, AP or Timecard detail for this job, when the GL account is either a Cost of Sales or Expense account.
Income – The amount from a Sales or AR detail for this job, when the GL account is a Revenue account.
Type – A transaction type depending on the Source. Generally there is only one type per source, and this will be blank for GL or JC entries.
Entity – The Vendor, customer or employee number of the transaction. This will be blank for GL or JC entries.
Currency – Currency of the transaction. A blank value means that the base currency was used.
Document – The Invoice number from a Sales or Purchase order, or the Timecard number from Payroll. For AR or AP transactions, the Reference value will appear here if one was entered, otherwise it will simply display ‘Invoice’. This will be blank for GL or JC entries.
Memo – A description for the transaction, which can come from any module transaction to display here.
Foreign Expense – The Expense amount calculated in the currency of the vendor or customer, when a currency other than base was used.
Foreign Income – The Expense amount calculated in the currency of the customer, when a currency other than base was used.

Reports

From the Jobs list screen and the reports toolbar button, you can select one or more jobs to print particular reports for the selection, or print the reports for all records. These same reports are available when editing a job and accessing the reports toolbar button at the top of the window.

Job Accounts List – Prints the selected jobs and their respective estimated and actual amounts for revenue and expenses. Within each job, each account and respective estimated and actual expenses and revenue are printed. This report is useful either when printing a single job, or a selection of jobs from the Job List screen.

Job List – Prints the selected jobs and their respective estimated and actual amounts for revenue and expenses. This report is most useful when printing a selection of jobs from the Job List screen.