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How to get real time job costing expenses and why

Written by: Shirley Coop

Article Overview: Have you considered tracking job cost expenses as your jobs are in progress? If your jobs have a short life cycle or are small you may not have the need to track job costing information. However, the more complicated your job processes and configurations and the longer the life cycle the more critical to track real time actual expenses and committed expenses while the job is in progress.

How to get real time job costing expenses and why

Have you considered tracking job cost expenses as your jobs are in progress? If your jobs have a short life cycle or are small you may not have the need to track job costing information. However, the more complicated your job processes and configurations and the longer the life cycle the more critical to track real time actual expenses and committed expenses while the job is in progress.
Have you ever completed a large project or job and handed that stack of paperwork to an administrative type to calculate your costs in excel? Are you one of the more organized managers who tracks your costs in excel as the job is in progress? Months after a large project are you still recording lagging unexpected expense items? Have no fear you are not alone. But this can be easier.
The main components to consider when tracking jobs expenses


Material
Labor
Outside services


Other considerations should be labor overhead and/or burden overhead. Over head are all the payroll related expenses not included in worked hour gross wages such as insurance, bonus, vacation and so on.
Overhead may include your rent, phone expenses, administrative and sales salaries and so on. For larger jobs change orders should also be tracked separately and should include revenue and costs estimates. You want to make sure change orders are billed back to your customer prior to the job being considered closed. The last factor to consider when working on managing total project costs are committed costs. Committed costs are goods or services contracted for that have not been received or expensed to a job.


Finally what you should also think about is establishing budgeted expenses in the beginning of a job. Somehow, someone calculated what they thought the job was going to cost. Hopefully, they used that information to then calculate how much to charge the client. What this exercise does for you is give you the tool for 2 things.

a. Monitor actual expenses to budgeted expenses as the job is in progress. This is extremely important if you have budgeted for example 100 hours on a job and when you are 50% thru the job if you have already expensed 80 hours to the job Houston it could be a big red flag that you are way over budget. In this example at least you know about this prior to the completion of the job and if there is a chance you can modify expenses to the job you are in a position to do so.

b. Measure actual expenses to budgeted expenses when the job is done so you will know your real profitability.
Just like any good system that delivers good business information you will need to find both a software that provides this type of tracking features and find someone who can help you set up this type of system so that it works in tandem with your business processes to deliver good business information.

While the economy has everyone shopping for bargains be careful to interview the person who will be helping you set this up. Ask for referrals. One of the most important steps in the process is a needs analysis. A lot of businesses install the software before they review what it is they need to software to help them do. A complete discussion of how you need reporting on recorded job costing transactions eliminates spending a considerable amount of time retrofitting your system once you get up and going.

Just be aware no one will care about paying close attention to this type of detailed business information as you will. No one!

Shirley Coop

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Article Tags: accounting budget, actual budget expense, Peachtree job costing expense



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