Costing - In Depth

The Costing module can be used to analyse all types of work within a variety of industries, from services based industries with time and sundry materials such as graphic design, to complex engineering organisations developing custom equipment, or trading organisations wishing to have detailed costing on the running of a supplier / customer contract.

Each project can be allocated to a manager, salesman and if applicable a customer, supplier and product. Contracts can have start and finish dates as well as contract dates and period to run over. Contracts can have fixed cost centres for use within their accounting postings and can have multiple statuses from prospective, active through to complete.

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Job Window

de Facto S5 Costing provides a configurable header and detail section, with multiple user-defined job views, and immediate drill down to underlying transactional data.

Multiple project types can be defined, each having any number of item codes defined for sub-analysis of the project. The job items can also define the cost centre for postings made for that item, and the currencies to be used for sales and purchase against that item. Individual contracts can have their own contract specific items added or alternatively each project could have a unique list of items.

There is also the facility to define a multi-level hierarchy above the items for reporting on complex projects in a summarised format.

Each job is able to store multiple budgets for both the costs and revenue side of the project. Variances can then be shown against the contract budget. Budgets can be prepared from three types of data, firstly, stock items that can be issued to the contract, secondly, miscellaneous costs, and thirdly, actuals posted from the various ledgers. There is also the facility to handle time budgeting and actuals posted via time sheets.

Multiple project views are pre-defined to show, for instance, job budget only, budget vs actual, outstanding commitments, etc. Additionally the user is able to define their own project views.

Project views also provide full drill down facilities for all data displayed within them. For instance, a job item of 'foundations' may have a budget of £1000 which could be drilled down into to see how the budget was made up, it could have actual costs of £456 which could be drilled down into to see various stock issues, and an outstanding commitment of £500 for which the drill down may show outstanding purchase orders.

New features have been added to allow the Job Costing and Stock Control modules to be automatically integrated for Product Costing. This provides detailed accounting for either an individual or range of products.

Activity charge rates can be set per activity, person, resource, project and customer. Time can be measured in any increment and be rounded to the nearest whole unit if required.

de Facto S5 Costing module has a facility for time-based costing for resources and staff. Time costing is based on a hierarchy of charge rates for a user-definable range of activities. Time is recorded on daily, weekly or floating time sheets and booked to the job and item. The time spent can be detailed and flags set for chargeable or not.

de Facto S5 offers standard facilities for defining multiple levels of analysis codes on all types of records and transactions at both header and detail levels. These codes can have user-definable titles and choice lists. Many standard reports can then use these analysis codes to select and sort data.

Projects have the option of being run as simple project budgets and balances or alternatively, they can be split over multiple periods and years. This capability makes the de Facto S5 costing system ideal for those managing long term projects.

All ledger-based transactions, including nominal journals, can book costs and revenue against contracts.

All transaction types when posted are immediately updated to the respective ledgers including the Nominal Ledger. Automated postings for such items as stock, cost of sales, work in progress, accrual accounting are therefore made. All postings are defined via sophisticated 'nominal interfaces', which control the selection of nominal accounts and cost centres for stock accounts or adjustment codes, etc.

Commitment Accounting is provided as an integral aspect of the de Facto S5 financial suite. It is available through the costing module so that both outstanding sales and purchase orders can be represented on and reported against the project, as well as within the nominal ledger financial reporting.

All Logistics Suite transactions can generate commitments against jobs and then subsequently book costs, stock or revenue against the contract and items. The ability to hold stock on a job is a powerful facility, ensuring that all work in progress postings are automated.

An enhancement to Job Costing now allows default Contract Terms and Job Items to be added to each Job record for use in sales and purchase transactions.

Previously each time a sales or purchase order was raised for a Job the item and contract terms had to be manually entered. Now a default job item and contract terms can be defined against each job which saves time and ensures accuracy when inserting sales and purchase orders for jobs.

Each of the categories listed below will have multiple versions exploiting the many options that the standard reports provide.

In addition to Costing specific reports, de Facto S5 provides a comprehensive series of Standard Reports, many of which can be easily parameter driven by the user. S5 further provides the Vistas feature, which are a powerful and easy way of selecting, sorting, displaying and working with data from either single or multiple tables.