Projects & Job Costing
Job cards with stock, labour and travel, job totals, projects with phases and milestones, and invoicing the work.
A job card collects everything that goes into a piece of work for a customer: stock, labour, travel and items bought on site. You can see the running total for each job and turn the job into a draft invoice when the work is done. Larger jobs can be split into project phases and milestones.
Open a Job Card
Go to Operations → Job Costing and create a new job. Choose the customer and enter a title, description, start date and due date. The job number is filled in for you.
A job can be Open, In Progress, On Hold, Completed, Invoiced or Cancelled. Overdue jobs are listed on the job reports.
Record Work on the Job
On the job's Stock tab, add the stock items used, with quantity and unit price. The quantity is taken out of stock straight away, from the warehouse with the most stock first, and written to the stock journal. You cannot issue more than is in stock.
On the Labour tab, record the employee, a description, the date, hours and the rate per hour. You enter the rate on each line.
On the Travel tab, record the employee, the vehicle, the distance in kilometres and the rate per kilometre.
On the On-Site Orders tab, list items needed on site with quantity and unit price. Track each line as requested, ordered or received. Open on-site orders are also counted as demand in the purchasing reorder recommendations.
Issuing stock to a job reduces the quantity on hand but posts no journal. The invoice created from the job does not post cost of sales for those lines either. Ask your accountant to post a journal for the value of stock used on jobs (DR 5000 Cost of sales / CR 1500 Inventory, or as advised).
See the Job Totals
The job's Overview tab shows a summary. The job list adds up, for every job, the stock, labour, travel and on-site order lines and a grand total. These totals are line value (quantity × the price or rate you entered). They are not a full cost: there is no overhead allocation and no work-in-progress posting.
| Line type | Line value | Moves stock |
|---|---|---|
| Stock | Quantity × unit price | Yes, when added |
| Labour | Hours × rate per hour | No |
| Travel | Kilometres × rate per kilometre | No |
| On-site order | Quantity × unit price | No |
From the Job Costing screen, open Job Reports for a status summary, jobs by customer, overdue jobs and the complete job list.
Invoice the Job
On the job, click Create Invoice. A draft invoice is made with one line for each stock, labour, travel and on-site order line, VAT at 15% and payment due in 30 days. The job is marked as Invoiced.
Open the draft under Finance → Invoicing (AR). Change lines, VAT codes or income accounts if needed, then issue it. Issuing posts the invoice to the ledger and locks it.
Labour lines with a zero total are left off the invoice, so you can record time that is not charged without it appearing on the customer's invoice.
Projects: Phases and Milestones
Go to Operations → Projects. For a job card, add phases with planned start and end dates and a budgeted amount. Start and complete each phase to record actual dates.
Add milestones to a phase with a due date. Mark a milestone as achieved when it is done. A milestone can be flagged as billable with an amount or a percentage of the job.
Billing a milestone confirms it is ready to bill; it does not create an invoice. Create the invoice yourself under Finance → Invoicing (AR). The phase budget is a planning figure on the project; ledger budgets under Accounting → Budgets are set per GL account and cost centre, not per job.
Related Modules
Stock & Inventory
Stock issued to jobs comes out of your warehouses and shows in the stock journal.
Procurement & Supply Chain
Reorder recommendations include demand from open job cards.
CRM & Sales
Quotes, sales orders and invoices for your customers.
Accounting Rules
How invoices and cost of sales are posted.