Job costing and cost value reconciliation

Three feeds, netted against each other so nothing is counted twice.

• Timesheets give labour actuals: hours multiplied by the rate held on those hours.
• Purchase orders give material and plant actuals as they are receipted, pro-rated by the quantity actually received.
• The cost ledger takes everything else you post against the job.
• Committed cost is the VAT-exclusive value of issued orders not yet received. Only orders that have been sent, part-received or received count as committed — a draft or rejected order does not.
• A ledger entry linked to a purchase order supersedes the receipt figure for that order, so posting the actual invoice does not double the cost.

NoteTimesheets and purchase-order receipts feed cost automatically. Everything else is a cost ledger entry someone posts.

Six categories: labour, materials, plant, subcontractor, preliminaries and other — plus a month-by-month actual cost curve.

• Cost codes can be organised as a tree, so a company-wide cost breakdown structure is possible.
• Budgets are versioned, with a draft, active and superseded state, and record whether they came from the estimate or were entered by hand.
• The cost position tells you whether it used the budget baseline or fell back to the job’s estimate line items.

From your own cost-to-complete forecast if you have entered one, and derived from committed cost and the remaining budget if you have not — and the position always says which.

• Forecast final cost is actual cost plus cost to complete.
• Variance to budget is budget minus forecast final cost, so a negative number is a forecast overrun.
• Forecasts are entered per period end, so you keep the series rather than overwriting last month’s view.

Contract value, approved variations, revised contract value, value certified, actual cost, committed cost, cost to complete, forecast final cost, budget, variance and margin — per job and as a whole pack.

• Margin to date is value certified minus actual cost. Forecast margin is revised contract value minus forecast final cost.
• Revised contract value includes approved variations, so a grown job is reconciled against what it actually is.
• Value certified is the sum of certified payment applications up to the period end you are reporting on.
• The whole-portfolio pack carries totals across every live job and exports to CSV.

NoteThe CVR exports as CSV and JSON. There is no CVR PDF.

Yes. The WIP report shows certified value against invoiced value per job, with the gap and the retention held.

• Earned value is what has been certified; invoiced is what has actually been billed, excluding voided and credited invoices.
• Retention held is computed from certified value at the job’s retention percentage, which defaults to 5%.