Cost Setup Overview
If you are using all of the facilities available in the Costing module you should consider the following priority of activities.
Review the Costing Options and make any changes necessary. This allows you to redefine the terminology used on each window of the costing system. You may choose between recording turnover figures as a true cost, or as an uplifted cost that reflects any overhead recovery or profit added to cost.
Enter details of any Resources you will require in transactions, this is a price list for charging out non stock items, such as staff, departments or equipment.
Set up a skeleton Project, (providing it is relevant for you to use similar formats for all of your projects), in the format you are likely to use most. Enter a Cost Centre for each of the categories of expense you may wish to allocate into your template.
Cost Centre records for a single Project, Cost Centres (by default) provide just one level of sub analysis for each Project. You should consider extending this through use of the Groups feature, which enables you to create a Cost Centre hierarchy of Grand Parent, Parent, Child etc. down to a maximum of ten levels. The system will total values (Budgets, Costs, Sales Values etc.) for each Cost Centre, for each Group Level and for the Project in Total.
Cost Centres
Each Cost Centre can collect the value of Sales and Purchase Invoices, Sales and Purchase Payments and Nominal Journals.
Every type of transaction that can be posted within any of the modules can be posted to a Project and to a Cost Centre within it.
You can choose between posting all Cash Transactions to one Cost Centre, or posting them to as many Cost Centres as are entered for each Project.
Similarly you can estimate a Sales value for each Cost Centre individually, or you may prefer to estimate the total Project Sales value to just one Cost Centre.
You can enter an uplift percentage for every Cost Centre. If you have some costs that attract uplift, and other costs that do not, you may have to enter two or more Cost Centres with similar names, to ensure uplift is only calculated where necessary.
Remember that if you have entered an uplift for Resources, and you post their costs to Cost Centres which also have an uplift, the Cost Centre will uplift again giving a doubling effect, in some circumstances this is precisely the effect you may be looking for.
When you have completed the entry of one Project complete with Cost Centres, you can use the Duplicate function to create duplicates as a 'stock' of template Project records sufficient to meet your immediate needs for other Projects.
You are now ready to use Costing.
The system can report at Project level, Cost Centre level or Transaction level, and you can select or exclude any combination of record status and transaction status, and include transactions from other ledgers .
Before you start
When using the Costing module, there are many facilities that you can configure to suit your own company's individual needs.
Select System Control
Select Costing Options:
Select Payroll Link tab, this card is used to set the Payroll linking options.
Select Transactions tab, this card is used to set the options used when entering Costing Transactions.
Select Info menu, and then Main Entry, and from the Table Name menu, select Definable Field Labels, to display a window where you can change the terminology used as field prompts within the Costing module, and wherever Costing is used.