Payroll - Job Costing

Question

If anyone can offer suggestions on this I would greatly appreciate it. We issue payroll at our company bi-weekly. After payroll has been processed (we use an outside payroll company), I then come into sage and enter all the employees hours and job cost their time to the various jobs and work orders (we have the service module - but its the same thing as just posting it to a job if you don't have that). The issue I am running into is that we cannot see the labor until after two weeks. That is a serious lag for us when we want to review work orders that are completed in just one day. Does anyone have any better way of posting payroll to the various jobs or job costing their payroll? I thought that maybe the daily payroll would help, but again, it doesn't actually job cost anything. Nothing actually gets job costed until I hit the final compute. Help?? 
 I tried calling support and she recommended making sure we input the hours the employee is supposed to work when we enter the work order but again that doesn't help us. We want to track how much time they actually are spending out there and see which jobs we are making or losing money, etc. So seeing the real costs.

Char DeLange · Answer

Have you looked at report 11-1-2-#91 estimated Work Order Profitability? 
 I just ran it on the Sample Company and it pulled an estimated labor cost value based on the technician's time put on the work order. #72 is editable so you could add a burden rate using a calculated field.

Char DeLange · Answer

For construction projects (not service work orders) you can use the cost to complete menu 6-8 for hours or costs to complete reports which will add burden to the payroll costs.

adjony · Answer

Hi Kevin. I was browsing through the forums and ran across this issue regarding how to post costs against the work order AFTER the work order has been closed. If I understand the issue, I believe I have a solution. When speaking with someone at Sage support regarding a different issue, they explained a scenario that (although different than your issue) I believe it will address your issue. Open menu 1-3 (as if you are going to enter a journal entry, although you won't actually enter/save a 1-3 journal entry). From the 1-3 menu, select the option to "view job costs" (I'm not at my computer, so I don't recall exactly what the menu says, however, I'll try to convey the concept). This is the same window that you see as the second step (second window) when recording a 1-3 entry whenever one of the line transactions hits the direct cost account. It's where you enter the job number, cost code, cost type, amount, etc. Notice that in this window there's also a column where you can enter a WORK ORDER number. Essentially, this is a "back door" where you can shift around or update job costs. It is here where you'll want to enter additional labor costs associated with whichever work order you're trying to update. Keep in mind that you shouldn't just arbitrarily be adding costs, rather, you should be "offsetting" costs from one location to another. In other words, we assume that the costs were already booked somewhere—such as miscellaneous/odd jobs, or something like that—so you wouldn't be adding an extra, arbitrary amounts that were just pulled out of the sky. So you'll want to create a positive expense for the target work order (whether it's labor, burden, or whatever), then create a negative (offsetting) expense to whichever account you originally coded the expense. If the work order is closed, then, as you stated, the system no longer allows you to update costs via the dispatch tab, so this method allows you to reallocate the costs to the desired work order, which will show up on all the reports. Does that make sense? I hope I understood the question correctly. Good luck!

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