If you set a budget for each of your cost centres, Abio will take the costs that have been posted to each centre, and the progress you’ve made, and forecast how close you are keeping to your current budget.
In the early stages of your job, Abio uses your budgeted rate to determine how much the remainder of the work will cost. At the beginning of a job, there are typically extra costs associated with starting work. Purchasing materials, acquiring permits, planning. Deferring to the budgeted rate at this stage acknowledges those extra costs, but recognizes those extra costs won’t be happening in the later stages of work.
As you progress through your work, Abio will begin to curve more towards the actual costs you are encountering, rather than your budgeted costs. If things are costing more than you anticipated, and you are well into the work, Abio will report budget overages.
Area Consolidated Cost Report
The Area Consolidated Cost Report shows rates for each of the centre’s cost types, grouped by area. The rates are the costs per unit quantity for each of the budgeted costs, forecasted costs, and actual to-date costs. Abio’s forecasting is based on these rates. It applies them in different weights depending on how far along you are in your job. You can use this report to better understand how the forecasted costs are being determined.
This report also lets you sort on Client P/O, Pay item, or Construction Work Package (cWp). These are fields you can code on your cost centres that map back to your client’s records. In this way, you can provide them with a report they can easily rationalize against their own codes.
The gain/loss column shows the difference between the budgeted amount and the forecast amount.
Centre Consolidated Cost Report
Like the Area Consolidated Cost report, the Centre Consolidated Cost report shows the rates (costs per unit quantity) that contribute to the forecasted costs. This report is presented by centres in areas.
The summary version of this report shows the group totals based on the ‘G’roup type centres:
Snapshots
If you have a large job with many ongoing costs, your progress and your costs can be out of step with each other. You may enter your progress one day, and have large costs posted in the following days, When Abio forecasts, it will see the earlier progress and the later costs, so that forecast will become less and less accurate. When you go around and measure your progress again, the forecast will again be more accurate.
To deal with these shifts, Abio lets you record a static version of the costs posted to your cost centres. We call this a snapshot. Costs are recorded and stored as snapshot costs. Forecasting amounts are based on the snapshot costs, so the snapshot forecast is more accurate than the ongoing forecasting.
It might be that additional costs, such as materials invoices or payroll, are received after the snapshot date but contribute to the progress recorded for the snapshot. Authorized users will be able to apply these costs to the snapshot amounts, to ensure greater forecasting accuracy. When posting amounts to jobs that have a current snapshot, those users will be asked whether to include the invoice amounts in the current snapshot. If they do, the invoice will be counted with the costs for the current snapshot. And, that cost will be used, together with the progress previously recorded, to provide a budget forecast.
Snapshot History
You can review how your job has progressed by looking at the history of budget forecast snapshots. These are listed for each cost centre in their own tab. For each snapshot you take, you can look back on your progress and costs, and how you gained or lost on your budget for each cost centre.
Snapshot History Report
Use the Snapshot History report to review your past progress snapshots. Navigate to [e] Job Costing, then [g] Centre Reports, then [p] Centre Snapshot History.
You can select a range of jobs, areas, centres, and a starting point for snapshot dates.
And then review your gain/loss on your budgeted forecast for each center and cost type.
