If your quote is accepted, you can use it as the starting point for the job.
This is pretty valuable, because you’ve itemized what you expect everything to cost your customer. In addition, if your cost estimate templates are set up with your actual costs, you also have an accounting of exactly what you think the job should cost you to complete.
Abio has a built-in forecasting utility. If Abio knows what you’ve budgeted for each cost centre, it only needs to know how much progress you’ve made at any given time. If it knows that, it can produce a reasonable forecast for what it will cost to finish your job. This is because all the job costs are updated to the cost centres every time you use the ‘Cost to G/L and J/C’ utilities for payroll and payables. The job costing is also updated each time you invoice or receive payments. All this information feeds into the forecast.
Cost Estimate Template
Before we create a job, we have to ensure the cost estimate templates we’re using has a job type recorded. The cost estimate categories also need to identify the cost centres and cost type. The budget for these will be set to the sum of the estimate amounts. To review the estimate template, you can click on the label.
Or, you can navigate to [b] Receivables, then [u] Set Up, then [g] Estimate Type.
Click on the Details tab to verify the job type is populated. In this case, it is using the RESIDENTIAL job type. The job type tells Abio which cost centres to create for the new job.
Abio uses the job budget columns when it determines the budget for your new job’s cost centres.
Create Job
Click the ‘Create Job…’ button to create a new job record and cost centres. The budget for the cost centres will be populated from your cost estimate components.
Abio prompts you to create a job.
When the job is complete, it will be recorded on the quote.
If you click on the area label, the centres that were created are listed on the ‘Add and Remove Centres’ tab.
In our simple example, we mapped the cost estimate components to cost centre 15101. If we click on the hotlink for that centre, we can see that the budget is set to the amount that was estimated.
