Jobs

When you start work with a new client, or, when you start a new contract with an existing client, that work is identified as a job. To set up a job, navigate to [e] Job Costing, then [a] Job Entry.

Abio displays a list of your current jobs.

Job Details

Click on the Details tab to add or update a job.

If you click on the action field, Abio displays a list of actions.

Job Actions

Inquire

The inquire actions lets you view, but not change, a job record.

Add

Add a new job.

Batch

This action lets you update a batch of jobs in a single step.

You can manage changes to ranges of jobs, areas, and centres.

Change

Make changes to the current job.

Delete

Delete a job that has no areas.

Forecast

Update the forecasted cost to complete each cost centre for the current job.

Print

Print, email, or export the current job to an excel spreadsheet.

Renumber

Change the job number on this record and all related areas, centres, invoices, timesheets, purchase orders, etc.

Snapshot

It’s challenging to forecast the costs for a job when payroll, purchases and invoices keep changing the current costs on the job. You’ll assess your progress as of a certain day, but the costs will keep flowing in from the payables, receivables, equipment, and payroll.

The snapshot action copies the current revenue and costs for each posting type in each cost centre. The project manager can record progress quantities as they apply to the snapshot amounts, and get an accurate forecast as of that date.

Learn more about snapshots here.

Unaudited change

This mostly applies to the financial amounts. The dollar amounts are continuously updated by the subsystems. If, for some reason, they are inaccurate, a system administrator can update them using this action.

Job Entry Fields

Active?

Only active jobs can be posted to.

Jobsite Office

These fields identify the main office on the job site, as opposed to the client’s office.

Address

• description,
• address line 1,
• address line 2,
• city,
• province,
• postal code,
• office phone,
• office fax

Accounts Receivable

These fields support time and materials billings.

Client, client job, client p/o, item

Recording the client information on the job makes reports easier to read.

Fixed Price?

If you’ve negotiated a fixed price on this job, you’ll want to keep a close eye on how much you’ve billed your client to date. The fixed price field is a selection criteria on the J/C Area P/O Tracking report. That report allows you to set alerts when the criteria you select are met. For instance, you can ask it to alert you when the costs for fixed-price jobs are within 10% of the purchase order amount.

admin fee

If you’ve negotiated an administration fee, enter the percent amount here. Abio includes this flag in the Job List report.

Abio will also include a line item for the admin fee when it creates invoices from daysheets.

Disperse Labour Billings?

This flag controls how the Intercompany Billing treats payroll labour. That’s the utility that allows a labour subsidiary company to pass the labour costs on to a parent company marked up at the Time & Materials rates. If you set this flag to ‘Y’es, payroll labour will be billed to the cost centre it is dispersed to. If you set this flag to ‘N’o, payroll labour will be billed to the centre it was originally posted to. You can learn more about labour dispersions here.

Equipment Revenue Area, Equipment Revenue Centre

These two fields identify which area and centre Intercompany Billing should bill equipment costs to.

T&M Equipment Rate

You can have one set of equipment, that you charge out at different rates depending on the job and the client. Set this field to indicate which set of equipment rates to use when generating the Time and Materials reports.

T&M Labour Rate

Like equipment, you can charge your people out at different rates depending on where they’re working and under what conditions. Your pay scale might be lower in cities with a lower cost of living, like Winnipeg, and higher in a city like Vancouver. You may negotiate lower rates for longer term jobs, and higher rates for remote jobs.

Set this field to indicate which set of rates different occupations will be charged out at. You can also set up rates person by person. The Time and Materials reports and daysheets will calculate the cost of labour by applying these rates.

Labour Markup %

If you just plan to add a markup to your labour rates, define that here. The Time and Materials reports and daysheets will calculate the cost of labour using this markup.

Material Markup %

Typically a markup is charged on materials purchased for a project. This covers the overhead you incur when you source materials, purchase them, and deliver them to the worksite. The Time and Materials reports and daysheets will calculate the cost of materials using this markup.

smtc per hour

This field covers the costs of small tools. If your client is paying an hourly amount to cover the purchase of small tools, enter that here. The Time and Materials reports and daysheets will include the cost of small tools based on this rate applied to all regular, time and a half, and overtime hours.

Accounts Payable

P/O use job address?

When you print a purchase order, an address is displayed at the top. Set this flag to ‘Y’es if the purchase order should display the job’s address. Set it to ‘N’o if the purchase order should display the company’s address.

Last Job P/O

Abio provides an option to generate sequential purchase order numbers each time you add a new purchase order. This field records the most recent purchase order number for the current job.

To turn this option on, navigate to [i] Administration, then [e] Properties Entry.

Change the ‘auto-generate p/o no’ to ‘Y’es to have Abio generate purchase order numbers for new purchase orders.

Payroll

Reg hours/day

When you add a payroll timesheet, Abio produces a warning when the number of regular hours exceed this number.

If the employee is setup to receive LOA or mileage amounts, Abio will default the number of hours to the number of regular hours, unless they exceed the job’s regular hours per day.

Include Staff Hours?

When payroll hours are posted to the job cost centres, you can use this flag to control whether or not staff overtime, travel, and shutdown hours are recorded with the other others that are accumulated in the cost centres. If this flag is ‘N’, and the employee is a member of a staff union, those kinds of hours will be ignored.

Timesheet Prefix, Last Timesheet, Timesheet Sign Line

These fields are used by the C/C Time Entry Report.

WCB Class

Payroll timesheets posted to this job will use this WCB class as a default.

G/HST Rule

Payroll timesheets posted to this job will use this GST rule as a default. This determines how GST or HST rebates will be claimed.

Concurrent crew memberships?

This flag controls whether employees assigned to this job can be on crews for other jobs or not.

Equipment

Time Entry Sheet Approver

The Equipment Time Entry Sheet will display either the Project Manager, the Equipment Manager, or the Department name in the report title depending on this value.

Management

Superintendent

This field is primarily information about the job. It is included in the J/C Job List report, the J/C Job First 6 Months Report, the J/C Job Last 6 Months Report, the E/Q Rental Agreements by Job in Client, and the E/Q Rental Agreements Coming Due reports.

Parent job

Abio allows you to tie two jobs together in a way that one job, the shadow job, contains the real costs of doing business. These costs can then be billed to a parent job using the Intercompany Billing utility. Reports can be run against the parent job for the client’s benefit to let them see what their job costs are.

If this is a shadow job, we conventionally prefix the job number with a Z. Record the parent job number (the job number without a Z prefix) in the parent job field. You’ll then be able to include data from the parent job when you run transaction reports.

freeze budget?

When a job is first being set up, there’s a budget created for each of the job’s cost centres. This is stored in the centre’s ‘original budget’ fields. It may take a while to correctly apportion the job’s budget between the various centres.

Once the project manager has finalized the original budget they can set the job’s ‘freeze budget?’ flag to prevent any further changes to the original budget amounts on the job’s cost centres. Down the road, if the scope of a project changes, budget changes will be recorded in the current budget fields on the cost centres. In this way, you can easily see the changes in the budget from when the job was first started.

job type

When you first add a new job, Abio will create an area and a set of cost centres. The job type is how you tell Abio which set of centres to create.

site contact, Site Contact Email

When day sheets are completed on the web app, an email will be sent to this email.

division

If your company is large enough to have separate divisions, you can assign jobs to divisions and report based on division.

contract company

If you’re taking on a very large job, you may choose to spread the work over several subsidiary companies within your family of companies. Use this field to record which company in your family of companies actually holds the contract for the current job.

region

If your business covers a large geographic area, you can set up regions and manage them independently of each other.

Each of the subsystems have reports that offer region as a report criteria.

dashboard group

Abio provides a variety of dashboard reports. You can isolate dashboard reporting to sets of jobs by assigning a dashboard group to each job.

Dates

start date, complete date

These fields are used for memo purposes only.

shutdown start, shutdown end

Overtime hours worked during the shutdown period are dispersed as shutdown premium hours.

The labour dispersion reports and consolidated cost reports report the shutdown premiums.

snapshot date

This is the last date a snapshot was taken for this jobs. Snapshots are a static record of the costs for each of the job’s cost centres. Abio uses them to forecast the costs to complete each centre.

last update

This is the most recent of:

• change to this job, or
• the date an invoice, or
• the date a payment was posted, or
• the last time a centre was changed.

It’s an indication of how active the job is.

Memo

This is a free-form memo that only appears on this screen.

Job Financials

Click on the third tab of the Job Entry screen to review the job’s financial summary.

The majority of these fields are populated by the system:

original budget

The job’s original budget is an accumulation of the original budget as recorded on each of the job’s cost centres.

current budget

The job’s original budget is an accumulation of the original budget as recorded on each of the job’s cost centres. The current budget amounts can be updated directly on the centre entry screen. They can also be updated by recording amounts on the Budget Transfer entry screen. Doing so this way gives you a history of budget changes.

to date costs

The job’s costs to date are updated when job costing is posted from payroll or the payables subsystems.

to date revenue

The job’s revenue to date is updated each time an A/R invoice is posted. Note that taxes aren’t included as revenue, as they are remitted to the government.

to date payments

The job’s payments to date are updated each time a payment is processed in the A/P subsystem. Note that the payments to date don’t include GST, as that amount will be recovered through GST/HST rebates.

committed costs

Committed costs represents purchases you’ve committed to, by sending out an A/P Purchase Order, but not yet paid for by issueing an A/P Invoice. This field is incremented each time a purchase order is issued for materials, and then decremented when the purchase order is converted to an invoice. At that point the cost is recorded in the to date costs field.

expected costs, expected revenue

Use the ‘E’xpect action to enter these amounts. They will be reported in the Job Profit Accrual report, along with other dollar values from this tab.

G/L costs and G/L revenue

For each job, the G/L Year-End process populates the year opening values for G/L costs and revenue from the previous year.

After that, whenever timesheets, a/p invoices, or a/r invoices are posted to jobs, the G/L Update records those amounts as job costs. The control accounts for job costs contain the totals for all jobs. At the same time, each individual job is updated with the amounts that are specifically posted to them. Amounts posted to job costs display in the G/L costs columns. Amounts posted to job revenue display in the G/L revenue columns.

The hotlinks for each G/L period link to the transactions that contribute to that total. You can further drill down from each transaction to the originating timesheet or invoice.

Shipping Destinations

A large job site might have several different shipping locations. In our example, we have a main gate:

a south gate,

and a fabrication plant.

We’ll be able to specify which shipping destination on purchase orders:

ACTIONS

The following actions are available:

• ‘A’dd a shipping destination for the current job.
• ‘C’hange the current shipping destination.
• ‘D’elete the current shipping destination.
• ‘I’nquire allows you to view the information for the shipping destination.

FIELDS

shipping destination– key field, populated by the system in sequential order.

display order – numeric, up to 2 digits – must be present on an Add action – determines the order the entry will appear in the drop down list of destinations for P/O Entry

name is a key field and cannot be blank. The name field will appear in the drop down list.

• address1
• address2
• City
• Prov – must be valid 2 digit province/state code – if this field is blank country is available
• Country –defaults from province/state entry – blank Prov code allows modification of this field
• postal code – should be A9A9A9 for Canada and 99999 or 99999-9999 for USA.

contact name, contact phone, fax, and contact email are memo fields. You can choose to include them in custom email templates.

active? – must be one of ‘Y’es, branch is active or ‘N’o. Inactive branches will not appear in the drop down lists.