Some jobs will be more tightly managed than other jobs, particularly if you’ve committed to complete the work for a fixed price. For jobs like these, the project manager can set a budget for each cost centre. If the job has originated from a quote that was set up in Abio, the budget for each cost centre will be generated from the amounts on the quote.
If one of the jobs you are managing has budgets set, this tab will let you record your progress to date. The progress you’ve made, together with the costs that have been posted to the job, will be used to forecast the total cost for each centre.
To see what this looks like, we’ll schedule a crew to work on a job that has budget amounts set up for its cost centres.
We’ve generated job 8 from a quote we’ve put together as a sample. When we go to the ‘Budget Tracking’ tab, it will display the budgeted amounts for the cost centres for this job.
The first block shows what costs have been posted to this centre.
Currently there aren’t any, because we just added it. As labour, equipment and materials are posted to the job costing system, this number will be updated. For the sake of our example, we’ll go back in time and post some labour to this cost centre. Here we’ve put a crew of 10 on this job for a day.
Running that payroll updates the costs for the centre the labour is posted to.
Our forecasted cost isn’t looking too good, but that’s because we haven’t recorded any progress. If we’ve spent $3,175, and the budget is $8,064, we should be a fair way through the job. Let’s measure that we’re 45% done.
The forecast is that we’ll spend $6,032.78 to complete work on this cost centre.
The block on the right shows the current budget and the projected profit/loss for this cost centre.
Back on Abio desktop, you’ll be able to run consolidated cost reports that look at the job as a whole, how each cost centre is progressing, and get a forecast cost for the entire job.