Let Abio know what you are budgeting for each cost centre and what portion of the work you’ve completed, and Abio will use that information to forecast your costs for that job.
Each cost centre records your budget to complete that work. It also accumulates all the expenses to date. To indicate your progress, you will assign a unit for each cost centre and record how many units are completed. Units can be things like linear feet, man hours, percentage, or per unit.
Example 1: You’re building a condominium, and you have a cost centre for drywalling. The units on the drywall cost centre can indicate you’re measuring each unit in the condominium. If so, you’ll record the unit as ‘PER’. If there are 48 units in the condominium, the budgeted quantity will be 48. If you’ve finished the drywalling in 30 of the 48 units, your quantity will be 30. Abio will then take into account the amount of money you’ve spent to complete the 30 units and forecast how much you will spend to finish drywalling all 48 units.
Taking a Snapshot
Before you start measuring and recording your progress, you’ll want to take a snapshot of your job costs to date. Snapshots are a record of the costs incurred to date and the associated budget forecast. While the costs for each centre continue to change as you post to them, the snapshot is static. In this way, your measurements as of when you took the snapshot will exactly relate to the snapshot expenses. If you don’t take a snapshot and payroll and material purchases continue to increment the centre costs, your forecast will think you’ve spent more to get where you are than you actually have.
Recording Progress
There are two ways to record progress quantities in Abio.
Recording Unit Quantities on the desktop
While unit quantities are displayed on the Centre Entry screen, they are actually updated from the Unit Quantities Progress screen. Only the latest unit quantity is displayed on the Centre Entry screen. The Unit Quantities Progress screen provides a controlled approach to unit quantity entry that allows you to review past progress entries. To enter unit quantities, navigate to [e] Job Costing, then [i] Unit Quantities Progress.
The list displayed shows the latest quantity entries for each centre. You can change the ‘only newest?’ flag to ‘N’ to display all the quantities that have been entered.
Click on the Details tab to enter a progress quantity. The screen shows the quantity that was budgeted and the previously recorded quantity.
If a snapshot is in progress, you will be asked if this progress is part of that snapshot.
If you say yes, the current quantity will copy to the centre’s snapshot quantity and forecasting will take this new quantity into account relative to the snapshot costs are.
If you say no, the quantity will only apply to the current quantity to date.
Web App
You can also enter quantities from our web app. The web app and the desktop app are two different entry screens for the same information. Both are applied to centres in chronological order.
Unit Quantity Reports
Unit Quantity Entry Sheet
This report is a worksheet you can print out and fill in on-site. You can expand the detail if you want room to mark down notes on each cost centre.
Unit Quantity Overrun Report
This report only shows cost centres where the amount of work done exceeds what was budgeted.
Centre Productivity Report
This report compares the rate you’ve budgeted for each centre against the actual rate you’ve incurred. Budget rates are calculated as the budgeted cost per total unit quantity. Actual rates are the costs-to-date per unit quantities to date.