The first tab is the Jobs tab. Typically, a job will span many weeks and likely months, and it will initially be set up in the office. A client will contact the company, work will be negotiated, a billing style will be agreed on, and the job will be created in Abio.
If, for some reason, you’ve started a new job without that lead-up, you can briefly identify it here. In Abio, costs are posted to either a job or a G/L account. Creating a job here gives you a job number to post timesheets, equipment, and materials to.
Click on the Jobs tab to add a new job and/or area.
Adding a New Area to an Existing Job
Small jobs will just have one area. A large job might be split up into several areas, with each area representing different physical locations, or perhaps different stages of work.
Day Sheets are the report the client sees that itemizes all the labour, material, and equipment charges for their job on a given day. These reports are based on a single job and area, so if you want to split out work on a separate day sheet, you can do that by creating a separate area under the same job to post the billings to.
You can add a new area to an existing job on this tab. Click on the radio button ‘Add or change area’. You’ll then be able to select the job in the drop-down field:
Once you select a job, the job details will display:
At this point, you have a number of choices. The current areas for the selected job are listed below the area.
If you want to add a new area, type an area code that doesn’t currently exist for this job. Here we’re creating the area ‘NEW1’:
When the app recognizes that you’ve made a change, the ‘submit’ button will display.
Before you create the new job or area, you should give some consideration to the type of job it is. Your company will have set up different cost centres for different styles of work. Click on the drop down selection and choose the most appropriate cost centres for this work.
Don’t worry about choosing the wrong set of centres. These can be corrected back at the office.
When you’re satisfied, click ‘submit’ the new area and cost centres will be created. You will now be able to post to that job.
Uploading Change Requests and Purchase Orders
If you type one of the existing areas into the area field, that area will be loaded. Here we’ve typed 20000, and that area was loaded into the fields:
If you have documentation you would like to record for this area, perhaps a change request, or if the client has sent you a purchase order, you can upload it to this job and area. The document will have to be in electronic format on your laptop. If the client mailed you the document, save it somewhere you can find it, the desktop for instance. If you have a paper copy you can take a picture and save the picture on the desktop or in your documents folder. Click on the blue upload button.
When you click the upload button, you’ll be prompted for a file. Select the electronic copy of the document you’ve saved on your laptop.
Abio will confirm the document was successfully uploaded.
If you’ve uploaded a document, a hotlink will indicate it’s presence and let you view it:
Clicking on the ‘view uploaded document’ link will display a list of documents for this job. Pictures display right on the window, but PDFs must be viewed in a PDF viewer:
Click on the ‘View PDF’ button to see your document:
If you upload an image, it will display in the document preview.
Click the <back> button to return to the Job screen.
Uploaded Documents
Not only are these documents viewable on the Abio Web App, they’re also available on the desktop app. This means they can be included in the billing package when the daysheets you create are invoiced to the client.
To view the documents on desktop Abio, navigate to [e] Job Costing, then [c] Area Entry.
The filenames of the documents you uploaded are listed with their area.
If you select that record and click on the Supporting Documents tab, you’ll see the documents that were uploaded from the web app.
When the Billing Department puts together an invoice for this client, they’ll be able to include the documents you upload with the invoice package.