Payroll - Job Costing

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If anyone can offer suggestions on this I would greatly appreciate it. We issue payroll at our company bi-weekly. After payroll has been processed (we use an outside payroll company), I then come into sage and enter all the employees hours and job cost their time to the various jobs and work orders (we have the service module - but its the same thing as just posting it to a job if you don't have that). The issue I am running into is that we cannot see the labor until after two weeks. That is a serious lag for us when we want to review work orders that are completed in just one day. Does anyone have any better way of posting payroll to the various jobs or job costing their payroll? I thought that maybe the daily payroll would help, but again, it doesn't actually job cost anything. Nothing actually gets job costed until I hit the final compute. Help??

I tried calling support and she recommended making sure we input the hours the employee is supposed to work when we enter the work order but again that doesn't help us. We want to track how much time they actually are spending out there and see which jobs we are making or losing money, etc. So seeing the real costs.

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    If you use Daily Payroll, you can run the 6-1-12-31 report and get Accrued Payroll based on the unposted payroll hours.  Also, the 6-1-3-41 report shows the Payroll only detail with accrued payroll.  This only works for Job Costing and not Work Order only reporting.  Support is correct.  If you aren't using Jobs, then you should record actual payroll hours on the work order and import them into payroll.  That way you can easily reconcile payroll hours charged on a work order to the payroll hours paid to the employee.

  • 0 in reply to Kevin M Smith

    This still doesn't help me though because we want to see the costs for the work orders. (So if you look at a work order, and view - service order costs. Or by running various reports.) We are having issues with employees spending more time then they are supposed to out on the work orders. We can't put in the actual hours after the work order has already been posted/invoiced. So basically we have to do it from the payroll section. Support understood what I was asking but she didn't know of a good solution. I was hoping someone else would. We don't want to see a report of the employees hours, we just want to be able to look at different reports in the service module and see the labor hours spent on the job. But didn't want to have to wait until payroll is posted because there is a 2 week lag or more. Thank you so much though and hopefully someone has a good method for handling this situation!

  • 0 in reply to Exclusive

    You state that they are spending more "time" than they are supposed to on the work orders.  So you already know the "time" they are spending, just not the burdened cost.   You can probably write a work order report that will add the burden, but the "time" seems to really be the issue.

    If you are saying that they are turning in more hours on their timecards than what they reported on the work order for billing, then tell them from now on they only get paid for what they report on the work orders.  If you enter their time there before you bill it, then import their time.  When they only have 24 hours imported but claim they are working 40, show them what got imported and short pay them that week.  It will only happen once.  You should also look into GPS systems for tracking their whereabouts.  I know some companies have discovered their technicians were at home or elsewhere when they claim to be at the work site.

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    Run a trial compute on the records you have then create a query in 5-2-2 to reflect the unposted labor and add it as a supplement to your job cost read-out.  

  • 0 in reply to JoshH

    We are having the same issue - our payroll is bi-weekly so we can't see accurate job profit reports until the final compute.  Our Consultant told us that the Service Module would fix this, so we paid for the Service Module - only to find that it just records total hours - it doesn't differentiate between regular and overtime (???)... so that doesn't help us at all.  

    We can't wait the full two weeks to run job reports.   Any other suggestions?

  • 0 in reply to smaris
    SUGGESTED

    Have you looked at report 11-1-2-#91 estimated Work Order Profitability?  

    I just ran it on the Sample Company and it pulled an estimated labor cost value based on the technician's time put on the work order.    #72 is editable so you could add a burden rate using a calculated field.

  • 0 in reply to Char DeLange
    SUGGESTED

    For construction projects (not service work orders) you can use the cost to complete menu 6-8 for hours or costs to complete reports which will add burden to the payroll costs.

  • 0 in reply to Char DeLange

    If I enter within a workorder just to see the reports then I will still have to go back and re-enter everything into payroll - since when the Workorder is imported there is no differentiation between regular and overtime hours.  

    If I make invoices using T&M billing (to ensure that the time gets tracked and marked as billed), then we have to wait the full two weeks until the final compute is done before we can create the invoice.

  • 0 in reply to smaris

    If it is that important, why not switch to weekly payroll?

  • 0 in reply to Char DeLange

    I'd actually need daily payroll then.  We tested daily payroll, and it seems to create issues with the taxes etc.

  • 0 in reply to Exclusive
    SUGGESTED
    Hi Kevin. I was browsing through the forums and ran across this issue regarding how to post costs against the work order AFTER the work order has been closed. If I understand the issue, I believe I have a solution. When speaking with someone at Sage support regarding a different issue, they explained a scenario that (although different than your issue) I believe it will address your issue. Open menu 1-3 (as if you are going to enter a journal entry, although you won't actually enter/save a 1-3 journal entry). From the 1-3 menu, select the option to "view job costs" (I'm not at my computer, so I don't recall exactly what the menu says, however, I'll try to convey the concept). This is the same window that you see as the second step (second window) when recording a 1-3 entry whenever one of the line transactions hits the direct cost account. It's where you enter the job number, cost code, cost type, amount, etc. Notice that in this window there's also a column where you can enter a WORK ORDER number. Essentially, this is a "back door" where you can shift around or update job costs. It is here where you'll want to enter additional labor costs associated with whichever work order you're trying to update. Keep in mind that you shouldn't just arbitrarily be adding costs, rather, you should be "offsetting" costs from one location to another. In other words, we assume that the costs were already booked somewhere—such as miscellaneous/odd jobs, or something like that—so you wouldn't be adding an extra, arbitrary amounts that were just pulled out of the sky. So you'll want to create a positive expense for the target work order (whether it's labor, burden, or whatever), then create a negative (offsetting) expense to whichever account you originally coded the expense. If the work order is closed, then, as you stated, the system no longer allows you to update costs via the dispatch tab, so this method allows you to reallocate the costs to the desired work order, which will show up on all the reports. Does that make sense? I hope I understood the question correctly. Good luck!
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    Put the date in the grid as the date you want to see it. 

    For instance, our grid date is a week earlier than our Payroll date.