Forecasting Job Costs

If you are new to using Chronicle, the simplest way to forecast job costs is to just enter the sold price and any possible purchase order amounts. This allows Chronicle to use the defaults set in the Main System Setup to do the forecasting for you. There are three job types that would be affected by these settings:

• Jobs that only have in house labor.
• Jobs that only use subcontractors.
• Jobs that use both in house labor and subcontractors.

Example #1 - Jobs that only have in house labor:

• Enter a job or navigate to a job already in Chronicle and on the Dept/Activity tab enter the sold price for the department you are working on and hit enter.
• The final price, total expected costs, and projected cost% fields will auto-populate for you.
• In this example, the sold price for the Water Damage department was $500 with the expected cost for labor of $100 which the system setup says should be 20% of the total revenue. The job cost tab pulls all the financial data into one place for easy viewing. As the job progresses you will be able to see actual costs showing when labor is entered into Chronicle.

 Example #2 - Jobs that only uses subcontractors:

• Enter a job or navigate to a job already in Chronicle and on the Dept/Activity tab enter the sold price for the department you are working on and hit enter.
• The final price, total expected costs, and projected cost% fields will auto-populate for you.
• In this example, the sold price for the construction department was $3000 with the expected costs of $1500 for the subcontractor which the system setup says should be 50% of the total revenue.
• On the P.O.’s (purchase orders) tab, add a new purchase order totaling what you will be paying the subcontractor to do the job. All that is needed is the dollar amount of the PO. You will most likely also create a document for this PO which you will save to the job file.
• In this example, the total of $1500 will be paid to the subcontractor.
• The job cost tab pulls all the financial data into one place for easy viewing. Eventually, in QuickBooks you will enter a bill or payable and it is this amount would be bridged from QB into the actual column of the job costing screen after the QB integration has occurred.

 Example #3 - Jobs that use both in house labor and subcontractors:

• Enter a job or navigate to a job already in Chronicle and on the Dept/Activity tab enter the sold price for the departments you are working on and hit enter. This will represent labor costs until you transfer some of that amount to the sub/materials cost when you put in the PO.
• The final price, total expected costs, and projected cost% fields will auto-populate for you.
• On the P.O.’s (purchase orders) tab, add a new purchase order totaling what you will be paying the subcontractor to do which is $1500. Make sure you pick the correct department. You will most likely also create a document for this PO which you will save to the job file.
• The Job cost tab will reflect how much of the costs is for in house labor and how much is for the subcontractor. You could even have a job where there is a subcontractor AND in house labor on the same department. Chronicle will do the math for you.