About Order Entry Integration with Project and Job Costing

Overview

Order Entry provides sales order integration with Project and Job Costing.

You can create an order and specify the job (contract, project, category, and resource, if applicable) to which each order detail applies.

Project Invoicing

Order Entry lets you handle the complete order-processing cycle in Order Entry, or create the order in Order Entry and manage the billing and invoicing in Project and Job Costing (called Project Invoicing).

Note: If you create an order or shipment for a customer for which no record exists in Accounts Receivable and you select the Project Invoicing option, you will not be able to add order or shipment details unless the default template includes a tax group. (The tax group is not editable if you choose project invoicing, and it will be blank unless it is specified in the template.)

Contract and Project Types Invoiced in Order Entry
Project Type and Accounting Method Invoicing Notes

Time and Materials project, Billings and Costs or Accrual-Basis accounting method

Fixed Price project, Billings and Costs or Accrual-Basis accounting method

Can choose to invoice in Order Entry or in Project and Job Costing

If invoicing in Order Entry, the costs and revenue are sent to Project and Job Costing (PJC) from Accounts Receivable when the invoice is posted in A/R. Costs and revenue are recognized during A/R posting. You can process orders, shipments, invoices, debit notes, and credit notes in Order Entry.

If invoicing in PJC, the order is completed at shipment posting, and costs are sent to PJC for invoicing, using the Create Billing Worksheet. For Time and Materials projects, the billing type, billing rate, and extended billing amount are also sent to PJC when you post a shipment. You cannot process invoices, debit notes, or credit notes in Order Entry. Costs and revenue are recognized in PJC during revenue recognition.

Time and Materials project, Completed Project accounting method

Fixed Price project, Project Percent Complete or Completed Project accounting method

Cost Plus project, Total Costs Percentage Complete, Completed Project, Labor Hours Percentage Complete, Billings and Costs, Category Percentage Complete, or Accrual-basis accounting method

Invoicing is done by Project and Job Costing

The order is completed at shipment posting, and costs are sent to Project and Job Costing (PJC) for invoicing, using the Create Billing Worksheet.

For Time and Materials projects, the billing type, billing rate, and extended billing amount are also sent to PJC when you post a shipment.

You cannot process invoices, debit notes, or credit notes in Order Entry. Costs and revenue are recognized in PJC during revenue recognition.

Note:

One of the most important processing decisions is how you are going to invoice orders (jobs).

  • If the invoice needs to be created in Project and Job Costing, Order Entry will complete the order when you post the shipment, and prevent you from invoicing in Order Entry.
  • If you delay invoicing in Order Entry, the transaction will be sent to Project and Job Costing as unbilled, and you will have to create the invoice in Project and Job Costing or bill from Accounts Receivable.

If you create the invoice in Order Entry, you can select retainage accounting.

If you create the invoice in Project and Job Costing, you cannot select retainage accounting in Order Entry because you will determine all invoice amounts in Project and Job Costing.

Quotes and Estimates

Contracts created from Order Entry quotes start as estimates in Project and Job Costing. Detail lines that you add to an Order Entry quote update contract estimate amounts when you post the quote in Order Entry. (The contract can have an Open status, but the project status must be Estimate.)

When you change the order type to Active and post the order, Order Entry changes the project status to Open for each project to which you posted a detail.

Order Detail Lines

Each detail line on a job-related order must be applied to an existing cost category in an open contract and project.

In Project and Job Costing, each category is assigned a cost type with a cost class that can be labor, material, equipment, subcontractor, overhead, or miscellaneous.

Setting up the Project and Job Costing side includes:

Setting up Order Entry includes:

Miscellaneous Charges

Miscellaneous charges perform several functions on job-related orders:

To create miscellaneous charges for job-related orders, you must select the Allow For Jobs option on the O/E Miscellaneous Charges screen, and then specify:

Miscellaneous charges can be assigned to categories with any cost type except material. You must use item detail lines on orders for material cost types.

Note: In Project and Job Costing, you can choose for each project whether to use the amount specified in Order Entry for the miscellaneous charge, or use a default billing rate specified for the contract in PJC.

Taxes

Although Project and Job Costing allows tax groups to be specified by project, if you are producing the invoice in Order Entry, the tax group specified for the order applies to all contracts and projects listed in the Order Entry document details. If you require different tax groups for different contracts and projects, you must enter these details on separate orders.

Note that this condition does not apply if the document uses project invoicing—the tax group of the project will be used to calculate the tax because the invoice will be generated in Project and Job Costing.

Note: If you create an order or shipment for a non-existent customer (a customer for whom no record exists in Accounts Receivable) and you select the Project Invoicing option, you will not be able to add order or shipment details unless the default template includes a tax group. (The tax group is not editable if you choose project invoicing, and it will be blank unless it is specified in the template.)

Prepayments

When you record job-related prepayments, you also distribute the payment amount to the details on the order.

Order Entry lets you automatically prorate payment amounts to individual details or do a "top-down" distribution, starting at the first job-related detail. If you prefer, you can edit the payment distribution amounts yourself.

Accounts Receivable Integration

If you are invoicing orders in Order Entry, Day End Processing will send Order Entry invoices to Accounts Receivable, where the costs and revenue are posted together in Accounts Receivable.

When Order Entry creates the invoice, it does not use the Work in Progress account and Billings accounts to post the costs and revenue; instead, it uses the Cost of Sales and Revenue accounts defined in the project or the category.

The Order Entry invoices posted in Accounts Receivable are treated like a billing worksheet in PJC, where the cost transactions are marked as billed and will not appear on the Aged WIP Report.

For more information, see Journal Entries Generated for Posted Order Entry Transactions .

Purchase Orders Created from Job-Related Sales Orders

If you are creating purchase orders from orders entered in Order Entry and the details are job-related, Purchase Orders removes the job-related fields when it creates the purchase order. It does this to prevent Receipt Entry from using the Work In Progress account and overstating WIP, which has already been debited with the order.

The entry for the receipt posted by Purchase Orders looks like this:

G/L Account Debit Credit
Inventory Control X  
     Payables Control   X

Double-Counting Item Costs or Miscellaneous Charges

Processing errors can arise when you bill customers for external charges (services or goods that are provided by a third party and that you receive in Purchase Orders or record in Accounts Payable).

If you are using several accounting programs to process goods or services for a job, you must decide which programs are going to record the costs and assign them to jobs.

For example, if you enter a job-related PO in Purchase Orders; assign items to a specific contract, project, category, and resource (if applicable); and then create a customer order in Order Entry and assign the same items to the same contract, project, category, and resource, the work in progress account will be overstated (costs recorded twice), and so will Contract Maintenance.

Similarly, if you enter a job-related order in Order Entry that includes a shipping miscellaneous charge, and then process an Accounts Payable invoice for the same charge and treat it as a job-related invoice, you will record charges twice for the job.

If you are invoicing in Project and Job Costing, it might make more sense to omit the miscellaneous charge on the order in Order Entry and record the transaction in Accounts Payable. The shipping charge for the job will then be picked up on the billing worksheet and included on the invoice created in Accounts Receivable.

In any case, you must decide when and how you want to transfer costs to jobs, and then set up the procedures for processing those costs.

Determining Prices

How prices are determined depends on the project style, project type, and accounting method.

For the following projects and accounting methods, you set the default source for the price using the Default Billing Rate field on the Project tab in Contract Maintenance:

To set the default source for the price:

Note:
  • For Time and Materials projects using the Billings and Costs or Accrual-Basis accounting methods, the project is billed at the category and resource level for standard projects and the category level for basic projects. You can create the invoice in Order Entry or in Project and Job Costing.
  • For Time and Materials projects using the Completed Project accounting method, you cannot invoice from Order Entry. Posting the shipment in Order Entry completes the transactions for O/E, and the transaction is sent to Project and Job Costing.
  • For Fixed Price projects using the Billings and Costs or Accrual-Basis accounting methods, invoices may be created in Order Entry or billing may be deferred to Project and Job Costing to process using the Create Billing Worksheet.

For All Other Fixed Price and Cost Plus Projects:

For Fixed Price projects using the Completed Project accounting method

For Fixed Price projects using the Project Percentage Complete accounting method

For Cost Plus projects using Billings and Costs or Accrual-Basis accounting method

For Cost Plus projects using Total Cost Percentage Complete and Category Percentage Complete accounting methods

For Cost Plus projects using Labor Hours Percentage Complete accounting methods

For Cost Plus projects using Completed Project accounting methods

Cost of Kitting Items in Job-Related Orders

Kitting items are treated differently in Project and Job Costing than they are in Order Entry.

In Order Entry, a kitting item is a collection of separate items, where revenue is recognized at the master level, but costs are recognized for each item in the kit.

In Project and Job Costing, however, a kitting item is treated as a single item for both revenues and costs.

This means that for job-related orders: