About General Ledger Accounts Used for Projects and Categories

When you set up a contract, you assign an account set that contains the set of default general ledger accounts to use for processing cost and revenue transactions for any of the projects in the contract.

You can change the accounts for individual projects, as follows:

• Billings and revenue accounts. The program displays these accounts on the Project tab of the Contract Maintenance screen and on the Project Maintenance screen. You specify these accounts only for the project.
• Payroll expense, employee expense, equipment, labor allocated, and overhead accounts. The program displays these accounts on the Accounts tab of the project Category Maintenance screen. You specify accounts to charge for resource use at the category level— you do not specify accounts for individual resources, even for standard contracts.
• Materials account.You do not specify an account for material usage in Project and Job Costing. The account specified for an item inSage 300 Inventory Control is used in material usage and return transactions. (If you do not use Inventory Control, you enter transactions for the cost of materials through Accounts Payable, specifying the account to charge in that program.)
• Work in progress and cost of sales. How you specify the work in progress and cost of sales accounts, however, depends on the project type and accounting method, as follows:
  • For time and material and cost plus projects that use the accrual-basis accounting method, you specify the cost of sales account for each category. (These projects do not use a work in progress account.)
  • For all other time and materials projects, you specify the work in progress and cost of sales accounts for each category.
  • For fixed price projects, you specify the work in progress and cost of sales accounts for the project, not for individual categories.
  • Accounts for cost plus projects depend on the accounting method, as well as the project type:
    • For cost plus projects that have a completed project, total cost percentage complete, or labor hours percentage complete accounting method, you specify the work in progress and cost of sales accounts for the project, only.
    • For cost plus projects with a billings and costs or category percentage complete method, you specify the work in progress and cost of sales accounts for each category.