This is copied from a client’s e-mail to myself, I’m not familiar with Sage so not 100% sure what he means.
As discussed, I am hoping to find the best way to use Quickfile to get some kind of project-level analysis similar to the attached, which is what I used to use and in brief works as follows;
- From the outset we build-up our tender for any given project in a “Sales suite”. This uses basic lookup tables to group each line of estimating into cost type groups. Fundamentally this is to enable future analysis for the accounting requirement to recognise profit as it is made over time i.e so that Sales and Cost of Sales can be kept in tandem in the accounts- even if they get out of line in practice.
- The reason for the multiple cost codes and cost types is to enable targeted analysis- i.e we wouldn’t bother to look in depth at any project which is running in line with budget however if a project is running out of line with budget we also wouldn’t want to waste time looking at four out of five cost types which may be ok- we just want to quickly identify the one that isn’t and then that narrows it down and we can start looking at individual cost codes or even individual supplier accounts.
- At the end of each accounting period we submit application for payment to the Customer, which is built upon a valuation which pulls all the cost types through from the Sales suite and sets cost targets proportionately by cost type.
- All the above comes together if you look in the Costings suite/ Analysis tab. This brings together the original Tender Budget in comparison with the Sage data and flags up any variance at face value.
- What I do with this, is I look into it to see if it is a genuine overspend or if it is simply the result of over/under invoicing on anyone’s part.
- Ultimately, and for absolute prudence in the accounts- if I do find an overspend is emerging, I will go back and re-visit the original estimate so that we do not over estimate profits. Once costs are re-established- we bring everything back to only the profit which is expected to be made on Cost of Sales.
I appreciate we may not be able to get to quite the level of detail I was getting out of sage- but in basic terms what we really want out of Quickfile is to export individual accounting lines per project which can be grouped into the 5 cost types…
I did ask the support@ email but got no response.