Labor and Expense Charges
After you enter project and employee information in the Vantagepoint hubs, you can begin processing project-related labor and expense transactions.
All of the work that your enterprise does and all of the money that it spends and receives is associated with a project. Every labor and expense transaction must have an associated project number.
Transaction Types
When you use the Project Control application by itself, without other Vantagepoint applications, you can process the following transactions:
- Timesheets: Use timesheets to record employee labor charges.
- Labor Adjustments: Use labor adjustments to record corrections to labor charges that have already been posted.
- Employee Expenses: These transactions are designed to record employee travel and automobile expenses, but can be used for all expense reporting purposes.
- Employee Repayments: Use employee repayments to record payments that employees make when they do not use the full amount of their expense advances.
- Units: Units are goods or services that you cost and bill at a fixed rate. Use unit transactions to record expense charges made using units.
- Miscellaneous Expenses: Use miscellaneous expense transactions to record expenses that do not fit into another expense category, including telephone, postage and shipping, models, and photography. This transaction type is designed to take previously costed overhead items and distribute their cost to revenue-producing projects.
- Prints and Reproductions: Use prints and reproductions transactions to record expenses related to printing and photocopying.
- Invoices: Use invoice transactions to records bills that you have sent to clients. If you use Vantagepoint Billing, the Billing application creates these transactions automatically when you create invoices.
These transactions update the project and employee data in your database and affect your project-related reports.
If you are also using the Accounting application, you can enter cash receipts and disbursements, journal entries, and other accounting-related transactions.
Effect of Posting Timesheets
When you post employee timesheets, Vantagepoint:
- Debits your labor expense accounts (for example, Direct Labor, Indirect Labor, and Vacation) for the amounts entered on the timesheets.
- Credits an indirect expense
account (Job Cost Variance) for the total labor cost.
The Job Cost Variance account (703.00 in the standard chart of accounts) holds the labor cost credit balance until you pay your employees. When you pay your employees, Vantagepoint debits the Job Cost Variance account for the total payroll amount. What remains in the account is the difference between the amount of labor costed to projects and the amount that you paid employees for that labor. Because Job Cost Variance is an indirect expense account, this difference becomes part of your firmwide overhead and therefore is distributed among all of your enterprise's revenue-producing projects when you allocate overhead.
Effect of Posting Employee Expenses and Advances
When you process employee expenses and advances, Vantagepoint:
- Debits the appropriate expense accounts (Reimbursable Expenses, Direct Expenses, Indirect Expenses, Other Expenses) for the amounts entered on employee expense reports.
- Credits an asset or receivable account for the amount of the expense or advance.
All of the labor and expense transactions that you process and associate with projects ultimately appear on your project reports, allowing you to review and track current, year-to-date, and/or total labor and expense costs for each of your projects.
- Related Topics:
- Direct and Reimbursable Expenses
You can record two types of expenses related to revenue-producing activities: direct expenses and reimbursable expenses. - Costing Labor to Projects
Labor is both the greatest single expense incurred during the course of a project and the expense that is most within the control of your project managers. - Regular and Overtime Labor Costs
Vantagepoint uses both regular and overtime hours entered on employee timesheets to compute labor charges for employees and the projects on they work. - Job Cost Rates
An employee's job cost rate is the rate at which you want to cost the employee's labor to the projects on which the employee works. An employee's job cost rate may or may not be the same as the employee's payrate. - Project Charge Types
When you set up a project in Vantagepoint, you must assign it a project charge type to specify what labor and expense costs are charged to the project. - Expense Categories
You can set up expense categories to make it easier for employees to fill out expense reports. For each expense category (for example, Hotels, Meals, or Auto) you can predefine settings such as general ledger accounts and whether or not the expense is billable, so that employees do not need to enter this information manually.