Units and Accounting Transactions

Units are goods or services, such as lab tests or survey crews, billed at a flat rate per item. Use a unit if, for example, you charge $90 per hour for a two-person survey crew, no matter who the two surveyors are and how much their labor costs.

Use Units Settings (Settings > Accounting > Units) to set up units for your firm's recurring expenses. Typically, when you set up a unit, you specify its cost rate, billing rate, and credit project.

Once a unit has been defined in Units Settings, you can create a unit transaction, composed of a quantity and a rate, to bill labor and expense charges for recurring expenses.

Units are used to cost expenses, bill expenses, or both. They are similar to expenses posted through cash disbursements, journal entries, or accounts payable vouchers because they allow you to record and bill project expenses. They differ from these other transactions because when you bill a unit, you can show both a quantity and a rate on the invoice.

Units can be used to recover internal (overhead) expenses and charge them directly to the project, whether or not the expense is reimbursable. Assume, for example, that your enterprise performs a specific lab test and charges it to a project. Each test is considered one unit. The offsetting entry is a credit to an overhead account and project that helps you monitor the charge-out of lab tests.

Inventory Items

As part of setting up the Inventory application, you identify inventory items in Purchasing & Inventory Settings, in the desktop application.

Then you link each inventory item to a unit table and unit in Units Settings. A unit record can be linked to only one inventory item. When selecting a unit record, you must select a unit whose quantity matches the item's quantity as expressed in the item's unit of measure. It is easier to modify the unit table's unit of measure and billing rate than to change the inventory item's unit of measure, quantity, and cost.

• You can create a unit from an inventory item.
• You can link an inventory item to an existing unit record.
• Posting an inventory issue transaction creates a unit transaction. This type of unit transaction is not accessible from the Units Transaction Center and can be viewed only in the posting log.
• The inventory issue transaction posting routine uses the inventory item's average actual cost and inventory common project.
• For inventory items, the offsetting entry is a credit to the item category's inventory amount and inventory common project.