Labor and Expense Charges

When you use Project Control, all of the work your firm does and all of the money it spends and receives is associated with a project. Every labor and expense transaction must have an associated project number.

• In some cases, the project numbers you use are projects in the traditional sense — regular, revenue-producing jobs. For example, when a survey crew goes to a construction site, the crew charges its labor to the construction project.
• In other cases, the project numbers you use are projects in a different sense — they are repositories for overhead information. For example, when a member of your Accounting staff spends the day processing checks to vendors, that employee charges labor to an overhead project.
• If you use Organization Reporting, project numbers have a third use — they steer project-related transactions to the appropriate organization’s Balance Sheet accounts. For example, you may have one office in Boston and another in Atlanta. When work is performed on a job owned by the Boston office, the labor charge is applied to the Boston office’s Balance Sheet.

Process Labor and Expense Charges

After you have created project and employee records in the Vision Info Center, you can begin processing transactions.

When you use Project Control by itself, without other Vision applications, you can process the following transactions:

• Timesheets — Use to record employee labor charges.
• Labor Adjustments — Use to record corrections to labor charges that have already been posted to the Vision database.
• Employee Expenses — Designed to record employee travel and automobile expenses, but suitable for all expense reporting purposes.
• Employee Repayments — Use to record repayments that an employee makes to the firm when the employee does not use the full amount of an expense advance.
• Units — Use to record expense charges made using units. Units are goods or services that you cost and bill at a fixed rate.
• Miscellaneous Expenses — Use 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 to record expenses related to printing and photocopying.
• Invoices — Use to records bills that you have sent to clients. If you use Vision Billing, the Billing application creates these transactions automatically when you create invoices.

These transactions update the project and employee data in your Vision database and affect your project-related reports.

If you are also using the Vision Accounting application, you can enter cash receipts and disbursements, journal entries, and other transactions that update the general ledger.

Effect of Posting Timesheets

When you post employee timesheets, Vision:

• Debits your labor expense accounts (Direct Labor, Indirect Labor and Vacation, Sick, for example) for the amounts entered on the timesheets.
• Credits an indirect expense account (Job Cost Variance account) 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, Vision 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 it is distributed among all of your firm’s revenue-producing projects when you allocate overhead.

Effect of Processing Employee Expenses and Advances

When you process employee expenses and advances, Vision:

• 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 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.