Using Blue Link to Track Costs, Revenues and Profits

Transcription

0:00 – 0:48 Welcome everybody, We’re just waiting for everybody else to get into the presentation for the waiting room we’ll take a minute or so. Just add in if you guys have any questions please type it in the chat and then we’ll be reading them out most likely by the end unless it’s like something that could fit in towards like in between points or whatever. We’ve got almost everybody and everybody’s going to be muted for this conversation so again as Christian mentioned just now if you have questions feel free to ask in the chat window and Christian will let me know when there’s one there.

0:44 – 1:14 What we’re going to do today is talk about one of the features that you all have in your Blue Link software which is the job costing module and some interesting uses that we’ve seen customers make of this module so historically people use job costing to track you know if you were building a house or something like that you have all the costs related to different subsystems in that home and then people want to know if we make money or lose money on the job

1:15 – 1:52 But a lot of Blue Link customers use job costing for different purposes there might be other sub projects that they want to track the cost and/or revenues of or they might have something like a trade show that they’re attending for example they want to figure out should we attend this trade show next year? What we’re all the different costs? You get a whole bunch of different invoices in for a tradeshow for example the actual venue itself maybe you purchase food or you might have purchased advertising materials for that show that type of thing and then from the show you’ve got leads which eventually turned into sales and maybe a few months later you want to figure out hey did we make or lose money on that show so that’s the example we’re going to use during the quick little demo today.

1:52 – 2:38 So let’s go through some of the business questions you may want to ask yourself is just like I said is it worth going to the show? Maybe you want to use job costing just to figure out is this customer profitable as a customer maybe there’s other things that you do around acquiring new business travel other types of things that that incur costs that aren’t directly related to that sale so a typical sales order in Blue Link uh if you just sold the product you’re looking at the margin you might look at the margin that you made on that order and say OK well that looks profitable but what if you incurred a ton of selling expenses that didn’t get tagged to that customer it was acquiring a new customer are they really profitable after you take into account all the times that you had your sales reps travel that type of thing.

2:39 –  3:07 What about inventory? Do you give away product to your customers? Do you send them samples? Are you tracking that? Again within the trade show context if we take a bunch of product out of inventory and want to know what the cost of that product was that we allocated to the show. Finally you might if you if your business process allows for it want to develop estimates for a particular job and then compare your estimates to actuals that’s the feature that you have as well with your Blue Link job costing.

3:08 – 3:36 Let’s talk quickly I’m going to show you a couple slides and we’ll jump right into the software so the whether you notice this or not you’re Blue Link screens have the ability to tag most types of transactions with job code. There’s a system parameter screen if you go into your system parameters you type job with little checkboxes this side I want to see the job code on AP Vouchers or I wanna see it on other transaction screens. So if you turn those on then you’ll be able to see them.

3:37 – 4:36 So, here for example I’ve got an Account Payable voucher that I’ve tagged with the trade show job code in the disbursement. On the purchase order screen I can do the same thing maybe I’m issuing a purchase order to buy some supplies for that trade show if I go over to job costing and tag, it’s there as well, that’s on the cost side of things. We mentioned the idea of inventory you might want to move take products out of your inventory to go to that trade show that you’re gonna give away samples normally you tell those products, but in this case we’re actually going to give away so I can go into a job cost inventory allocation screen which looks like this and then I can actually say I’m moving items to the job and then if I process that the dollar value of those items are gonna come out of inventory and it’s gonna go into that job and then when I return from the show maybe you didn’t give everything away you have some product you’re gonna put back into stock there’s actually a from job option as well that you can take back those things in the stock that you had previously allocated to job and you’re going to end up with the net cost ending up in job.

4:37 – 5:12 On the revenue side of things so those are examples of costs going to and from your job on the revenue side of things you might have sales orders or you could have AR vouchers if you’re into doing that type of thing and again those can also be tagged with the job code so now we’re capturing the revenue coming in from those jobs so again if these were sales orders that came from the trade show you just keep tagging them finally you’ll have some reporting features, so rather than just showing slides let’s go and actually flip over now to the Blue Link software and show you some of the stuff in action.

5:23 – 5:42 Here and let’s start off with job creation so if we go into a job cost maintenance screen what you can do is you can create new jobs, tag them with all sorts of different attributes if you’d like but at the simplest level here, I have a simple job called tradeshow, I can put in some descriptions. If this was a customer specific job and I only wanted to be able to see this job for sales orders for a particular customer I can optionally tag it that way as well and then I’ve got all sorts of other project information tabs.

5:43 – 6:06 If I do estimates for my jobs I’ve got a spot where I can enter estimates. But the rest of these tabs really talk to pulling information from other parts of Blue Link so that you can see them all in one place so for example here I’ve got my account payable tab and I can see that there’s AR vouchers, and you can see here I’ve got two AP vouchers that were entered with some cost for this job.

6:07 – 6:34 I can go to my purchase order summary tab and here I’ve got one open purchase order for this job I’ve got one that’s already been posted and received. On my sales order side of things I’ve got a couple open orders and one posted order. So here’s some revenue. And then I do have the ability to enter ad hoc transactions, we’ll say I posted a transaction before and I forgot to tag it properly but I still wanna capture that I can actually do an ad hoc entry straight into jobs for costing purposes.

6:35 – 6:52 Finally we see the same thing for inventory allocation and so on. So let’s look at those little screens in the Blue Link app, you’ve got purchase orders here for example I’ve got this open purchase order all I’ve done to tag it is simply pick the job code from the list and optionally a cost code.

6:52 – 7:15 If you think back to the building house example you can create as many different cost codes as you want you can label them anything you want. At the simplest level most Blue Link customers just create one Cost code just all costs. They don’t really care what the breakdown is they just want to know if I make money or not overall. If my revenues greater than my expenses for this. And you just need one Cost code to do that.

7:15 – 7:55 If you do have different aspects to your job that you want to track you can actually create as many cost codes as you like so the building housing example you might have a HVAC system or electrical or plumbing or that type of thing if in this example here you can see we’ve got products services that type of thing so things I bought people I had to pay administration fees I had to pay or maybe marketing materials so if I purchased advertising for that show or I purchased a new handouts and those might be marketing materials so if you’re interested in having a breakdown of that you can actually tag your categories appropriately.

7:55 – 8:34 There’s an example of an open purchase order. Purchase order details can just have as many lines as you want. If go to another open screen here I can go to sales order for example this is the revenue side of things and again just on my order info tab I can tag the job code here. Normally don’t put cost codes in on sales orders but it depends on how you configure the system. Cost codes normally if it would have be anything would usually be something like products. So that would be the costs for the cost of goods sold of the item that are on this on this sales order.

8:35 – 9:23 On the AP voucher disbursement side of things you have actually could imagine having one invoice that actually covers different jobs and if that happens all you do is you can put the job code on different lines so here I’ve got one AP voucher that’s for $250 where I’ve got it split across two different jobs. Ones going to my trade show job or let’s say this is from a beverage vendor so drinks from the show and then maybe I’ve got a different job code set up for something else. One of the things that we often see customers do is they actually create jobs that are for internal expenses so they can just kind of tag split costs between customer specific things on some lines on their disbursement and internal kind of admin or overhead costs that they track on a different job.

9:24 – 9:52 When you’re all done you wanna see how do you did overall you go back to your job maintenance screen and just flip through the different tabs if you just wanna see summary or you can run job information reports the job information reports allow you to see things like all the individual transactions for your job or job profit and loss overall so I want to see what I’ve got posted so far in my trade show job I can just filter for my trade show, print that off to the screen and now I’ve got a quick summary report that lets me see that.

9:53 – 10:19 If you zoom in on this a little bit you can see here that my cost code 000 represents my Billings all the revenue so far I’ve only posted one order not for much and then I’ve got some other breakdown of things that I’ve tagged with administration or marketing and business and right now I’ve only got those transactions that I’ve actually posted so here you can tell I’m currently in the situation where I’m losing a lot of money on this job but maybe I just ran the trade show I hardly have any sale to get that show yet.

10:20 – 11:11 It could be that it’s gonna take me some time to actually you know entering the orders that I got from the show or business that came directly from the shows you could imagine over a period of maybe the next month or two as I post and ship the orders that came from this show all of a sudden my profitability situation changes and now I’m making money again or maybe this was a net loss for this show and I just never actually did recover the cost which is kind of the whole point of this exercise is it worth spending the money on the advertising on the flights on the food expenses all the other costs that are associated with trade shows is it worth it by attend five or ten trade shows I can tag all the business from each different show with different job code then I can say hey you know what these three shows seem to be doing really well for us we make a ton of money we’re profitable on those these other ones were not maybe we shouldn’t attend those next year.

11:12 – 11:40 So, that’s kind of the high level the very quick summary of job costing and costs keeping track of those different costs and keeping track of the different revenues against the one job. Do you have any questions yet Christian? so far no we’re good to keep going. Alright.

11:41 – 11:56 I’ll just give that a reminder to everybody to people come in the little bit after we started if you have any questions please type it in the chat and we’ll get to them potentially through some pauses or or at the end.

12:02 – 12:38 that’s pretty much what we had to show today so very quick short sweet presentation again it was just making sure that you’re aware that you already own this module if you already have it in your Blue Link software. It cuts across all the different transaction screens that you have including things like your posted GL screens. Using the job costing is as simple as just picking the actual job code in the transaction screen that you have and that’s pretty much all there is to it after you’re done you run a profitability report you can see if you’re making or losing money and you hopefully answered your business question.

12:39 – 12:56 Darren, It’s Michael here maybe you can show a little bit about the setup of the estimating on the job cost in the beginning of the show our customers.

12:57 –  13:27 So one of the other things that I mentioned very briefly let’s get out of this report, that in the job cost setup what you can do is actually enter estimates so you have this ability for each type of cost code you can actually put in estimates of what you think you’re going to do now for each job code there’s a secondary dimension of that labor material subcontract and other but doesn’t particularly matter for the purpose of entering estimates which place you put these numbers.

13:28 – 14:22 But you can actually if you can imagine if this was labor you can put in the number of hours that you expect at what rate if it’s something like just a straight up cost, you can just enter the total number that you’re expecting so let’s say for this dimension for products I’m going to ship $4000 worth of product to this job. I can post my estimate to the job later on what that allows me to do is compare my actuals to estimates. I got a message that I’ve already posted it, now I’m good to go and if I were to go back into my job information reports I can actually go to my estimates report to see straight up the estimates or if I go back to my job profit and loss I can actually compare my budget or estimates to actuals and see what the variances were.

14:23 – 14:41 So again if you’re anticipating making certain amount of expenses against a job maybe when you priced out the job in the first place you put in estimates to try to figure out what should we charge for this job and then once you actually do the work you compare that to the actuals that you end up with.

14:42 – 14:52 Can you also show how to add an ad hoc cost in job maintenance?

14:53 – 15:33 So we do have this enter transaction section and again this is allowing you to tag the different aspects of this so let’s say you missed just labor costs you already entered the AP voucher to pay that vendor, you can go ahead and enter over here my transaction I can optionally pick which employee is actually entering this adjustment and again we against which sections maybe it was services invoice that we missed. We’ll choose the $750 invoice and go ahead and post that transaction to the job.

15:36 – 16:00 So, again that type of thing you could imagine you already posted the thing and you just missed the opportunity to tag and this is letting you add ad hoc cost to the job a little bit later. If I go back to my job reports that ad hoc cost should now be part of my profit/loss report.

16:12 – 16:33 So it’s as simple as that for those of you who attended yesterday’s session on the GL financial reporting one of the things you would have noticed is that the excel financial report add in has the ability to pull GL transactions that have been tagged with job codes. So you can actually also create the P&L in excel with job information as well.

16:42 – 17:07 OK I think that’s pretty much it any other questions Christian? No, just that one. Alright everyone thank you so much for your time today again we kept this presentation super brief we just wanted to draw your attention to the fact that you all have this feature and feel free to try it out in your playground if you need help with configuration give us a call and contact your support reach out to Joanne and we can do some additional training. Thanks everyone!