Jobbing accounting program

[Hein Holtzhausen]

Looking for suggestions on any good software out there that calculates total job costs to streamline quotations and calculating GP's. Any forum members in the jobbing industry? Please reply.

[IanF]

Hein
We are a job printer in that are jobs are all specific to the customer. EG NCR books every one has their logo and different colour papers used for different copies.
We use dolphin estimating but I am looking at Quick easy to replace them, Dolphin want to charge me R10K to move to the latest version, as they need to reconfigure the database.

We don't do job accounting as such we just issue the correct amount of paper etc. per job and for the expensive paper we only order for the specific job. The focus is more on repeatability and liaising with the customer about quantities when last ordered keeping track of numbering etc. From what I remember Quick easy looked like it could track from quoted costs to actual costs.

Anyway you should ask your competitors / trade association what they use as it will be more customised for your industry.

Welcome to Theforum.

[Hein Holtzhausen]

Thanks.

Our job costings needed will be similar to the engineering industry. I'm not familiar with what they use.

[Dave A]

As long as you can generate an accurate bill of materials (via a CAD program I would think), Quickbooks should meet your criteria. I'd suggest getting the premier edition to make sure you get all the features you need.

You can capture components as you purchase them and then build assemblies.
When you build assemblies the portion item cost is drawn through to the assembled item.
And when you invoice the client, that cost is tracked to customer level.
You can create seperate projects per customer - it's much like a sub-account.
There is a gross profit per customer report, although I haven't played with it much so I don't know just how powerful it is.

I think planning the set-up would be critical to the quality of the results, particularly when it comes to the base unit for stock items. For example you don't want to be capturing purchased steel sheet stock in units of per sheet when you're consuming it in units of per square meter.

[Justloadit]

This is the way to go, currently all invoice pass through me, I need to make sure that there are no funnies that I have to pay for. At the same time I capture the cost into Excell, which is then indexed by all my current products. At a flick of the mouse button, I can see my latest cost, along with the selling price, and in turn gives me the GP.

Doing this in the Accounting package is a smother move, because it is all integrated, however, the main issue I can see, is that the data capturer (Creditor Invoice), must understand the basic raw materials, so that during the time of capture, it get allocated correctly, and an individual invoice can have up to 20 or 30 different items. It means that a mistake at this level will spell disaster when reading the sub assembly costing.The other advantage of capturing it into the accounting package, is that you can set up order levels, or even flag minimum quantity limits, and simultaneously have a stock figure.

On the surface it looks great, but in reality it will be a huge challenge. I'am not saying that my method is the best, the advantage that it has, is that my books are up to date, with out waiting for me to allocate and categorize a new component. Invariably, on a regular basis new components are supplied to replace existing ones, and equivalents are also supplied for older components. The data capturer would need to identify this in order to allocate the costing.

I also have the situation, that I do piece work, and have no regular moving product. All stock order usually covers the order that we are doing, so stock keeping takes a couple of hours if I need it done, simply because there is little raw material stock.
In some business this may not be an issue, but in my products, there can be between 150 to 300 individual components to make up a product.

[AndyD]

Simply Accounting is capable of doing all you're looking for including bill of materials within the package.