You can set up a budget for each job. The budget is used to plan the resources that you allocate to a job. The budget can be either general with few entries or it can contain more entries that are divided into activity levels. You can then compare the budgeted amounts with the actual usage as recorded in the job journal. By monitoring differences between actual usage and budgeted usage, you can control an ongoing project and improve the quality of future jobs by reducing the risk of underestimating costs.
The following procedure describes how to estimate budgeted costs during planning. For information about recording budgeted versus actual job prices and costs, see Record Usage for Jobs.
How To Estimate Job Budgets in Business Central
When a customer wants to know the price of a job that will be invoiced based on usage, you must have to determine the budgeted costs for the job. You use the Job Task Lines page to do this.
- Choose the Tell Me (magnifying glass icon), enter Jobs, and then choose the related link.
- Open a relevant job.
- Select a task line of type Posting, and then choose the Job Planning Lines action.
- On a new line, fill in the fields as necessary. Hover over a field to read a short description.
For the Line Type field, refer to the following information.
Key:
Line Type: Description
Both Budget and Billable: The cost and price amounts entered on the planning line are the budgeted costs for the particular planning line. The price amount will be invoiced.
Budget: The customer is not charged for usage. Usage is not transferred to an invoice, but will still be used in the calculation of WIP.
Billable: The customer is charged for usage. Usage is transferred to the invoice, based on the quantity specified in the Qty. to Transfer to Invoice field.
Note:
- The Planned Delivery Date field for the planning line contains the date when usage related to the planning line is expected to be completed. It is also the date when the planning line may be transferred to a sales invoice and posted.
On the underlying job task on the Job Card page, the Start Date and End Date fields respectively contain the value of the Planned Delivery Date field on the earliest and latest job planning lines in the related Job Planning Lines page.
- When you fill in the Quantity field, all total price and total cost information will be calculated and filled in for that planning line. You can edit them at any time.
On the Job Card page, you can now see a summary of the total budgeted costs, budgeted price, billable cost and billable price for each task.
