Profitably Managing your Services

If you're in the business of selling services (with or without materials) over an extended period of time, you'll be faced with the following challenges:

• estimating the job accurately based on expected costs and margins
• keeping track of your staff and sub-contractors and managing cost blow-outs
• ordering materials for direct delivery to a project
• progressive billing based on the percentage or stage of completion (work in progress)
• managing warranty retentions, including automatically invoicing retentions when they are due
• calculating the profit or loss on a job

A good Job Costing system will be seamlessly integrated into your Payroll System so that staff time booked on projects are also used to process the payroll payments. Inventory should also be linked so that estimates can be quickly prepared, accurate purchase orders raised where there is insufficient stock on hand for the job or where materials are always dropped shipped to the site.

Many businesses would benefit from a powerful Job Costing system, including Construction Companies, Airconditioning manufacturers and many Service companies (such as Software Developers).

More information: Axsapt

Cebit Sydney Surprises

Cebit this week wasn't as impressive as last year's pre-recession event. Gone were the giants of small business accounting: MYOB and Quickbooks. Other notable "no shows" were Microsoft, SAP and Sage whose stands last year probably cost as much as a small house.

Surprisingly I discovered some gems including an Australian web based fully featured Accounting and Payroll solution priced from less than $45 per month for an unlimited number of users. My first impression is this system is more capable than the hyped up Xero from New Zealand.

Another stand out was a powerful web based work flow engine from the USA for only $50 per month per user. I've seen clumsy and less capable systems for 30 times that!

Also from the USA was a powerful low cost document management system with no compromise top-level security access and a portable storage model with seamless integration into any accounting system. This is the first such system I've come across that will make document management a reality for small to medium businesses.

Over the next few weeks we'll investigate these products in detail so we can see if the "show hype" holds up and they really are of benefit to Axsapt's customers.

Explosive Accounting

With such interesting concepts as Future Income Tax Benefits, Amortisation, Consolidations, Minority Interests, Internal Rate of Return, Provisions, Contingencies, Depreciation, Revaluations, Debits, Credits, and dare I say: Double Entries, there's plenty to keep young Chartered Accountants thoroughly engaged.

And just when you thought there was no where else to go, along comes accounting for BOMs for the Australian Defence Force and other Axsapt customers.

A BOM is a Bill of Manufacturing or in the case of the Defence Department, Recipes for meals served at their Officers Mess, Sergents Mess and OR's (Other Ranks) Mess. With thousands of personnel eating in Messes every day, Axsapt's accounting systems ensure that the right number of ingredients are ordered for delivery to the kitchens.

Apart from Food, BOMs can also be used by other Manufacturers from Electronics to Shoes and Clothing. The benefits to manufacturers of using these sorts of systems is that stock holdings for components/raw materials are kept to a minimum, there is less wastage and more intelligent pricing decisions can be made because costs of finished goods are more accurate.

For more information: Axsapt