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