Access Costing

Gain complete project control

Access Costing is designed to handle the complex requirements of heavily project-based companies, such as engineers. consultants, publishers and architects. Each project record within the Costing module holds a huge amount of information, from start to finish dates to actual/committed costs and cashflow. The Project Costing module is updated automatically with all other modules within the system, presenting you with clear, concise and comprehensive project information in addition to conventional Profit & Loss reporting.

It can be deployed company-wide, and in a manner unique to the requirements of individual departments. For example, internal events, promotional activities, P11D expenses and vehicle costing can all be tracked with ease. Access Costing adapts readily to a wide range of industries, and provides screen labels and prompts that can be customised to accord with industry-specific terminology.

For those project managers that wish to manage projects through the web, Dimensions also provides a complete project management toolkit for remote operation. It delivers information in a clear and concise format, designed for the occasional user, while providing the features that project managers demand of a comprehensive project management module.

Project Preparation

Setting budgets

Effective control of budgets is an essential part of project management. Within Dimensions, both cost and revenue budgets are catered for. As with other elements of the software, the type and format of these budgets is completely configurable within the system. Budgets can either be entered directly, calculated from component elements, or even derived from associated resource plans. Budgets can then be optionally profiled either weekly or monthly across the lifetime of the project.

Job sign-off

For many organisations, there is a requirement to get sign-off for any new project before budgets and resources can be assigned and the project initiated. Dimensions provides full support for this process through the configuration of flexible controls.

Setting milestones

Against any project, a project manager can record and manage key milestones and events. Milestone types and statuses are fully configurable within the software and associated to any milestone can be values and specific cost centres within the project. It is also possible to allocate milestones to other users within the organisation who can automatically be alterted when any action is required.

Project Implementation

Resource planning and allocation

Resource allocation allows project managers to dictate which resources are able to book time on any of their projects and within a project, any specified task. These allocations can also be used to track and control the amount of hours the individual has been allocated for the specified activity. In addition to allocation, it is also possible to create a comprehensive resource plan for the project, combining resources, grades or roles onto a detailed project timeline.

Time Sheets

The Costing module offers excellent time sheet management for analysing staff and resources to projects and cost centres. The system calculates individual staff productivity and tracks lost man-hours. Time costs can be uplifted to reflect overhead recovery or profit for recharge to clients.

Timesheets can also be deployed to your workforce through the web-enabled ‘self-service’ functionality, enabling your people to capture time-based data anywhere in the world, on the move or at project sites.

Payroll Links

Within Costing, time sheets look up labour rates directly from Access Payroll, streamlining the booking and analysis of elements such as basic rate and overtime. There is no limit to the number of pay rates that can be assigned to each employee. Access Payroll calculates deductions, prints payslips, and provides the option to book Employers' National Insurance to the relevant project cost centres.

Project Management

Project Costing Information at a Glance

Each record within Costing holds full customer information with instant on-screen comparisons available at all levels of a project. You can compare budgeted against actual for project costing, sales and profit, budgeted or actual costs against budgeted or actual sales, and analyse project cash flow (cash expended against cash received).

There is room for eight pages of free format notes, and six user definable fields can be used for searching, sorting and subtotalling reports. Each record within the Costing module can be analysed over an unlimited number of cost centres. These can, in turn, be analysed as a hierarchical structure up to ten levels deep.

Easy Invoice out of Project Costing

In addition to analysing sales orders and sales invoices to jobs, there is an option to generate sales invoices from the Costing module, based upon cost transactions. Drill down will instantly display all of the cost transactions posted to each job, project and cost centre. These can be sorted by transaction type, time sheets, purchase invoices, Nominal journals and so on, or by using cost centre, resource and date, enabling you to easily identify the cost transactions that you wish to invoice. In addition, you may select any combination of cost transactions (from any number of projects for the same Customer) to include within each sales invoice. Costing will show you the cost price, any uplift and the uplifted cost price, but you have total control over the value that will be invoiced. Costing allows you to generate invoices that display as much or as little information as you choose, and to generate estimates in a similar manner, based upon anticipated cost transactions.

Flexible invoice options

Through the web-enabled functionality available, Dimensions also supports three main billing options within the project control function, all of which integrate seamlessly with the sales order processing and sales ledger modules. Time and material projects can be billed out of project control, allowing the project manager to specify which element of time and costs to pass on, with or without an uplift. Fixed price or stage payment billing is supported with full integration to the sales request module. These requests can optionally pass through an internal approval cycle before being released to the client. In addition, full support for application for payment processing is available within the system.

Project Analysis

Flexible Reports

The Costing module contains a comprehensive range of search, sort and subtotalling facilities. Multiple jobs can be consolidated by common data (for example, contract number), and you can single out an individual cost centre or resource and report on it for multiple projects. Dimensions’ web-enablement functionality also caters for modern working practices, so providing remote workers with access to Crystal reports through a web browser.

Work In Progress

While each organisation will have different methods for calculating work-in-progress, the responsibility for supplying the information normally rests with the project manager. Dimensions provides a complete set of tools to enable this information to be captured easily within the system. There are a number of methods supported within the software including percentage complete, cost to complete and hours to complete. It is also possible to get project managers to specify income recognition values within the software. All of these inputs can be used to automatically calculate and post month-end journals into Dimensions to represent accurately the organisation’s financial position.

If project costing transactions cannot be re-invoiced, they can be removed from Work In Progress and analysed as extra or unrecoverable costs.