Internal Resource Costs
Costing lines can be configured to automatically update their Cost and/or Sell values from Resources (Vehicles, Packing Material, Labour). Often companies like to display these at the top of the costing screen:
Setting up Supplier/Creditor Products to update their values from Resources is simple. In Administration -> Moveware Setup -> Supplier/Creditor Products, there are two fields that determine
What Resource should the Product pull from? Select Labour, Vehicles, or Packing.
What values should be updated? This gives you the option of updating the Est Cost, Act Cost, Sell price, and any combination of the three.
Once the Creditor Products are configured, they need to be added to the applicable Job Types in order to appear on Cost Options. Once that’s done, the updating of Costs will happen when Labour, Vehicles and Packing Material are added to a Job. The Cost/Sell values are determined based on the Rates set up.
Labour rates are set up in Employee Management – Rates
Vehicle rates are set up in Inventory Management – Vehicles
Packing Material Rates are set up in Inventory Management – Packing
Updating Multiple Cost Options
An issue that may arise when updating Cost Options with Resources is when multiple Cost Options exist. If the Resource Cost/Sell values update all Cost Options, it may cause the numbers to be inflated, as the Cost/Sell should only apply once.
A solution exists in the System Parameter “Update 1st Cost Option Only From Resources”. If that is set to Y, only the first Cost Option will update its Cost/Sell values from Resources.
Multiple Branches
Another option exists for companies with multiple branches, who would like each branch’s values to update into different line items on Costing to track each branch’s labour costs separately. To achieve this the following needs to be setup.
System parameter
The System parameter “Split Labour costs across job branch and other branches” must be set to Y.
Supplier/Creditor Products
With the above parameter set up, the Creditor Products screen splits the Labour option in Inventory Types into multiple options: Labour Origin, Labour Destination and Labour Other Branch.
The three options enable multiple Creditor/Supplier Products to be set up for each specific type of labour usage. In other words, you would set up a separate line for Labour Origin Costs, Labour Destination Costs, and Labour Other Branch Costs (if required).
How the branch is determined
Moveware determines whether the labour cost should go to the Origin or Destination Labour based on the Origin and Destination codes (e.g. AUMEL, GBLON, etc). These Codes reside in the Destinations screen, where there is a field to allocate each code to a branch.
When a branch is designated against a destination code, the branch linked to that destination determines the branch on diary actions. This new feature uses the same logic to determine the branch of the origin and destination for costing.
Example: A job is going from AUMEL to AUSYD. AUMEL is linked to branch MEL, AUSYD is linked to branch SYD. An Uplift and Delivery diary actions are added to the job. The Uplift action assigns to branch MEL, which the Delivery action is assigned to branch SYD. Any labour allocated to the Uplift action will be included in the Origin Labour line in Costing. Labour allocated to the Delivery action will be included in the Destination Labour line.
Inventory Type Options
There are 3 options for Inventory Type that replace the Labour option: Labour Origin, Labour Destination and Labour Other Branch. The Origin and Destination options are self-explanatory, but the Labour Other Branch is a little different. The reason this was added was for the case where labour is added to an action that is not either the origin or destination. In the above example, if another action was assigned to a third branch, which is neither the origin or destination, Moveware will apply this cost to Labour Other Branch. If there is no Labour Other Branch in the costing, this labour allocation will not be seen on the job costing. It might be considered that this charge should be included in the Origin Labour line. If that’s the case, the Origin Labour Creditor Product should be setup with Labour Origin and Labour Other Branches in the Supplier/Creditor Products section above (multiples can be selected).