Setting Up Contracts
In Project and Job Costing, a contract is a collection of projects and cost categories that represent the substance of your formal agreement with your customer.
You set up and manage contract records using the Contract Maintenance form and its related forms, Project Maintenance and Category Maintenance.
A contract record contains settings that determine how the program processes transactions for the contract, and how it accumulates cost information.
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For
each project you assign to a contract,
you specify settings that determine when to recognize revenue, how to
bill, the excess of your costs to bill as profit (for cost plus contracts),
and the general ledger accounts to which you will post transactions. You can assign to a contract any project that is defined for Project and Job Costing in the Projects form (in the PJC Setup folder).
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To each contract project,
you assign categories and (for standard
projects) resources representing the costs you will incur
for the project. You can assign only categories and resources that are defined for Project and Job Costing in the Categories, Employees, Equipment, Miscellaneous Expenses, and Overhead Expenses forms (in the PJC Setup folder).
You use these categories and resources to estimate project costs and to track actual project costs as you incur them.
Note: The level at which you track costs depends on the project style. For a standard project, categories and estimates are linked to each resource. For a basic project, categories and estimates are linked directly to the project.
You can assign default settings for all the projects within a contract, or you can let Project and Job Costing use the default settings specified in each project record. You can also change the settings for individual projects on the Contract Maintenance form.
Copying Projects and Categories from Another Contract
Project and Job Costing provides a New Contract Wizard that lets you copy the projects, categories, and resources from an existing contract to a new contract, which can make even complex contracts much easier to set up.
The New Contract Wizard also lets you choose whether to use estimates or actual figures from the existing contract as the estimates for the projects in the new contract.
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