More commonly known as ‘Job Costings’ to Microsoft Dynamics users, within Dynamics it’s possible to project manage tasks such as organising a job/task or planning resource quickly and easily.
This functionality is suitable for a diverse range of industries, not just large organisations or industrial businesses, such as financial institutions, logistics companies, hospitality sector, and crewing organisations.
Jobs and Resources are a way of keeping track of work being carried out, or chargeable time spent within your business. This in turn helps you quantify organisation profitability.
What can using Jobs and Resources do for your business?
Managers will have an overview of not only individual jobs/tasks, but also the allocation of employees, machinery and other resources being used. Jobs and Resources functionality can:
- Create jobs, assign tasks and prepare job planning lines
- Allocate resources to jobs and manage resource prices
- Create timesheets with integrated job tasks, planning lines and then post timesheets to a job journal
- Budget for resources to be used in jobs and compare budgeted to actual usage to improve the quality and cost efficiency of future projects
- Review and record usage on various parts of the job, which is automatically updated as you modify and transfer information from job planning lines to job journals, or job invoices for posting
- Purchase supplies for a job, either on purchase orders or invoices, and record item and the times they are required/used
- Record job costs for resource usage, materials, and job related purchase on an on-going basis and invoice the customer, either when the job is complete or according to an invoicing schedule.
An example could be an office move. You would need to factor in the removal of old furniture, installation of new furniture, painting and decorating, tech installations etc. All of these can have separate job planning lines with varying resource prices for different timescales.
Billable and Non-Billable
Job planning lines can be billable and non-billable. Therefore something that is ‘Billable’ would be an expense your client agrees to. For example time an engineer or consultant spends on a job, or database connection fees. Whereas ‘Non-billable’, is an internal task which could form part of your business as usual activities, or work carried out as part of a contract or agreement.
However, there are occasions when internal time may indeed be billable.
Getting ready for using Jobs and Resources
For use on both internal (meeting rooms being booked for events, resource days needed or used…) and external projects, before you can use Dynamics to manage projects, you need to set up your resources, timesheets and jobs.
Once this has been done, you’ll be able to create jobs and schedule resources to go with them, as well as manage budgets, track and pay expenses, employee hours and timesheets.
With help on how to set up your first job, or ways in which you can get the most out of Jobs and Resources, get in touch with TVision to find out more.
