Buildxact has traditionally only looked at estimated costs and actual costs when tracking costs. This approach gave a good view of how your costs were tracking relative to the set budget but didn't deal with looking forward at costs you'd committed to spend but hadn't actually spent yet. We've expanded functionality here now to give a better overall view of the job.
Here is a summary of the three types of cost at a job costing level:
Estimated: This is the budgeted spend on an item and have come from either the estimate or have been added in as the result of a variation
Committed (NEW): This is the costs which are linked to sent purchase orders, they will also be populated automatically when the status of an order is moved straight to received.
Actual: This is the actual spend on an item, they are captured when you enter an invoice/receipt against an order
Where can I see committed costs?
Currently they can only be seen on the Estimated vs Committed report, there are plans to expand the usage of committed costs.
Do committed costs decrease as the actual cost increases?
That is to say, as the committed costs are realized and become actual costs, does that committed figure decrease? No is the answer. We want to be able to show the total estimated cost against the total committed cost, and total actual cost. Eg: If you budget $100 for an item and commit to $90, but spend $110 we want to show the journey rather than losing the committed figure in the process.
What other changes are associated with this?
As we are now storing cost data for items as they are sent as orders there are occasions when you'll see additional items being added to you job costing screen at the point when you send the order. The scenario for this is, when you send an order for an item that wasn't budgeted for (or add an extra item to an order), the item will be added to the costing screen when you send the order, previously it would add when you received the order. Note that when we add it after you send the order the estimate and actual costs will be $0, when you then mark the order as received the actual cost will update.