We at times have the need to create a ‘Bucket’ which can capture costs. These costs could be labour or non-stock material or services. We don’t want to go through the process of creating a job as it isn’t necessarily to produce a ‘thing’. The Bucket may be open for a year and throughout this time, the costs will be written off generally to an expense account.
Does anyone have a suggestion of how this might be best managed?
Thanks.
The only “buckets” we have would be a Job or a gl account.
I personally would create a new bucket product group which would have gl accounts for WIP that are all expense accounts. Then create a job and assign it to that product group. Then you can buy to the job, issue materials, and charge labor. When done, close the job short. Any coats would go to the variance account assigned to the product group which could be the same expense account.
How do you get around the fact you need to raise a Sales Order to create a job? The majority of these are internal ‘jobs’? Some of this is for R&D type work. Some of it is for internal workshop work.
Thanks,
You don’t need a Sales Order to create a job. Use Job Entry, once you’ve created the Job Header you need to add a demand link. There are 3 types of demand link:
Make to Order
Make to Stock
Make to Job
Use the Make to Stock option, and like Tim said just don’t ever need to receipt any quantity to inventory.
Can you ‘close’ these multiple times? In essence I need to take the costs from the job each month…
We do this by handling labor and materials separately.
For labor, create an Indirect Labor Code for your “project” and assign a G/L Control to it. This posts directly to the GL when you run your Capture WIP process. No job required. In Time and Expense Entry, the users choose Indirect Time for the type of labor and enter the code.
For materials on a Misc line, we use a Part Class with the description that starts with “X:” so they are grouped together. Again, assign the G/L Control to your expense account. You can check that the correct account it hit in the Release Tab to ensure that is the expense account you want to hit.
Mark W.
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Thanks Mark. This is basically what we are doing but I just wasn’t sure it was the best way. We are Epicor newbies -eek!
Out of interested, do your users use the standard Time & Expense Entry. It seems very cumbersome to me and we are about to look into customising a solution whereby users just enter a code, if the code starts with a letter it is an Indirect code, if it starts with a number it is a Production code (for example).
We will probably look at doing some sort of web interface thing - I am NOT technical!
Hi Tracey,
Some of our users use the MES method of time entry but our Project-based users do use Time and Expense Entry but they use the “Weekly” method which is a little easier.
TE Entry is a ripe candidate for web entry! Epicor might be doing MES as a web-app in the coming year but a simplified version using the REST interface would be challenging but I like to think doable.
Mark W.
I’ve been using Tsheets lately, I have been considering what integration could be done with it. They say it can generate flat files at this point I am thinking a bit of DMT action.
We do use DMT for some field workers. Someone has to monitor for errors like job not release, job closed, correct project, operation, employee ID, etc.
Mark W.
They demoed a Web MES at Insights: http://erpmes.azurewebsites.net
I just put in Tsheets at a company for field service. They were able to generate the flat files and we built a pretty simple integration to labor entry in epicor. I just wish they had an api to gentheis data directly instead of manually pulling it.
Andrew Fagan
afagan@sonasgrp.com
617-335-0505
This site requires authentication. Can you post a screenshot?
Mark W.
They say on their website they integrate with many products, so it might be worth dropping them a line. They probably have REST access.