For our Field Service, we use Misc Charge to bill our customer for travel expenses (rental car, flight, hotel, perdiem, mileage, etc). On a service job, we use the Job Details - Materials - Material Service - to enter a Misc Charge called Trip Expenses (used for the billing amount).
If we put the cost in on the Job Details - Materials - Detail - Unit Cost Breakdown Material, that is just an estimate, not the actual cost.
We put a small service fee on these charges, but our accounting group wants to capture the actual cost of charges on the service job. What is the best way to do this?
Hello,
May be you can try below options
Option 1) If the expense need to be tracked against each job card.
Enable purchase direct in the job materials. This will enable to book purchase order for “Job material”. Cost will hit the service job once the respective receipts made.
PUR-MTL transactions.
Option 2) Expense to be tracked without linking to job card. Use “Time and Expense Entry”.
In the employee master enable “Enter Expenses” this enables the employee to enter expense entry.
Open Time and Expense Entry and create “New Expense”.
Both the above options helps the finance team to book AP invoices.
Add charges like a rental car, hotel, etc in Job and then use PO. Another option is to directly allocate cost from AP Invoice Entry against the job using Job Misc Line.
We have Service Job, Job Details, Materials detail that has them marked as Misc Charges. They are not flagged as Make Direct nor Purchase Direct.
The service department will populate the Materials Service with some unit prices. Service technicians will enter labor transactions against Operations.
The AP department will enter Job Misc charge lines from AP invoices or expense reports that show as ADJ-PUR.
The AR department will invoice whereby it picks up the unit price from the Material Service unit price entry, and the labor transactions; where they are flagged Billable.
Often the unit prices and the actual costs are not matched, resulting in improper invoicing. I am currently working on a solution to add an AP Invoice Entry customization that will use a grid to call in all of the AP records so that there can be some kind of review and matching process that occurs.
Recently it came up about the small service/office fee for all of the behind the scenes logistics. There’s a myriad of thoughts around this I am sure. I would be interested to hear more about how you implemented this.
Michael,
We never figured out how to roll trip expenses into service jobs.
There are a couple of things we do not like about the Field Service module.
You cannot enter a credit card on a service call
The Service Call does not use the Credit Manager functionality that is extended to Order Entry
The Scheduling portion of Field Service was more cumbersome than using an Outlook Calendar
We modified some legacy excel forms (so our Techs did not need to change their process at all) to allow us to copy and paste the Techs hours at the correct bill rate (Weekday Travel rate, Weekend/Holiday Travel rate, Weekday Labor Rate, etc) and to paste in the Service Call charges detailed explanation.
Our service job costing is not correct because we are not capturing the travel expense costs to the service job (we are billing the customer for these expenses, but they are not rolled into the job costs).
Because of the issues I named above, we may look and handling our Service Calls via Order Entry and drop the Field Service module.
When we route expense reports to be matched with the vendor invoices at the AP department, and the AP Invoice new job misc line goes in, they associate it to the service job. I am only just now training them up and finding solutions starting with the BAQ I shared on the other thread, as to how to reconcile all the costs at the AR invoicing step of the process. If I understand you correctly, that’s where you’ve run into short comings too. In that, if the new job misc charge line on the AP side would just affect the unit price on that material in a ‘running total’ kind of fashion, then that would be a lot more functional? Comes to mind to investigate a Data or Method Directive that perhaps could handle that when those job misc lines are being created. Although, just getting visibility is the priority right now.
We generate ‘material transactions’ by using AP Invoice Entry with the new job misc line type of invoice line - and associate that to the service job. I plan to look at it in Pilot, with the ‘Expense’ part of ‘Time And Expense Entry’ whereby the service department maybe could do this. Probably would lead to another horrible ‘matching’ issue but would like to see how it works at least.