A natural desire of employers collecting clockings is the ability to start costing those clockings, and hence hours. This process, known as Job Costing, extends to more than just simply costing jobs though.

The Main Components

The process of Job Costing can be broken down into a few separate components. By dealing with the components separately, rather than all together, it becomes easier to make sure that the results you get are the results you wanted.  These components are;

1. Deciding what features you want to use
2. Configuration
3. Collecting Job Clockings
4. Processing Job Hours
5. Managing Jobs
6. Reporting the results

I'll discuss each component in more detail below.

Deciding what Features to use

1. Decide what costings you want to use

As you probably know you are able to classify your employees in 8 different ways. Company, Branch, Department, Cost Centre, Category, Scale, Type and Workgroup.

You can now also decide to cost your hours worked in these 8 classifications, and we've added a ninth one called Job. Thus you can break down hours worked (and ultimately money) into Companies, Branches, Departments and so on.

This ability to assign the time to multiple classifications in this way allows for a lot of flexibility. For example some Job Costing systems allow for "sub jobs" or "tasks" (welding, grinding, fitting etc). This is trivial to implement using TNA 2000 as you can simply assign one of your classifications (for example Category) to be your Tasks.

2. Decide if you want to use Charge Rates

Calculating everything in Hours is not terribly useful from a costing, or billing, point of view unless everyone ion the company is working at the same rates. Therefore we've got a feature called Charge Rates. This allows you to enter the Cost, and Billing rates for employees. (Actually you create a set of rates and then assign that to as many employees as you like. And you can create as many sets as you like.)

3. Decide if you need to use Quantities

In some situations it is useful to track the number of items manufactured. TNA 2000 has some support for quantities, but this is not yet completed.

Configuration

Configure the system in the following places;

1. Configuration module, System Setup menu, Features option.
   Job Costing tab (for Job Costing Classifications) and
   Job Features tab for the other Job Costing Features.
2. Configuration  module, System Setup menu, Job Costing / Charge Rates option (if you're using charge rates.)
3. User Module - Assign charge rates to employees (either via the Update Employee screen, or via the Bulk Update Employee screen)
4. Hardware Module - decide which devices are Job Costing devices and assign the necessary classifications to those devices.

Collecting and Processing

Collecting and Processing are done automatically.

You can add additional clockings & hours in the Job Costing module. when entering manual, or bulk, clockings and hours in the User module you can also specify the Job Costing allocations.

Tip : At the moment there are no specific processing options for Job Costing. However more options will be added here later...

Managing Jobs & Customers

Jobs can be managed via the Job module, Query or Edit menu, Jobs option.

The Customer list can be managed via the Job module, Query or Edit menu, Customers option.

Reporting the results

1. In the Report module

Reports can be printed in the usual way. New reports specific to job costing include;

• Job (Classification) Hours Summary Report
• Job (Classification) Money Summary Report
• Job Hours Report by Classification
• Job Money Report by Classification
• Cost (Hours) of Classification
• Cost (Money) of Classification
• Job Comparison Report
• Job Schedule Report
• Job Analysis Report (currently incomplete)

2. In the Job Costing module, via Graphs.

Click on the Graph menu in the Job Costing module to see a list of available graphs. Currently these include;

• Daily Hours graph (also graphs cost or billing money)
• Payroll Hours graph (also graphs cost or billing money)

All Graphs can be saved, or printed by right-clicking on the graph.

Still to Come

• Isolated Job Clockings : The ability to make Job Clockings, on demand, at Payroll clocks.
• Full support for quantities
• The ability to reset employee classifications to a default at the start of each day.
• More Daily Hours and Payroll Hours processing options.
• More Reports
• More Graphs