Consultant Accruals

Use the Consultant Accruals feature to budget project expenses at the vendor/consultant level using the Project Budget Worksheet, post expenses as they accrue for vendors/consultants, and compare accrued expenses to budgeted expenses.

With Consultant Accruals, you can:

• Calculate accrual amounts based on budget, estimate-to-complete, or estimate-at-completion amounts.
• Post accruals as they are generated.
• Suppress billing.
• Update percent completes; drill down to compensation and billed detail.
• Send reports to a process server for printing.
• Save report settings.
• Select accounts one by one, by account type, or by project.

The Consultant Accruals feature complements the Revenue Generation feature. Use Revenue Generation to recognize revenue when it is earned instead of when it is invoiced, and use Consultant Accruals to recognize vendor/consultant expenses when they are incurred instead of when they are billed to you. You can more accurately assess project profitability, because the project's financial data does not depend on the varied billing practices of your vendors or consultants.

Typically, when vendors/consultants complete their work, they send you an invoice. Often, though, the invoice arrives weeks or months after the work has been completed. This can distort your project reports because the vendor/consultant expense has been budgeted and spent, but not yet applied to the project's expense totals.

With the Consultant Accruals feature, you accrue the cost of work performed but not yet billed by the vendor/consultant. This amount is captured in a Consultant Accrual account, which you define in Settings > Accounting > Posting Accounts.

Consultant Accrual Calculations

Each time that you process Consultant Accruals for a project, DPS calculates and posts a journal entry for each of the project's budgeted accounts, based on the project's percent complete data and the options specified when you set up Consultant Accruals. Each entry consists of a debit to the budgeted account and a credit to the Consultant Accrual account.

You can choose one of three methods as the basis for accrual calculations:

Method	Calculation
Budget Method	(Percent Complete * Budget) – Job-to-Date Spent
Estimate-to-Complete Method	[(Job-to-Date Spent + Estimate-to-Complete) * Percent Complete] – Job-to-Date Spent
Estimate-at-Completion Method	(Percent Complete * Estimate-at-Completion) – Job-to-Date Spent

Timing

You should process Consultant Accruals when any of the following changes occur in a project's data:

• Percent completes are updated.
• Consultant vouchers or expense reports are posted.
• Budget amounts are updated.

Consultant Accrual Reports

Consultant Accrual transactions appear on the Income Statement, Project Progress, Project Detail, Office Earnings, and Consultant Ledger reports.