Labor and Expense Charges

After you enter project and employee information in the DPS hubs, you can begin processing project-related labor and expense transactions.

All of the work that your enterprise does and all of the money that it spends and receives is associated with a project. Every labor and expense transaction must have an associated project number.

Transaction Types

When you use the Project Control application by itself, without other DPS applications, you can process the following transactions:

  • Timesheets: Use timesheets to record employee labor charges.
  • Labor Adjustments: Use labor adjustments to record corrections to labor charges that have already been posted.
  • Employee Expenses: These transactions are designed to record employee travel and automobile expenses, but can be used for all expense reporting purposes.
  • Employee Repayments: Use employee repayments to record payments that employees make when they do not use the full amount of their expense advances.
  • Units: Units are goods or services that you cost and bill at a fixed rate. Use unit transactions to record expense charges made using units.
  • Miscellaneous Expenses: Use miscellaneous expense transactions to record expenses that do not fit into another expense category, including telephone, postage and shipping, models, and photography. This transaction type is designed to take previously costed overhead items and distribute their cost to revenue-producing projects.
  • Prints and Reproductions: Use prints and reproductions transactions to record expenses related to printing and photocopying.
  • Invoices: Use invoice transactions to records bills that you have sent to clients. If you use DPS Billing, the Billing application creates these transactions automatically when you create invoices.

These transactions update the project and employee data in your database and affect your project-related reports.

If you are also using the Accounting application, you can enter cash receipts and disbursements, journal entries, and other accounting-related transactions.

Effect of Posting Timesheets

When you post employee timesheets, DPS:

  • Debits your labor expense accounts (for example, Direct Labor, Indirect Labor, and Vacation) for the amounts entered on the timesheets.
  • Credits an indirect expense account (Job Cost Variance) for the total labor cost.

    The Job Cost Variance account (703.00 in the standard chart of accounts) holds the labor cost credit balance until you pay your employees. When you pay your employees, DPS debits the Job Cost Variance account for the total payroll amount. What remains in the account is the difference between the amount of labor costed to projects and the amount that you paid employees for that labor. Because Job Cost Variance is an indirect expense account, this difference becomes part of your firmwide overhead and therefore is distributed among all of your enterprise's revenue-producing projects when you allocate overhead.

Effect of Posting Employee Expenses and Advances

When you process employee expenses and advances, DPS:

  • Debits the appropriate expense accounts (Reimbursable Expenses, Direct Expenses, Indirect Expenses, Other Expenses) for the amounts entered on employee expense reports.
  • Credits an asset or receivable account for the amount of the expense or advance.

All of the labor and expense transactions that you process and associate with projects ultimately appear on your project reports, allowing you to review and track current, year-to-date, and/or total labor and expense costs for each of your projects.

Related Topics:

  • Direct and Reimbursable Expenses
    You can record two types of expenses related to revenue-producing activities: direct expenses and reimbursable expenses.
  • Costing Labor to Projects
    Labor is both the greatest single expense incurred during the course of a project and the expense that is most within the control of your project managers.
  • Regular and Overtime Labor Costs
    DPS uses both regular and overtime hours entered on employees' timesheets to compute labor charges for each employee and the projects on which he or she works.
  • Job Cost Rates
    An employee's job cost rate is the rate at which you want to cost the employee's labor to the projects on which the employee works. An employee's job cost rate may or may not be the same as the employee's payrate.
  • Project Charge Types
    When you set up a project in DPS, you must assign it a project charge type to determine how labor and expense costs are charged to the project.
  • Expense Categories
    You can set up expense categories to make it easier for employees to fill out expense reports. For each expense category (for example, Hotels, Meals, or Auto) you can predefine settings such as general ledger accounts and whether or not the expense is billable, so that employees do not need to enter this information manually.
Parent Topic: Project Control