Skip to main content

Tracking costs and profit on jobs/sales orders

Compare forecast and actual costs on jobs and sales orders to see running profit, report on them, and set how PO costs are calculated.

Compare forecast and actual costs to give you a running profit.

Forecast Profit and Actual Profit donut charts comparing 47% forecast margin with 46% actual, with profit and cost values below

Forecast - Copied over from the quotation or when an item is added to the job directly from the 'Add Item' button. These can be overtyped. If the dial and columns are not visible, click on the 'Screen Options' button and select 'Forecast Costs' (Admin users only).

Actual - These are from:

Reporting

Select Report Center -> Report Studio, then select the Job/Sales Order module. Use the report on dropdown to analyze using these metrics:

Report Studio Report On dropdown searched for "margin," listing Gross Margin, Gross Margin %, and Gross Margin Variance options

Splitting the Actual Cost

There are two ways the cost from PO associated with the job can be calculated. The system can either take the whole cost of the PO for that line item, or it can take just the number of items that match. In the latter case, this is useful where you might have 4 on a client order but want to order 8 and keep the rest in stock. To use this second method to open the Job Settings -> Job Defaults and make sure that the 'Calculate Cost by Whole PO' is unticked. This is a more laborious method so should only be set to this if you regularly do this bundling of client and stock orders together.

Setting the Calculation Method

For Purchase Orders created from a job, there are two ways the cost can be calculated on the job/sales order:

  • For the whole job - this is the default and easiest to manage

  • Against a specific item - this enables you to combine orders to suppliers from different jobs and clients

  • To set the method, click on the Cog -> Financial Settings -> Order Cost Settings:

Financial Settings, Order Cost Settings section with the Calculate Cost By Whole PO checkbox highlighted

Note that changing between them will not retrospectively recalculate older jobs, and you may lose historical reporting.

Learn more: jobs in Zigaflow

Did this answer your question?