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Job Costing is a program which helps you track your costs after you have won the bid. You can set up these cost categories using the Budgets part of your estimating Price Book.
EasyEst Estimating interfaces with a number of job costing systems, using the CMS Estimating-Job-Cost Interface Format. Ask your job costing vendor if they support this format. The format is freely available, and any vendor may use it. We also export Budget information to Quicken QIF format and Intuit QuickBooks IIF format.
When you select the interface to the job costing system, the totals for each of your Budgets will be sent to a file on your disk. Your job costing system will then be able to import this information. It is quite useful in showing you where you are spending your money, where you are over or under budget, and by how much.
How To Interface to Job Costing
The interface to Job Costing simply creates one or more text files (depending on the type of interface you select) which can be imported by your job costing system if it has that capability.
Before running the Job Cost Export, you need to assign Budgets to your Items. The Accounting Code for each Budget (or its Code, if no Accounting Code is assigned) should correspond to the Budget Code in the job costing system.
From EasyEst Estimating, interfacing to a job costing system is easy:
1. From the Main Menu select File/Transfer/Export to Job Costing.
2. Enter a Bid # (1-999) that will automatically be placed in the filename or file data to identify the job transferred. If Bid you are working on has a Bid Code which is numeric and between 1 and 999, the Bid Code will be the default Bid #. (The Job Costing Interface only works with Bid Numbers, not alphanumeric codes.) The number is for transferring purposes only; you may assign a different number/code to your job in job costing.
3. In the field following the Export to Directory: button, specify the directory where you want the transfer file to be placed, or you may press the Export to Directory: button to select from a list of directories. You may use a temporary directory, or store it in either your estimating or job costing directory.
4. In the field to the right of the Job Costing Directory: button, enter the directory where the job costing conversion program is located (usually your accounting program directory). As before, you can press to button to get a list. If a program was included by your job costing provider, then that program will automatically be started to convert the file. (The program will be called BUDRECV.EXE or JCDBA.EXE.) If receiver program is provided, you may leave this field blank, but you will need to import the information into job costing manually.
5. If your Job Costing program can process Item details too, then check the Transfer Item Details check box. If you’re not sure if your job costing program uses this information, it is usually harmless to check this box. But if Item information is not needed, the export will run faster if it does not have to generate it.
6. Check New Interface Format if your job costing system uses the new CMS estimating to job costing interface format. Most accounting systems use the new format (which generates files like HEADR001.TXT, DETAL001.TXT, and BTOT001.TXT) instead of the old format (which generates ES1JBUD.TXT), with the exception of CDCI. Check your job costing manual or ask their technical support representative for details. If this check box does not appear in your Export to Job Costing dialog box at all, the New Interface Format will always be used.
Click on the Export button to start the export running. It will generate the file(s), and run the receiver program, if any.
If you have any problems with the interface, including the import in job costing, be sure to read the interface tips.
See Also: Budgets, Job Costing Interface Tips, Export to QuickBooksExport to Quicken, Export to QuickBooks, Transfer Menu
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