Date or Posting Period

Job cost reports are amazing. There are dozens and dozens of reports, and each one has various criteria to further dial-in the information you want to see and follow.

In general, the Project Managers and Field Supers have a few ‘favorite’ reports to track their jobs. Most often, these are printed by job, by cost code, sometimes filtering for materials only, or to compare budget to actual.

Most PM’s don’t really care about accounting posting periods, so they usually pull these reports by date. They may need to know who was on a job on a specific day or week; the date of material invoices; weekly invoices for roll off containers; when specific equipment was on a job.

So if I pull a report for March 1st through 31st, I’ll see all the items that were dated March.  But if I pull the same report for Period 3, I’ll get a different total—why?

If you pull up a calendar for March, you’ll see that March 30th and 31st, a Monday and Tuesday, were on a payroll check that had April work dates and an April check date. If you follow our recommendations for payroll entry, and you use Certified Payroll reports, you would have entered each of these day in the grid of the payroll record. When the March job cost is pulled for March dates, Monday and Tuesday will be included. When you pull by the posting period for March, the costs for those two days will NOT be included because they were posted to April.

When you pull your Work In Progress (WIP)/OverUnder billing, it will be by posting period. Your billing on the job will have been based on your estimated completion by the end of the month including labor, materials, and equipment. The work week was a split month; the invoice from the subcontractor didn’t come in on time; one material supplier sends invoices mid-month and the other sends at month-end; your credit card statement is the 10th of the month; and on it goes.

When addressing the field work, pull the reports by date. When addressing your accounting and financial reporting, pull reports by Posting Period. —CMW