This activity is used to run the Job Cost Calculation to create Job Cost Details and update the source transaction.
'Calculate Job Cost' is an assistant where the administrator can select which type of Transaction to calculate, and for what time period the transactions should be fetched. The calculation is run for one company at the time and it is recommended to utilise the employee selection template feature to run the calculation for a subset of employees. It is also possible to limit the number of transactions included in the job by only including project transactions or work task transactions.
Since it is possible to fetch large number of transactions for a single execution, it is possible to execute this 'Calculate Job Cost' function as a background job so that user can continue work without interruptions.
The calculation finds correct rates depending on different parameters in the transactions, for example the employee and the project. The rates could be from connected agreements, specific rates connected to the employee or prevailing wage agreements with a specific parameter (usually location). The rates are used to calculate the amounts and create new Job Cost Details. A message will inform the user that the calculation is done and whether there were any conflicts that needs to be investigated. Any transaction that couldn't create the details as expected will have Job Costing Updated set to 'Error' to make it easier to find and adjust any problems.
The calculation normally only includes the transactions that doesn't have any details in the calculation. If already calculated transactions should be included as well, there is a toggle 'Re-run Calculation' that can be switched on. This should be used for example if the rate agreement has been changed. If re-run option is selected, then all the job transactions (regardless job cost details exist or not) will be considered in the calculation.
Depending on different conditions the calculation is more complex than just creating one detail per hit in the rate agreement. These cases are breifly described below and can be applied separately or together.
Prevailing Wage
The prevailing wage is considered based on a special parameter, usually location, that is connected both to the rate agreement and the job where the time is reported. The Rate Agreement also needs to be connected to a Category with 'Use Prevailing Wage' set to Yes.
When a transaction gets a match in a prevailing wage rate agreement, the direct rates from this rate agreement is summarized and compared to the sum of the direct rates in other matched rate agreements. The result will be created from the agreement with the largest amount of direct rates. The Indirect rates are added from the connected rate agreements that is not prevailing wage. After this the total sum for the different kinds of rate agreements are compared. The result should at least match the largest of these sums, but if this is not the case a shortfall is added to the result which is a separate detail with the remaining amount.
The prevailing wage agreements doesn't have to be connected to the employee to be considered in the calculation.
Job Cost Periods
There are situations when a fixed indirect value should be added to the employee's wage for one full period. This additional value needs to be converted to an hourly rate both to be able to transfer to the payroll system and to be able to handle prevailing wage. To handle this a period has been defined as one week (7 days). The start day of the week could be defined with help from the parameter 'Start Day of the Week Parameter' in Company Details. Weekday parameter and Calendar parameter is considered, while Schedule Cycle Parameter is ignored since it is too detailed for this area.
The weekly rates are defined in the rate agreement, and when the calculation is done it is divided by the total amount of hours the employee reported during the full week. To get a result, the full week need to be covered in the calculation period.
Blended Overtime
There are situations where employees are assigned to multiple assignments where different payment rates are applied. In these situations, if the employee works overtime, the overtime should be based on an average rate independent on which role the worker actually reported the overtime on.
For transactions to be included in the Job Cost Calculation, the following prerequisites needs to be fulfilled:
In addition, a valid and correct rate agreement must exist which matches any transactions that fulfills the above bullets.
If employee properties should be used as Job Cost Parameters, the time registration needs to be done through pages Time Registration or My Time Registration. These additional parameters are only available in these time reporting pages.