RAVE's Financial Management System provides a number of key project and business profitability reports - via your Financial button, the project's Back Costing, Profitability and CC Report sub-tabs, and your Reporting portal's Branch Budget and Client Invoices reports - in this article we're going to review the project's Back Costing report.
The Back Costing Sub-Tab
The Back Costing sub-tab breaks everything into two very easy-to-navigate options. One being by your Categories and the other by Supplier. We will now go through how the Back Costing page works in more detail.
The default view for the back costing page is by category as this is how we have grouped all of your Quotes, Budget, Purchase Orders and Bills. To the left, you will see your current Running Profit, the Variance between Bills & Quotes, and the Variance between Quotes and your Budget (if using a preliminary budget). Then over to the right-hand side, we show your Budget total, Quotes total, Purchase Order total, Bills-In total, Project Value (agreed client price), total Client Invoices, and Expected Gross Profit.
NOTE: Your Expected Gross Profit should be a positive number at all times. The running profit will be positive (+) or negative (–) depending on your invoicing cycle to clients vs the timing of the bills you pay.
As you can see below there are four further reporting sub-tabs - Budget, Quotes, Purchase Orders and Bills. These tabs compare your Budget to Preliminary Budget, Budget to Quotes, Budget to Purchase Orders and Budget to Bills. The Budget sub-tab will be greyed out if you are not using our 'Preliminary Budget' tab.
If one or more of those fields is blank then we will show you an overspend (red) or a black $0.00 - meaning there was no price in this field. You can see below that I have a quote for Labour for $9,000 but no Purchase Orders, and one Bill totalling $1,800. The Quotes vs Bills column is green - meaning there is some budget still remaining). The PO's field is red as there is no PO, but we have added a Bill for it. If you don’t use Purchase Orders you would just compare your Bills to your Quotes.
If you're over budget it will display as red, if you're under budget it will be displayed as green, and if you've come in on budget it'll be black. You can click on any quote, purchase order, or bill blue text to take you back to that page.
We also have two exportable export reports. 'Export to Excel' will export your entire Category back costing report to a CSV file. The figures are also colour coded, as above, and each Category has its own tab. This allows you to really break down your Costings and manipulate any information you need to.
The 'Export Charge Up Report to PDF' shows your Quotes (costs) vs your Bills, and the remaining balance. This report is used for open-book operators who share their Budget and their Bills with clients. This report doesn't have the client percentage markup on it.
