Zavanti ERP Best Practice encourages the original budgets (baseline) to be estimated as accurately as possible at the estimate stage. When we copy an estimate to a job, we can choose to create purchase orders from the estimate. If this is the case, and we have committed some of these purchase orders, we cannot change the budgets in the Budgets window. We must create a variation for this job to change the budgets.
If we have not created Purchase Orders when copying the estimate to the job, there will not be any commitments marked against the job, and we can maintain the original budget.
To maintain the budget, we can create a new original budget, and the previous budget becomes marked as Historical. Once it has been marked as historical, it is as good as being deleted. These figures cannot be accessed in any reports, or used in anyway, and are not the budget that the system uses. They merely appear here for historical purposes. To maintain the original cash flow and job budgets
The budget we have created in the estimate is copied to the job created in the Job Costing module, and used as the current budget. The current budget acts as a baseline to the project. The Current budget as shown in the Budget tab of the job is used throughout the software as the baseline. Any over runs of the budget will be calculated from this original budget and any variations are added to this current budget figure.
Therefore it is important to set this correctly in the estimate. If, however, we want to change this budget at a later stage, we can create another budget in the Budgets tab of the Job, and it will replace the budget we have entered previously. The ability to do this will be based on security settings in the system.
1. Ensure Job Costing is open and select the required Job
2. Click on the Budgets tab.
3. To enter a new original budget, we simply add a NEW budget for the cost centre that we wish to change. If there are commitments against this job, you will not be able to alter the original budget
4. Click on the New button
5. Click on drop down box for cost centre and choose the Cost Centre, enter a Note, and Budget Amount in total. You may enter a Note if required
6. Click on Process. This budget will now be set as Current and the previous budget for that cost centre will be set as Historical.
7. Click on Process
8. Close the Job