Projects

Introduction

Projects are a method of combining differrent activities in the system into one place for the purposes of management and reporting.

Items that can be included in a project are as follows:

• Sales forecasts
• Sales quotations
• Sales orders
• Direct sales
• Sales invoices (of delivered orders)
• Miscellaneous sales invoices
• Miscellaneous purchase order lines
• Cost of delivered products
• Miscellaneous work orders

Project income is calculated from the following, where these items are marked as belonging to the project in question:

• Sales invoice lines of items shipped against sales orders or against direct sales.
• Miscellaneous or periodic sales invoice lines. i.e. sales invoice lines that are not connected to any shipment.
• Direct sales that are for cash. (Invoiced direct sales will be included in the above).

Project costs are calculated from the following:

• Cost of items shipped against sales orders or direct sales. Costs are calculated from the normal work order and inventory costing methods according to FIFO averaging as described in the Design section.
• Costs written to miscellaneous work orders, i.e. work orders that have no product produced.
• Costs from miscellaneous purchase invoice lines, i.e. invoice lines that are not connected to any delivery. See Invoice section for further details.

Note that although purchase order lines may be marked for a project, this is to identify the items on receipt. The system will allocate materials correctly to sales orders and hence to projects according to the normal allocation methods as described in the Production menu. Costs that are not used in normal product manufacture should be written to a miscellaneous work order.

Projects can also have linked PRM activities for tracking miscellaneous data such as notes of project meetings. If products are shipped that have serial number tracking, the project id will be marked in the asset tracking section of the Sales section.

Note that different orders that are linked to one project do not need to be for the same customer or supplier.

If you prefer to collect work hours to a project rather than to manufacturing work orders, open a miscellaneous work order, mark it to the project and collect work hours against this. See the Production menu for further details about miscellaneous work orders.

Licensing

The projects module has its own module which needs to be licensed. See licensing from the Admin menu. The project module affects many parts of the system, generally where there will appear an extra drop down list to select the project for a particular action such as sales invoice, work order etc.

Using

To create a new project, in the Sales section click the "New" under the project title. A new project is created and given the next available project number. This number can be changed to another number or short text providing it is unique to this project.

Data fields for a project are:

On the project screen is a list box of project reports. To obtain a report for this project, select the report from the list and it will be sent.

Issuing purchase materials automatically to a project service work order

It is possible to set the system to issue any received materials from purchase orders to a service work order. So purchase order lines marked to a project will not be received to inventory, but rather will be automatically used on the service work order selected. Consider the warehouse receipt process in your company so that perhaps project materials are physically separated from normal inventory. The template for the service work order can be set in system settings.