Explore how to administer jobs

  • 6 minutes

The Jobs functionality will help you keep track of usage on jobs and provides data for invoicing the customer. You can manage both fixed-price jobs and time-and-materials jobs. The Jobs area supports common project management tasks, such as configuring a job and scheduling a resource, in addition to providing the information that is needed for managing budgets and monitoring progress.

Resources

A resource can be defined as a person's effort or that of a machine. With the Resources functionality, you can register and sell resources, combine related resources into one resource group, or track individual resources. Resource management is often used in combination with the Jobs functionality.

Screenshot of the Resource Card page in Business Central.

Resource Capacity and Availability

You can set capacity for each resource and monitor the usage for resources, which allows you to obtain a complete overview of the capacity and availability of your resources.

Screenshot of the Resource Capacity page in Business Central.

Jobs

With the Jobs functionality, you can manage long-term projects that involve the use of employee labor hours, machine hours, inventory items, and other types of usage that you want to keep track of. Using the Jobs functionality will provide a good overview of not only individual jobs, but also the allocation of employees, machinery, and other resources that are being used in all projects.

Screenshot of the Job Card page in Business Central.

You can set up a job for a project that you will perform for your customer. On the job card, you can enter all the data that you need to manage the job from an administrative and financial point of view.

By entering tasks for your job, you can specify everything that must be done to complete the job. For each task, you can plan capacity and sales for resources and items. Based on the item cost and price and the resource cost and price, your task and planning lines will create your job budgets, giving you the ability to manage the profitability of a job.

Screenshot of the Job Tasks page in Business Central.

After you have started working on a job, you can post usage to a job when purchasing items, for example. You can post usage by assigning the job number and the job task number on the purchase line, on the purchase order, or on a purchase invoice.

With job journals, you can use items on stock for a job or post resource usage. Periodically, you can invoice jobs to your customers and use job statistics to follow up on your job budget. You can also use the Jobs functionality for many types of services and consultancy tasks.

Time sheets

Time sheets are a simple and flexible solution for time registration with manager approval, and they integrate with the Service, Jobs, and Basic Resources functionalities.

With timesheets, resources can enter hours that are spent on projects. After configuring which resources should enter timesheets, the timesheet administrator can prepare timesheets by week based on job planning lines. The resource only needs to confirm if the time spent is the same as the budget for a specific job task. After the resource's hours have been submitted and approved, the timesheet administrator or the project manager can post them to the job.

Screenshot of the Time Sheets page in Business Central.

By assigning one of the available job costing methods, such as percentage of completion, you can have the program post recognized costs and sales to the income statement and post work in progress to the balance sheets. From the job card, you can track the work in process and the recognized costs and sales.