First, costing and GAAP are not at all the same, and we all need at least a visual audit trail at this level for GAAP to validate our workarounds outside of Sage. Second, when our vendors invoice us for many different jobs on the same invoice - not statement, Sage users have to split each invoice into many different Sage invoices to accomplish this. This makes communicating over billing with the vendor a nightmare. So, instead we have workarounds for our workarounds. Third, we have to make allocation entries for overhead items that trace to both departments and jobs. The job split is currently only at the cost level, while the department split is only at the journal entry level. I maintain a spreadsheet for every such entry, with all the associated calculations (weighted cost blended with known specifics, manually adjusted for things like selectively-applicable credits, etc.). If job were at the detail level, I could look the split up after the fact inside Sage at any time and not keep the spreadsheet. Better still, I could pull the underlying splits into Excel directly from the database, to cut the calculation work-up time down to negligible on the broader allocations.

by: Bob T. | over a year ago | Accounts Payable