Costs and revenues



Costs and revenues

In all resources that allow cost and revenue entries you will find the two tabs Invoices (used for revenues) and Costs. In order to find out the profit margins of any resource you therefore have to register your costs and revenues the correct place. You can also see the entire lists of costs or revenues in you system by going to Tools -> Administration -> Assets, where you will find the two lists 'Invoices' and 'Costs'.

In the following page we will name both invoices and costs as "bills". This will make it easier to describe those similarities that exist.

For all bills registered in the system we see there as being two actors. One is the person who has incurred the bill (incurred user), the other is the accountant who may export them and in other ways use the bills for financial matters. Since the incurred user may need to change his bills or just register parts of a bill, the accountant needs to know, when a bill will not be changed anymore by the incurred user. For this the bill system has a 'submit system'. For a bill to be completed by the incurred user for processing with the accountant (e.g. receiving payments for invoices or reimbursing costs) he will have to have submitted the bill. This is done using the 'Submit' button that you can see on the bill resource lists.

Since it may happen that a incurred user submits his bill by mistake we also need a method for un-submitting it again. We of course do not want this to be done by the incurred user himself, since this will come as a surprise to the accountant, who may already have processed the bill. We therefore ensure that only the accountant is allowed to un-submit the bill, by giving him access to the navigation function: "ResourceCost_CanSetPaid".

When we add or edit a bill we will see the cost or invoice resource dialog. Below is shown the cost resource dialog.

If the bill is not yet submitted the paid check box and paid date field will be null. It is only the accountant who can set these fields. They will be disabled for incurred users. If a bill was submitted then the incurred user will see the dialog in non-edit/non-save mode. The accountant will always see bills in edit mode and have access to all 4 different types of save buttons. In order to undo the submitted status of a bill, the accountant just needs to save it as draft, and it will return to the non-submitted state.

Bills consist of some general information shown on the left side of the bill, and a detailed specification of the elements of the bill, shown on the right side.

The bill detailed specifications require you to specify an account to register an entry on (click here to read more on setting up the general ledger), a description of the cost, a number of sold (for invoice) or bought (for cost) units and the currency that the unit is registered in. The amount will then automatically be converted to the systems default currency, and a total of all the entries shown on the bottom of the screen.

There are a number of differences between the general information of a cost resource and an invoice resource, so these will be explained in detail in the two chapters below.