MYOB Account right does not process job costing properly in terms of standard accounting principles as has been described in all accounting text books which means that the profit and loss that is bei...
I would not have thought that the vast majority of users were using the job costing function as cost centres and quite frankly to do so successfuly would require a lot of discipline on the part of users.
If your mode of businees is Projects, jobs, contracts or whatever name you want to use and you have a contract price and incuur many different costs to complete the contract, you will have a point when it is completed and it is up to a business to determine what the criteris is but there will be a date of completion. At that point of completion, that business will measure the profitability of the job. Whether that job lasta a day or a greater period, the principle is the same. It is totally irrelevant the length of time that it takes a job to be completed. You may though, where a job takes a long period use a % of completion method or possibly break the job up imto measurable stages ie sub jobs but the basivc accounting principles remainthe same.
It may well be that few contracting ERP software packages have the ability to process jobs in the manner that I have desribed in terms of determining Profit but that says more about those other package. Surely, any contracting ERP software package must have some capability to measure profits on jobs. Is it not a critical function of accounting to meassue profitability and NOT in a way that requires a whole lot of journal entries? We are using computers that once you give them rules, can process data reasonably quickly.
I have difficuly in believing that businesses schedule billings so that the accountant can measure the profitability of the business. If the businees is doing this, then the system is patently wrong and you are doing this because the methodoly used in MYOB is wron, wrong. It is the tail wagging the dog, as simple as that. A business should not be run by the system. The system should be there to support the business.
The comments about large users and the use of the % completion methodology have no coherency and there is absolutely no comment on to whether the process of holding revenue and costs in work in progress until a job is completed and then transferring the revenue and costs to Sales/cost of sales accounts at that point is right or wrong. The text books say it is right and even Wikiperdia agrees
The idea is about using the correct accounting principles to process jobs and the production of meaninful profit and loss reports so that management of a business gets the reporting he needs to have and it is also about using a computer. You run a program to process all your completed jobs, run a report or display to check the results, correct errors and run it again,. How simple is that? And you are using the computer to do what it does best. Give it the rules and the results are there in no time. Its called efficiency.
In the end this comment becomes a sales pitch for a supposed business intelligence product. As far as I am concerned, MYOB should itself be providing the "business intelligence" about jobs and It won't do it unless its puts the correct accounting principles in place And when it does, it will be able to produce reports and drilldowns that tell a coherent story to management.
The programming changes? With all the competent programmers, they must have, it should be a piece of cake.
Michael