The following extract is taken from publicity material for a company called My.N.

Once you have turned a quote into a job, you will need to book costs in a number of different ways. The integration of your stock system means that items brought into the job from stock are automatically taken out of stock and booked to work in progress. This result of this is that both your stock, and the costs attributed to the job are automatically updated. Any items not in stock can either be left to go onto back order, or you can generate a purchase order directly from the job. Items ordered in this way are booked straight to the job on receipt.

Additional costs such as external consulting and plant hire costs can also be handled in this way and booked directly to the job. Labour and production cost can be booked directly to the job or you can post labour costs through the time sheet. So from whatever direction you are incurring costs, My.N’s Job Costing Software is able to bring them in and account for them accurately, and in real time.

To summarise, costs can be added to a job by:

• picking stock and adding it to the order;

• booking the receipt of a purchase order item directly to the job;

• despatching stock (where an item is flagged as ‘delivery required’);

• posting timesheets;

• booking labour or production costs to the order.

Costs assigned to a customer job are automatically posted to the work in progress account. They will remain there until removed from the order.

Questions

1 What steps are taken in the job-costing process?
2 How will a computerised system save time compared to manual recording?