Only a few industries – like construction and engineering – hunt for job costing services. However, is that level of detail actually useful in the long run, and are they able to find job costing through accounting services?
At CSI Accounting & Payroll, we’ve worked with small businesses for over 50 years. We’ve spoken to a lot of construction and engineering company owners who want to know:
Prospects who come to us for accounting often want job costing, too. They want us to track bills by a project, or job. It’s similar to time costing, except job costing includes materials and overhead expenses.
Do accounting services do this? No, not to the extent that many of these prospects are looking for. They can’t be in your books daily, so they won’t know which job each charge is for unless they ask you about each transaction.
However, there are a few different ways to get around this.
First and foremost, CSI does not advertise that we offer job costing. Again, this is because we can’t offer it to the full extent that many prospects are looking for.
However, a huge part of our monthly accounting service is advice. Part of this is examining whether your business actually needs job costing or you just want it.
If you need job costing, we can show you how to do it. We have some clients who assign receipts to their corresponding individual projects. Whoever manages this has to know your business intimately and be on-site to ask lots of questions every day.
Otherwise, if we determine you don’t need as much detail, CSI can look at your overall costs and provide an overall gross profit margin and cost of goods. If your jobs are roughly the same size, finding averages can be all you need.
We also offer add-on consulting services for our monthly accounting clients. With this, we can treat job costing as a project rather than an ongoing service. There are two ways we can handle it.
The first option is if you noticed you’ve been losing money over a few jobs and want to know where the leak is coming from. We can examine those jobs specifically to find each of their profit margins.
The other option is that we can take a look at your overhead expenses from a certain facility over a period of time and allocate them to jobs based on how long the job took in that facility.
It might not be exactly what you pictured, but we can still work together!
Now that you know about the limitations that accounting services have with job costing, what we can do for no additional fee, and what we can do as part of our consulting service, are you ready to check out monthly accounting services?
If so, please consider CSI Accounting & Payroll! To see if we can be a good fit for your business, click the button below for a free consultation:
Not ready to talk? That’s okay! First, learn more about what it’s like to work with CSI by clicking the image below: