Administration Settings

Setting up a new Job Book system

When you first get Job Book you are given a blank system, and as an Administrator it is your job to set it up. Start by creating an office. After that come the line items your staff record work against (Labour Cost Items, Equipment and Materials and Fixed Price Items) and the Expense Items your staff claim against.

All of these screens live in one place. Click the Navigate button in the top-left corner of any page. The groups in the flyout start collapsed, so click Administration to expand it.

Offices

Every job is run out of an office, so every company needs at least one, and plenty of firms never need a second. Create more when you want work kept apart: a branch in another town, or a business unit you run from the same building and want to track on its own. There is no limit on how many you set up.

What that separation buys you:

• The office travels with the job and shows up throughout the backlogs, the reports and the maps. Where it is a grid column you can group or filter by it, which is how you read one branch on its own rather than the company as a whole.
• The office decides which address prints on the invoice, under your company logo. See Invoices.
• Every job picks its office from a dropdown of the ones you create here, so the offices come first. See Job Setup.

To see the offices you already have, click Navigate, expand the Administration group, then click Offices. The list opens on its All view, with the search box and the Search button above Create and Export to Excel, and a record count on the right. Each card reads Name: followed by the office name; click a card to open that office.

Setting Up an Office

The office form is a name and an address.

1. On the Offices list, click Create. The form opens titled Create.
2. In Name:, type the name of your office. It could be “Head Office” or the name of the town the office is in. This name is used inside Job Book only, and customers never see it.
3. In Address (Will be shown on Invoices):, type the address that should print on invoices.
4. Click Save. Cancel leaves without saving.

Line Items

A line item is anything you track on a job and bill for: an hour of someone’s time, a day of a machine, a lump-sum fee. Rate sheets are built out of them, a job carries its own selection, and your staff record work against them day by day. Job Book tracks the equipment and materials used as well as the hours worked, which is why those records are Daily Work Records rather than timesheets. See DWR Entry.

An item you set up here is not yet on any job. It reaches a DWR only once it is on the job’s own line items, either through the rate sheet applied to the job or added by hand, so if staff report that an item is missing from the DWR form, the place to look is the job, not this list. See Adding line items.

They come in three collections:

• Labour Cost Items: the labour your company pays for in payroll or charges to a customer, usually counted in hours, though any unit will do.
• Equipment and Materials: what a job consumed: the equipment your crews ran and for how long, and the travel and hotels the work needed.
• Fixed Price Items: charges an Administrator puts straight on an invoice with no hours behind them, such as a lump sum for a survey. Staff still book their time to labour items for the work itself.

Start with the items your company uses most often. The prices you set here are defaults, and two things can override them: a rate sheet can reprice an item for one client or one contract type without you recreating it, and a job can override it again on its own line items. See Job Setup.

Two decisions are worth settling before you type the first item:

• Name them to match your accounting system. Job Book raises the invoices, but best practice is to migrate them into Xero, Sage or QuickBooks, and that migration expects the two sets of line items to correspond.
• Record equipment and materials even where you do not bill them to the client. The company is paying for them either way, and the Line Item Report totals how much each one gets used.

A job adds a few things of its own to the items you set up here: a Bdgt Qty column, an Archived checkbox and a Show Archived toggle on its line item grids, and the job’s own Taxes, Fees and Additional Fields. Those are all set on the job, not here: see Job Setup.

Labour Cost Items

Click Navigate, expand the Administration group, then click Labour Cost Items. The list opens on its Active view.

• Active shows the items still in use. Click All to see the active and inactive items together.
• The grid columns are Name, Accounting Code, Hourly Cost, Billing Unit, Billing Unit Cost and Actions. The Name column sorts.
• Rows are grouped under a Category: heading. The small triangle beside a heading collapses that group.
• You can edit an item by clicking the pencil button in the Actions column, on the far right.
• Export to Excel downloads the list as a spreadsheet.

To create one, click Create.

• Name: the name of your labour cost item. Next to the name of the field is a red star, which denotes a required field. If you try to save a form and a required field is empty, Job Book highlights the field in red and makes you fill it in.
• Accounting Code: not required, but accounting systems such as Sage 50 use these codes when importing data from Job Book. The number you use should match the one your accounting system uses. In Job Book we call them accounting codes, but you might hear them referred to as chart of accounts, or GL or General Ledger codes. If you are wondering where they come from, ask your accountant or bookkeeper.
• Category: required, and picked from a dropdown that also remembers the categories you have already created. It is only used for sorting the line items into human readable categories. That sorting is what you see on Standard Rates, the printable list of the default price on every Labour and Equipment and Materials item, grouped by category, so pick names your whole company will recognize.
• Billing Unit: required. It defaults to HR. The dropdown also offers DAY, PER and UNIT, and you can type a unit of your own, such as miles.
• Billing Unit Cost: required. The rate for one billing unit.
• Hourly Cost: filled in for you while the billing unit is hours, because then the two are the same. Pick a different billing unit and the field becomes editable, with a line of text under it: you set the day rate in Billing Unit Cost and the hourly cost here, and Job Book tells you how many hours that makes a day of work. An $800 day at $80 an hour is a 10 hour day; at $100 an hour it is an 8 hour day. Job Book asks for both because staff record hours on their Daily Work Records, and it is the hourly cost that turns a party chief’s 8 hours into 1 day of Survey Mobilization on the reports and the invoice.
• Tax Exempt: tick it if no tax is charged on this item.
• Active: ticked by default. While it is ticked the item can be picked when setting up a rate sheet or a job. Delete is on the item’s display view, which opens when you click the item’s name in the list (the pencil under Actions opens the edit view, which has no Delete). It only works if the item has never been used; if it has, clear this checkbox to deactivate it instead.

Click Save. Cancel leaves without saving.

Equipment and Materials

Click Navigate, expand the Administration group, then click Equipment and Materials. The list opens on its Active view, with the same Active and All views, search box, Create and Export to Excel as the labour list. Its grid columns are Name, Accounting Code, Unit, Unit Cost and Actions, and the rows are grouped under a Category: heading.

To create one, click Create. The form is the Labour Cost Items form without Hourly Cost, and with Billing Unit: and Billing Unit Cost: labelled Unit: and Unit Cost ($): instead: Name:, Accounting Code:, Category:, Unit:, Unit Cost ($):, Tax Exempt and Active, each meaning what its counterpart means there.

What is particular to this list:

• Name an item for the thing itself, such as “Robotic Total Station”.
• A survey firm’s categories might be 3rd Party Charges, Delivery, Equipment, Fees and Survey Markers.
• Unit: defaults to HR. Change it to any unit that fits the item, DAY, PER or UNIT from the list, or type one that is not on it, like Bundles.

Click Save. Cancel leaves without saving.

Fixed Price Items

Fixed price items are line items that can be added to invoices, but are not recorded as work on a DWR. They capture costs that are not tied to work done by your employees, such as third-party charges or fixed service fees.

Click Navigate, expand the Administration group, then click Fixed Price Items. The list carries the same Active and All views, search box, Create and Export to Excel as the other two line item lists, and the same grid columns as Equipment and Materials: Name, Accounting Code, Unit, Unit Cost and Actions, grouped under a Category: heading. A survey firm might use categories such as Backcharge, Subcontractors and Survey, holding items such as Boundary Survey, Compliance Fee, Topographic Survey, Utility Locates and Third Party Charges.

To create one, click Create. The form is the Equipment and Materials form, field for field.

Two tips for fixed price items:

• Unit: PER is useful when charging a fixed amount per item or service.
• Unit Cost ($): where the price varies from job to job, set it to $0 as a placeholder and set the real price on the job or the invoice.

Click Save. Cancel leaves without saving.

You pick them when setting up jobs and when invoicing. See Invoices.

Expense Items

An expense item is a category of out-of-pocket spending your staff can claim back: gas, accommodation, field materials. You need them only if your people ever pay for something themselves, so a company where everyone carries a corporate card can skip this screen.

They differ from the other line items in the way that matters most here: an expense item carries no price. The employee enters the amount when they file the expense, because only they know what the receipt says. See Expense Entry.

To see the expense items you have, click Navigate, expand the Administration group, then click Expense Items. The list opens on its All view, with the search box and Search button, Create and Export to Excel above and below the cards, and a record count. Each card reads Name: followed by the item name. Typical items are Accommodations, Field Allowance, Field Materials Misc, Gas, Misc and Office Materials Misc.

Click Create. The form holds one field.

• Name: the name of the expense item, such as “Field Materials Misc”.

Click Save. Cancel leaves without saving.

Once they exist your staff can file expenses against a job; see Expense Entry.

The Other Administration Screens

The Administration group carries a few more lists. Clients and Jobs are day-to-day work with their own pages, Clients and Job Setup. The rest are not part of the first-day setup, but this is where they live.

Asset Locations

Click Navigate, expand the Administration group, then click Asset Locations. The list has one All view, the search box and Search button, Create and Export to Excel.

Create opens a form with Name:, Municipal Address:, Province:, City: and Location:, a Map Display panel, and Save and Cancel.

Training Courses

Click Navigate, expand the Administration group, then click Training Courses. The list has the same All view, search box and Search button, Create and Export to Excel.

Create opens a form with Name: and an Active checkbox, then Save and Cancel.

Vehicles

Click Navigate, expand the Administration group, then click Vehicles. The list is shaped the same way again.

Create opens a form with Unit Number:, Make:, Model: and Year:, an Active checkbox, then Save and Cancel.