We have a construction oriented business that has anywhere from 50-100 "jobs" per month.
Each job has about 10 expenses and an invoice to the customer
The issue becomes when we want to report both expenses and income for said jobs and keep them in the month.
Let me give you an example:
Job A has materials come in June 20th. We enter those bills in June. Then more come in July 10th, we enter them in July.
We ship the job July 20th. This is when we execute an invoice to the customer, on shipment.
We complete the job July 25th, but a few straggling invoices come in Aug 10th. So those bills are entered in Aug
As you can see I have a job that is spread out over 3 months, when the actual "work" on the job took maybe 3 days.
When we run a PnL it is not correct because of the dating of the bills vs the dating of the invoice.
Our jobs do not run long enough to do a WIP and all the accounting involved in that, this is purely a dating issue. The only work around we have is to go into said job and RE DATE all the bills and invoices to match up to the corresponding month of shipment, which if not careful throws off our dating on AP.
We pay commissions on our jobs so we have to have accurate job costing and profits per job on a timely basis. Plus we want our monthly PnL to be correct on the income we earned.
Does anybody have a solution that we are not thinking of? We have almost gone to an envelopes type of accounting where the bills/invoices wait in a holding box until we ship the job then enter all the data at that time. The problem with that is jobs can sit in the warehouse for 2 weeks or 6 and that can cause an issue with AP.
Any input would be great. Thank you
