Continuing in our presentation of new System Integrator features in D-Tools’ latest product release, SI v18, this entry will focus on the Job Cost reporting aspect now live within the Project Explorer. This time however, we will look at the Revenue aspect of this mechanism. This seems like a logical follow up from our prior entry on one of our other new report features - Job Costing. Click here in case you missed that one.
“Revenue? What’s that?” you say? In today’s ever challenging world of labor shortage and supply chain constraints, is there anything more pressing? Each of our dealers has to answer accordingly but is this not why we are all here after all? To earn a living by providing a service to our clients. Understanding a project’s bottom-line is where SI aims to help with this goal.
This is one of those methodologies in SI where entering exact product and labor cost/selling price values, along with time sheet entries from your field techs, really has a maximum affect. This report feature will allow you to leverage your specific project data to get a true and complete understanding of where your funds are distributed on any given job.
What exactly is a Revenue Report?
Well, from SI’s perspective, a Revenue Report is essentially a Job Cost Report that focuses exclusively on your project’s earnings. This evaluation is going to check estimated versus actual cost of all items in an SI Project, which includes all products and labor entries.
Where to Start?
To access to this report, you’ll need to proceed to the Project Explorer which can be launched directly from the Home Page of SI:
Once there, you will see the icon in the Home ribbon labeled “Reports” in the “Job Cost” partition:
From the dropdown, select Revenue.
Now prior to running this report, you will need to select at least one preferred project so that the appropriate data can be loaded. Meaning, if you run this report on Projects that have yet to commence, you may get some zeros in your display. Keep in mind too that you can highlight multiple projects in order to see results for multiple jobs.
Once the appropriate project choices have been made, simply left-click on the Reports – Job Cost icon and select Revenue to see a result something like this:
Before diving in, let’s step-back and review a couple of options and/or settings.
First and foremost, click on the Job Cost Settings icon:
Here you will see an option that will determine when values will be applied to the included report data.
Seeing how the Job Cost labels are within SI, one could look at this in terms of when exactly do we incur the cost of payment with regard to the items in any given job? Is it when they are ordered, received, “picked”, or installed? This is somewhat of a reverse order presentation from top to bottom in terms of the process flow of events. Consult with your internal accounting team to determine what may be the best option here if you are unsure.
As with other areas of SI data presentation, you will be best served by next clicking on the ubiquitous Auto-Fit All Columns icon to help display the data in a more optimized format for your screen.
You can then start to dive deep into the presented data and conduct your analysis on any one of multiple points of interest (namely Revenue):
So why does all of this matter?
Simply put, this sought after feature enhancement within SI now provides you with real-time data and analysis directly from values populated into an SI Project, Time Sheets, and from our Mobile Install platform. It now keeps all this data home within SI so that you do not need to export this data outside of SI (although you can of course).
As I am sure you have all heard and read before, in this industry, revenue is paramount to your team’s success.
Even if you are in this game for a short time, you will certainly know it is vitally important to overall operational cash flow.
For those of you “in it to win it,” this data extraction is such an important process of this feature in SI v18, we have actually recently added Profit as a data column in the Project Explorer to save you from going a level deeper in the Job Costing report. Just change your Project Explorer Layout to Price and enjoy!
For some us, it will only be after hours of back and forth with a client, weeks of PO’s, and perhaps months of installation deployment time that these numbers will start to take shape. However, you can sometimes get the transitional data you need while a job is in progress as you are ultimately awaiting completion to see the final bottom line.
Since there is much more to explore here, we will follow this up with a look at how the Backlog Job Cost report option can help you sort out various details about your deployment bottleneck both in the short and long term.
Well there you have it, the latest in D-Tools SI v18 analysis and innovation!
As always, we are reviewing your Feature Requests to determine our best step forward and next course of action with future SI product releases so…“keep’em coming”!
Hopefully this presentation of just some of the many recent feature additions to SI will not only improve your team’s efficiency and effectiveness, but will also keep the needle moving in the right direction as you tackle all the challenges of this year. As always, we will continue to present new features from our latest release (v18) to enable your team to get more and more out of D-Tools System Integrator software.
Please check back later for future blog entries!!!
In closing…
For more information on these and other features of SI v18, please see this link: D-Tools v18. You can also review our other videos and our usual support documentation.
You can also get more detailed information about v18 via our upcoming webinars and by enrolling in SI training with our PSG team.
And don’t forget, that’s why we are here…to ensure your success with our product! Be sure to check back here next month for more on v18!!!