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How To: Make Miscellaneous Payments to Contractors
1. BackgroundThe Logger's Edge has the capability to make miscellaneous payments to contractors (vendors) for any items that are not tied to production or hourly work. These payments will be added to your vendor statements and will be tracked in the system so that they are included when you cost out a block.
2. Entering Miscellaneous Contractor ExpensesNavigate to Data Entry | Expenses | Contractor Miscellaneous from the Main menu. This menu item is used for entering three key types of information.
1. Any amount (positive or negative) that you want to appear on a contractor's pay statement that is not calculated based on load tickets, time cards, or production slips. For example, you may want to pay a vendor a $500 safety bonus, or you may want to pay him an extra dollar amount as a fuel reimbursement.
2. Any amount that you want to attribute to a block that is not calculated based on load tickets, time cards, or production slips. For example, you may have legal expenses of $2500 that you want applied to a particular block.
3. Any amount that you want to attribute to a particular piece of machinery or truck. By entering the expenses into The Logger's Edge, you can run reports showing all expenses incurred for a given piece of equipment in a given date range, and you can group the expenses into categories called "account codes." In general, if you assign expenses to an equipment or truck unit, you will not want to assign these expenses to a specific block because you will ultimately account for the expenses through your hourly equipment costing rates. See the documentation on the equipment costing worksheet for more information this topic.
Before you can enter miscellaneous expenses, you will need to ensure that you have:
- Set up Account Codes (under the menu item Setup | Accounting | Account Codes) to group your expenses into categories (e.g., Fuel, Tires and Chains, Parts, Repairs, etc)
- Set up Vendors (under the menu item Setup | Vendors) to whom you owe the money. (e.g., Petro-Can, Kal-Tire, etc).
- Set up Equipment and Trucks to which you want to assign the miscellaneous expenses.
- Set up Pay Periods (under the menu item Setup | Accounting | Pay Periods) that encompass the date range for which you'll be entering information. This set up step is merely so that you can select the pay period at the top of the entry window prior to making your entries so that the system can validate your date entries as you type.
To enter your Miscellaneous Entries, select the menu item Data Entry | Expenses | Contractor Miscellaneous.
First, choose the pay period that encompasses the date range of your entries. Make this selection before you begin keying in entries.
Next, click the Add button to begin making your entry directly in the grid.
| Date | Enter the date of the bill you are paying. (If you are making an entry for a vendor that you are also paying by the load or by the hour, enter a date that falls within the pay period of the statement on which you want the amount to appear.) |
| Vendor | Enter the payee for this bill/expense. |
| Equipment | Enter the piece of equipment for which this expense was incurred. Leave set to NONE if the expense is not allocable to a machine. |
| Truck | Enter the truck for which this expense was incurred. Leave set to NONE if the expense is not allocable to a truck. |
| Block | If you want the expense assigned to a specific block, select it. Otherwise, users generally set the block to the "Internal Cost" block. |
| Activity Code | Currently, this field is only used on the Invoice Report. NONE is, of course, a valid option. |
| Expense Code | Select the expense code into which you want this expense categorized. Users set up expense codes under Setup | Accounting | Account Codes. |
| Description | The description will auto-fill based on the description you entered for the expense code. You can over-ride the description with your own text if you'd like. |
| Invoice | Check this box if you have an invoice (that is, a bill) for the amount you are entering. |
| Invoice # | Enter the Invoice # associated with this expense. If you have a multi-line invoice, you can have multiple rows in this window with the same invoice #. |
| Amount | The amount of the bill (excluding GST). |
| GST | GST will auto-calculate (if you have GST enabled). (You can type over the default amount if your bill rounded differently than The Logger's Edge. |
| Total: | Total will auto-calculate as the sum of the Amount + GST. |
Users
in regions that have PST often want to include PST in the base amount, which
throws off the automatic GST calculation (because GST is not calculated on top
of PST). If you encounter this problem, a Caribou Support Representative
can re-order the Amount, GST, and Total columns so that you can enter the Total
and GST, and the Amount will auto-calculate as the difference between the two.
Common Questions
1. What do I do with invoices that have multiple line items?
You can enter the same invoice number on two miscellaneous entries in our entry window. The system will throw a message at you to confirm that you do, in fact, mean to duplicate the invoice number, so you will simply need to confirm your intent in the pop-up box that appears.
2. What do I do with invoices that include spare parts that may be used for any number of trucks or machines (e.g., filters, hoses, etc)?
If you have an invoice and are unable to divide the invoice amount among the relevant machines accurately, you will need to determine a reasonable allocation method, and break the invoice into separate line items artificially. For example, you could divide the full amount evenly across the relevant machines, or you can run a report showing relative hours worked by machine, and base your allocation on the relative hours worked by each machine on the assumption that the more hours a machine operated, the higher the share of these ancillary parts it would have used.
3. What reports should I run that make use of the miscellaneous entries that are assigned to pieces of equipment/trucks?
The following reports make use of the miscellaneous entries assigned to equipment/trucks:
Equipment | Operating Costs
Trucks | Operating Costs
In addition, the information entered into the Contractor Miscellaneous Window lends itself very nicely to a user defined report where you can organize and subtotal the information any way you'd like.
4. I entered a multiple expenses against a block, but the expenses are all lumped together into one line item on my Block Profit & Loss reports. Is there a way to display them separately?
There is a setting in the database that may not be turned on for you. If your miscellaneous entries are being lumped together, contact a Caribou Support representative to ensure that the following entry is set to a value of "1" in the Basic Setup Table: GROUP_BY_MISC_ACCOUNT_FOR_REPORTS.
