You've been running with your cost centre/ price list setup for some time now and you realize its limitations. How do you go about improving it without losing all your work in progress ?
Cost Centres
The main determinate for your cost centres are the invoices you receive on a job:
| • | Each invoice should relate to a single cost centre. Each invoice from your suppliers must relate to a single purchase order even though they can have multiple invoices on that order |
| • | Multiple invoices can relate a single cost centre |
| • | Separate invoices from the same supplier can relate to different cost centres. |
| • | Cost centres should be able to be grouped by job progress and stage. This enables us to schedule and force progress claims based on completion of cost centres. |
Coding is a very subjective. Most prefer numerical codes rather than alphabetical ones. Cost centres have a sort order field, and various sorting options, so it is not important that they are in alphabetical or numerical order of production.
Having reviewed you current cost centres, you will no doubt come up with:
| • | New Cost Centres you want to add – simply add them |
| • | Cost centres you want to phase out. If they are not currently being used, simply delete them. Otherwise use GCHANGE to change codes to easily recognizable redundant codes ( e.g. "001" to "OLD001". Delete these some time later after all jobs using them have been deleted or archived. |
| • | Cost centres whose code you want to alter – use GCHANGE |
Catalogue
The first step is to kull your present catalogue of unwanted items.
From Quantities / BOQ Reports, select all jobs then run the Items in Bills reports. Items in the NOT USED report that are not recipes or ingredients ( "R" and "I" in the legend of price file reports) are candidates for kulling
| • | Having reviewed your current items, you will no doubt come up with: |
| • | New Items you want to add – simply add them |
| • | Items you want to phase out. If they are not currently being used, simply delete them. Otherwise use GCHANGE to change codes to easily recognizable redundant codes ( e.g. "1234" to "XX1234". Delete these some time later after all bills using them have been deleted or archived. |
| • | Items whose code you want to alter – use GCHANGE |
| • | Duplicate items. Use gchange to alter the redundant code to the one that's staying |
Once again, coding is very subjective. Avoid including cost centre code within the item code – it makes item codes too long.
Once complete, you will need to reassign cost centres to items. This can be done by using the filters and search routines to highlight items and then drag and drop them onto the cost centre drop-down.
GCHANGE is a utility that ships with Databuild and is used to change Itemcodes, Cost centres, supplier codes,contacts, Job Codes and item descriptions globally in Databuild systems
