Job bidding process through job costing software

Bidding and pricing
Proper understanding of job bidding is a vital part of running a business that requires an exhaustive understanding of actual operation costs. The managerial function of reviewing pricing materials and defining workforce needs are necessary parts of the bidding process. This process includes the following consistent steps:

• Initialize the bidding process that considers true costs
• Submit bids that can be fulfilled profitably
• Gain from past bidding experience
• Correctly allocate overhead costs to specific jobs
• Identify which jobs may not fit with equipment

The bidding process requires the use of specialized software as it helps assess how many hours are spent on a particular job. If a company does not use job bid software , then it will be difficult to assess labor costs, allocate resources and determine proper employee compensation. In any case, it becomes very important to have an effective software package that lets determine cost relationships.

Software
Job bid software is aimed to estimating the jobs worked on by employees in a given company. It is essential to making the bid process successful and understanding reasonable profit margin. For example, it can be used to calculate indirect costs. Let's briefly consider this. There are three ways for calculating indirect costs:

• Allocation of indirect costs by direct labor dollar. This way assumes that for each dollar of direct labor spent on a specific job, it gets a share of the enterprise's indirect costs.
• Allocation of indirect costs by labor hours. This method considers that for each hour of direct labor spent on a specific job, it gets a share of the enterprise's indirect costs.
• Allocation of indirect expenses to direct material costs. This method states that for each dollar of direct material spent on a particular job, it comes with a share of the enterprise's indirect costs.

Depending on industry each company chooses one of these methods as a primary tool to calculate indirect job costs. For example, often trade companies use the indirect labor hours method. The use of job costing software allows to track indirect labor hours (this is about the hours spent by administrative and supervisory staff) and assess profit margins in such companies.

Job costing software based on task management
VIP Task Manager is more than just software , i.e. the software that quotes job and determines an amount of money the company compensates its employees with. It allows not only calculate working hours and sum up job costs, but also managing tasks and jobs with efficient task management capabilities. You do not have to implement extra systems for workflow management and activity management to manage and track productivity of your employees. By using VIP Task Manager , you can create and manage workflow in your department or the whole company. Whether your company is involved in projects or run business processes, this job quote software lets you keep tasks and job-related information in common database and always updated. You will find that the job cost software provides the detailed job information and helps determine problem areas in existing jobs, so you can use this information to accurately estimate future job costs. The special feature of the job costing software are below:

• Job cost custom fields

In VIP Task Manager, you can specify the custom fields that accounts working hours and sum up job costs. This may be such custom fields as 'Worked hours', 'Overtime', 'Wage', 'Bonus', etc. that are assigned to each task. You can use the same job cost custom fields for all tasks, or you can designate special custom fields for specific jobs. The job costing software allows to use mathematical formulas in the custom fields, and you can your own job cost formulas.

• Charging equipment costs to jobs

Tracking of equipment expenses and applying of equipment costs to jobs is critical point for accurate job costing. In VIP Task Manager job pricing software you can set up each equipment unit in the custom fields, specifying the cost per hour/day to be collected when it is in use on jobs. As equipment is in use, you can input into activity, hours, and equipment units, so that the job pricing software will compute the costs directly to the activity.

• Managing employee job profile

Successful tracking of changes within employee job profile can determine if a project or business process is profitable. It is important that every change in employee job profile is accurately reflected in job estimate. In VIP Task Manager you can register each employee profile and easily update it every time job tariffs are raised or an employee has got higher qualification.  The package also lets you print out employee job profile by using Resource List view.

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