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We've had to resort to Excel to provide a place for us to collect entries of items to be billed to a customer on a T&M project. When doing a T&M billing we can copy them over to PC but this has proved to be error prone. It would be much more efficient to have a table that would contain those items for any billable items. American Contractor had this.
Bob Arnett
| Company | Whitson Inc. |
| Job Title / Role | CFO/Data Manager |
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I looked and looked but could not find "Catalog Items" in our system. I checked with the online chat tech and was told that catalog items are part of the Materials module so it is not available to us. (We also do not have the Estimating module.) I also don't think that would work for specifically what I was requesting. We need to enter items to be invoiced to specific T&M projects that may or may not be part of our stock. The only other not-so-good workaround is to start an invoice with those items and keep it in a "Hold" posting group. The problem with that is if time is put in through payroll and/or materials through Payables, when the T&M invoice is generated, all those special items entered are wiped out and one has to re-enter them. From what I have been told the Materials Module is the answer but for us it will not work. The amount of time to enter vendor invoices catalog item by catalog item is just too cumbersome for the amount of good we would get out of it. Although the Excel work-around does work, it would be helpful to have this within the program.
It is interesting to me that the pre-purchase conversations led me to believe that with ProContractor, use of Excel would be minimized. This has not proved to be the case but in fact the use of Excel has increased dramatically with PC.
We were told that you don’t have to have the Materials module to take advantage of catalog items, and the only information I keep in there is our billing number, description, UOM, UPC, and billing cost to the customer. It is basically just a list of billable items. I’m attaching a few screenshots. I only have a few hundred items that I keep in there, we type specials in manually, but PVC, EMT, wire, and several other everyday items I keep so we don’t have to type them over and over or use a spreadsheet.
I was able to import them using a PC utility and I do get a price update every week from a local vendor to maintain local market pricing. Hope this helps.
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We actually don't have the Materials module. Also, we have found that the upkeep (price changes, additions, deletions) of an inventory database requires much more than it's worth to our company when all we need to do is type in the few items we are billing. That's why we are hoping someone will recognize the value in having a "holding bin" for billable items.
Have you tried using Materials? We have a catalog of T & M material that we use every day for billing purposes even though we don't track inventory. I also keep my mark ups and labor codes in the catalog as well.