On a Fixed Price project, estimates & job costing can be turned on or off at any point during a project's lifecycle until a change order or variation is created. However, it’s best to determine this setting at the start of your project. Since this setting has important effects on the way financials are handled in the system, any change to the estimates & job costing after a project is created will require admin rights.
Where to turn estimates & job costing on or off
You'll configure your project's job costing setting from the project Setup page, which you can reach in the following ways.
When adding a new project: "+ New Project" from the Projects page
For existing projects: Head to the Project Setup page
Note: Open book projects always have estimates & job costing enabled, and this cannot be turned on or off. If you’re not tracking your estimate and budget within CoConstruct, you will want to select the Fixed Price financial structure even if the job is a cost-plus or time & materials arrangement.
Switching estimates & job costing from "On" to "Off"
If you are switching estimates & job costing off for a project, you will lose any information you've added to keep track of your project's costs, including the original budget and revised budget numbers.
Since you are no longer entering your budget into CoConstruct, you will notice that the Budget and Estimate tabs are no longer available under your Financials. Instead, your Base Price will be set on the project’s setup page and any allowance amounts and option prices will be entered directly on the Specs & Selections.
While you will no longer have the underlying tools that you had previously used to build any client allowance or client price, your client price and allowance information will still be retained on your Specs and Selections. The system will still track price variances for the client from selections and change orders against the Base Price, but will no longer track your cost/profit breakdown or cost overages.
Switching estimates & job costing from "Off" to "On"
If you switch estimates & job costing from "Off" to "On" for a fixed price job, you will have some new tools at your disposal, including the ability to estimate your projects and track your project's costs.
If you had previously entered any allowance or client price information on your projects, those details will be lost. This is why turning estimates & job costing to "Yes" for a Fixed Price project is something that's best done at the very beginning of the job.
Your allowances and client pricing are not retained in this scenario because you will now be building those numbers using cost lines and broken out into the correct accounting codes with cost and markup differentiated. Since this financial structure does not exist if you're not tracking the budget, there is no way to retain any manually-entered allowance or client price information on a fixed price job.
Template vs. Project Settings
If you have any cost data saved in your Spec/Selection templates, it is important to understand how the estimates & job costing setting affects how that financial information transfers to the project.
With your financial information built into the template through cost lines, the system will bring the full budget breakdown into your project when the estimates & job costing is ON. If your project estimates & job costing is OFF, all allowances and option client prices will be brought into the job will be carried over but your budget breakdown and markups will be lost.
If you have allowance amounts and client prices entered directly on the template without cost lines, the project’s estimates & job costing must be OFF in order for that information to be transferred to the project. When the project’s estimates & job costing is ON, all options will be brought down as TBD as a reminder for you to re-build those prices through the cost lines.