My company only reports billing rates for labor to avoid just this issue. The CFO obviously uses actuals for his reporting but Operations folks can only see the billing rates. We're a Timberline shop and in STO you can accomplish it by pointing all Operations job cost reports to the Billing module to use the T&M rates set up there and you will have to maintain the tables and generate WIP there every week even if you don't use Billing for billings.

We've now done this in two different systems so I suspect it's possible in most major ERP systems but it's not without pain and it will potentially impact future development and integration of third-party apps with STO so I can't wholeheartedly recomend it, only acknowledge that it's feasible.

Stephanie,

It is critical to charge PM salaries to projects to capture the true cost.  Also, in the event of a claim, it is typical that only actual incurred project costs can be recovered.  Since maintaining salary confidentiality is important, I had my software accumulate fully burdened PM costs weekly, and make the charge to the job in the "Overhead" cost category, with no associated labor hours.  Typically, the costs are booked in the "Labor" cost category with the associated manhours, making confidentiality impossible.  By converting the costs to "Overhead", the job still benefits from the actual cost while eliminating the possibility of calculating confidential salary information.

Hope this helps.

Bill

This has been an issue for me for over 20 years. Not only do you need to be concerned about other PM's salaries, but I have seen experienced superintendents make more than new PM's which would also be an issue. Also, if you only charge the PR taxes you are leaving out other costs than are part of an employee's compensation.

The way I have handled it is to create a blended Super and PM rate that can be charged to the job. At the end of every year I create a spreadsheet that details all employee costs (PR taxes, FUTA, SUTA, W/C, auto, cell phone, group ins, retirement plans, bonus, etc.). We have distributed this to all of the employees so that they can see all of the costs that go into their compensation (sometimes we all need some reminding of our benefits). I capture the holiday, vacation, sick (and any other paid leave) by reducing the denominator accordingly.

With the help of my Timberline consutant we have developed various rates to charge to jobs. Some rates are even more burdened to include our warehouse costs or some overhead if appropriate. I used to just make monthly entries, but now we have the costs coming directly from Payroll.

We use eCMS (CGC) and have been setting up standard rates for each employee class that is assigned to each employee in the employee master file. This rate can be set at one rate for the global employee class level, or a different rate for each project, should we need to contractually on negotiated projects. The actual wage and associated burden gets charged to Overhead, and the standard rate charge offset is credited to a payroll backcharge code in overhead.

The only challenge we have is in situations where we need to charge at a standard rate on one job, but actual costs on another (in the case of an assistant superintendent for example) in the same week. The system does not allow this in the same week.

Lastly, charging standard rates works better than trying to limit the information on projects from others. I fail to understand why one would want to hide job cost information from internal users.

Good luck.

Stephanie Magenau wrote:

Stephanie - This is a difficult one, and the only way I've seen it work successfully is if your ERP software allows you to automaticall "HIDE" specific groups of employees (Ie blocks employee names and/or $$$ amounts) in project reports.