Can you add approved and paid expenses to a project? (Belatedly)

[KMenz (Karen menzie)]

Hi

We are testing Project Costing, and hope to roll it out in live in March.
The directors want us to play catch up on some closed sales orders and assign them to projects in Live.

I have checked in test and it seems ok to reopen a sales order, add a ProjectID to the lines and the project ID also flushes through to POs and invoices related to the sales order lines. So far, all good.

We don’t yet record labour in live, so we won’t need to try and add a project ID to any labour transactions belatedly.

However I may be tasked with adding the projectID to some closed expenses.
So far in test, this is going nowhere. Once an employee’s expense has had an AP invoice against it and they’ve been paid, i can’t recall the expense and add a projectID.

In our set up, an employee expense gets added to the Project as a material on the job in the WBS phase.
So I have tried to duplicate an expense as a material in a project job, e.g. hotel accommodation or mileage. In Project Entry > Project Costs, the amount of the expense not populates the Estimated ODC field, but I can’t get it into ‘actual’

When I normally create an expense and tag a project ID, it becomes a material on a job, and
both ‘misc material’ is populated, and the supplier ID (the employee to be reimbursed).

A working example when project id is entered at the time of logging the expense, and the expense becomes a material on a job:

However, If I try to replicate this, because I can’t recall an expense to add the project ID to it, In Job entry > add material, If i tick misc material, the supplier field is greyed out and read only.
That’s kind of fine, as I don’t want to end up reimbursing the employee twice, but now it’s not the same.

So now, I have the material set up as an estimated cost but I can’t make it an actual cost on the project.

I tried ‘issue material’

and I can’t issue material this way, because it is a job miscellaneous charge

Business Layer Exception

Material is a job miscellaneous charge, cannot issue.

Exception caught in: Epicor.ServiceModel

Error Detail

Description: Material is a job miscellaneous charge, cannot issue.
Program: Erp.Services.BO.IssueReturn.dll
Method: OnChangingToJobSeq
Line Number: 7199
Column Number: 21
Table: IssueReturn

Client Stack Trace

at Epicor.ServiceModel.Channels.ImplBase`1.ShouldRethrowNonRetryableException(Exception ex, DataSet[] dataSets)
at Erp.Proxy.BO.IssueReturnImpl.OnChangingToJobSeq(Int32 piToJobSeq, IssueReturnDataSet ds)
at Erp.Adapters.IssueReturnAdapter.OnChangingToJobSeq(Int32 piToJobSeq)

So I try 'Issue Miscellaneous Material

And I can’t, because I have to pull in a part, and this is not a part in our part table.

How can I get a paid expense to belatedly record as a recognised cost in a project, or is not possible?

Thank you!

[Michael_Ramsey]

Not related to Projects specifically, but our ‘expense’ Parts on our Field Service Jobs are actual parts in the Part master. Why wouldn’t or shouldn’t they be?

I’ve done a lot of research and work into the expense capturing features of Epicor. Projects is a separately licensed module, but it seems to have the built in functionality to be able to associate expenses directly. Otherwise out of the box all you get is indirect expense entry.

Our reach-around for service jobs is to use AP Invoicing feature that creates a misc job charge transaction against the job so that costs hit it, and the employee can be reimbursed. Seems easy enough, but it’s a paper-full reach-around to accomplish what would be so nice if the employees could enter their own expenses or better yet having the capability to interface with some of the more popular expense tracking software that is available.

Field Service is also separately licensed, but in 5 years this issue of expense reporting against jobs still has no traction.

I hope you found your way through your project, just wanted to let you know that I found it very interesting.

[Ernie (Ernie Lowell)]

Do you have the Time and Expense Entry program? That is also a separately licenses module…

[Michael_Ramsey]

Yes, we do.

[Ernie (Ernie Lowell)]

That’s a (relatively) easy way of having your employees enter their reimbursable expenses (that’s actually how we do it). There’s some setup involved of course, but you can probably get it all done there.

[Srakesh0303 (Rakesh S)]

For you posted expenses be it labor, material, or otherwise … use opening balance option for the project. Whereas, T&A module will help you to book all direct project expenses related to Employees.

[Kpressler (KRISTIN PRESSLER)]

Hi Karen, did you find a solution to this problem. We are looking to do the same thing with paid expense’s processed outside of epicor. I want to tie them back to the project without creating an AP invoice. Thanks

[Srakesh0303 (Rakesh S)]

Apply expense with payment method (non-reimbursement type), this way it will get applied to the project without need to do any AP Invoicing for it.
KR