Enhanced interface

Project transaction rules overview

Use project transaction rules to calculate and post secondary transactions (such as journal entries) to projects automatically. Depending on your company, you might use transaction rules to:

Process incoming timesheet entries (as the work is done).

Entries are calculated and rounded per entry. Cost and other calculations belong to that entry and are stored in the database as a two post decimal precision rounded amount.

Capture cost plus billing markups and bill for General Ledger transactions.
Post operational data to statistical journals.
Capture cost of labor and automatically post indirect labor costs by item General Ledger, employee, or employee group.
Capture the billable value of labor and post it as unbilled Accounts Receivable (AR) or work-in-progress (WIP).
Capture direct labor costs by project or type of work (for example, a contractor who bids different cost rates for different projects).

Before you begin

Prerequisite	Description
Journals	Secondary transactions created by a transaction rule entered in the journal you select. For example, you can post transactions in an Indirect Labor Costs journal.
Item GL Group, Employee, or Employee Group	When setting up a transaction rule, define steps that select incoming transactions based on their Item GL Group, employee, or employee group. When triggered, each step of the transaction rule only applies to the incoming transaction if the Item GL Group, Employee, or Employee group of the posted transaction matches the one in the step.
Labor cost posting (for indirect costing)	If you plan to set up transaction rules to calculate indirect labor costs, you must Set up labor cost posting to calculate the cost of each employee's time. Labor cost posting isn't required for transaction rules that calculate unbilled AR.

Prerequisite

Description

Journals

Secondary transactions created by a transaction rule entered in the journal you select.
For example, you can post transactions in an Indirect Labor Costs journal.

Item GL Group, Employee, or Employee Group

When setting up a transaction rule, define steps that select incoming transactions based on their Item GL Group, employee, or employee group.

When triggered, each step of the transaction rule only applies to the incoming transaction if the Item GL Group, Employee, or Employee group of the posted transaction matches the one in the step.

Labor cost posting
(for indirect costing)

If you plan to set up transaction rules to calculate indirect labor costs, you must Set up labor cost posting to calculate the cost of each employee's time.

Labor cost posting isn't required for transaction rules that calculate unbilled AR.

Components of a step

The easiest way to understand the components of a step is to look at an example. The following example shows a transaction rule for indirect labor cost posting. This transaction rule contains two steps:

The first step processes source transactions. If the item for the timesheet entry is in the Item GL Group Services, the step retrieves the cost amount of the labor.
The second step subtotals the previous lines and multiplies the result by 0.3000 to calculate the payroll burden. The resulting amount is posted using a journal entry that is defined in the Post column.

Sequence	Description	Action	Item GL Group	Post	Subtotal range	Transaction amount	Rate	Resulting action
5	Direct employee labor	Process source transaction	Services			Cost amount	1.0000	Multiply rate times transaction amount and hold the result.
15	Payroll burden on employee labor	Subtotal previous line			5-14		0.3000	Subtotal previous lines, multiply by rate, and post to GL debit to 7700 and a credit to 8700

Sequence numbers aren't required to be consecutive. In this case, numbers are skipped so that additional lines can easily be added without having to rewrite the steps.

Use the Transaction Rule Details section to define the sequence of steps applied when processing a transaction. In general, the goal of the steps is to:

Retrieve the value of selected source transactions: For example, define a step that retrieves the transaction value where the item is included in the Item GL Group for Services.
Process and post related secondary transactions: For example, subtotal the results of previous steps, add a multiplier, and post the result as a journal entry with an associated debit and credit.