Project Module Concepts
What the Project module is for, how cost and revenue reach a project, and the order of setting it up until the per-project income statement fills. Read this before opening any form.
What This Module Does
One question this module answers: is this project making or losing money, and how much of its budget is already used. It targets businesses whose work runs long and carries its own budget - contractors, property developers, software houses, event organisers, project workshops.
- Per-project income statement from the same general ledger as the company financial statements - not a second set of books.
- Budget versus actual per expense account, so overspending shows while it can still be prevented.
- All-projects summary with margin, physical progress, and cost absorption side by side.
- Work breakdown (WBS) as the source of the physical progress figure.
This module is a paid add-on. Its menu, and every Project field on transaction forms, appears only after the Project feature is active on your subscription. Tenants that do not use it see no new field at all.
Why The Numbers Cannot Disagree With The Financial Statements
A project in Acosys is not a separate cost ledger: it is a general ledger dimension.
- Every document carries one project in its header. When the document posts, all of its journal rows are tagged with that project.
- The Project Income Statement is the very same company income statement with one extra project filter. It therefore cannot diverge from the company result.
- Every rule already correct in posting applies without being rewritten: voiding, approval, period closing, returns, and adjustments.
- The consequence: if a document has no project on it, its cost will never appear in the project reports - and no error will say so. That is the single discipline this module demands.
Where The Project Is Entered
The Project field appears in the header of these twelve documents. It may be left empty - a document without a project is still valid, it simply stays out of the project reports.
| Document | What it records for the project |
|---|---|
| Purchase Requisition, Purchase Order, Goods Receipt, Purchase | The procurement chain for material and services. The project flows down automatically: entered once on the requisition or order, then carried to the receipt and the invoice. |
| Outgoing Inventory | Material issued from the warehouse to the project. This is the document that turns material into project cost. |
| Sales, Sales Order | Billing and the realised part of the contract value. |
| Sales Return, Purchase Return | They reduce project revenue and cost. The project must be chosen on the return screen itself - a return is an independent document and does not inherit the project from the original invoice. |
| Expense Journal, Revenue Journal | Project cost and revenue that do not go through purchasing or selling. |
| General Journal | Carries the project per row, not per document - so one journal can split cost across several projects at once. The project chosen in the journal header only pre-fills new rows. |
One document can belong to only one project. A single material invoice for three projects must be split into three invoices - or charged through a General Journal, which carries the project per row. Two kinds of document deliberately carry no project: the POS cashier (POS is retail) and receivable collection / payable payment documents (both only move cash and never touch a profit and loss account, so the project reports lose nothing).
Why Material Cost Does Not Show As Cost Yet
This is the first objection almost every first week raises, and the answer is in the report.
- Buying material for a project debits the Inventory account, not an expense account. The money has left, but in accounting terms the material is not consumed - it is still an asset in the warehouse.
- That is why the project reports carry a Not Yet Expensed column: project journal value that landed in Inventory or Prepaid Cost accounts.
- As soon as the material is issued to the project through Outgoing Inventory, the amount moves from Not Yet Expensed into Actual. Total Committed - the sum of both - does not move during that shift.
- Budget absorption is computed from Total Committed, so spent budget is visible from the purchase onward instead of waiting for the material to be used.
- Buying fixed assets for a project (heavy equipment, vehicles) is deliberately excluded: that is capital expenditure, not project cost.
Terms
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Project | One piece of work with its own code (for example PRJ-CITRA-01), contract value, schedule, and budget. The code is typed rather than auto-numbered, because it appears on reports and documents. |
| Project Group | A grouping of projects: clusters for a property developer, work types for a contractor, product lines for a software house. Used as a summary filter. |
| Work Breakdown (WBS) | The project task list coded 1, 1.1, 1.2. Each task has its own weight and progress; the project physical progress is born from both. |
| Project Budget | Planned cost per profit-and-loss account. Not a free-form category - the account is the same one the journal uses, so the actual needs no mapping. |
| Physical Progress | The weighted average progress of the weighted WBS tasks. Entered by people through each task progress. |
| Cost Absorbed | Total Committed divided by total budget, as a percentage. Compared against physical progress. |
| Internal Project | A project with no customer and no revenue - your own office building, your own product development. The margin column is left blank so it does not read as "100% loss". |
Setup Order
- Make sure the Project feature is active on the subscription; the Project Management menu appears only after that.
- Create Project Groups first if you need them - skip it when there are only a few projects.
- Create the Project: code, name, customer (leave empty for an internal project), division, manager, contract value, and schedule.
- Fill the Work Breakdown List tab: tasks, weights, and planned dates. Without weights the project physical progress stays zero and the reports lose their early warning.
- Fill the Budget List tab per expense account. Without a budget the Budget vs Actual report still shows actuals, but there is no absorption to compute.
- Start filling the Project field on documents: requisitions/purchase orders, purchases, Outgoing Inventory, sales, and journals.
- Update the progress of each WBS task regularly - it is the only number in this module that people must enter.
- Read the Project Dashboard daily, and Budget vs Actual whenever you approve the next spend.
If The Tenant Has No Accounting Package
- Without a general ledger there is no income statement. For that there is Project Gross Profit, computed from sales documents minus purchase documents per project.
- That figure is not an income statement: it ignores operating expenses, tax, and material not yet consumed. The report is titled gross profit and must not be read as net profit.
- Budget vs Actual and the Project Income Statement are still there, but both read the journal - so they only hold numbers when journals are produced.
What Is Deliberately Absent
- Gantt charts and kanban boards. Progress from WBS weights is more defensible than cards being dragged.
- Task dependencies and automatic scheduling.
- A separate project cost ledger. It would diverge from the financial statements sooner or later, and once the gap is found the module stops being used.
- A project dimension in POS.
- Milestone billing, completion certificates, unit instalments, and timesheets - along with WIP and percentage-of-completion revenue recognition. All three demand a different billing style per industry, and are planned as the next stage.
- A permission system of its own. Access to project menus and forms is set in the Roles master like any other menu.