Charging equipment maintenance costs to your Project

Owned by Nelson Leong
Last updated: Jul 11, 2023 by Maria Harreguy
2 min read

Scenario

Plant Back Charges on Logs:
When plant is wet-hired, the client may be responsible for the maintenance costs. In Logs, where that plant's maintenance costs are recorded, the POs/AP invoices use the plant job, such that all the repair costs are recorded with the plant, regardless of dry or wet hire.

Then we want to invoice the client, with their job code on the invoice header and some invoice lines to the client job and some invoice lines originally on the plant job.

Solution

This scenario is a normal expectation and is a common scenario for Plant Maintenance, often equipment damaged on a project follows the same pattern. The process to follow is as below:

  1. You should have a job created for the wet hire activity with the appropriate client, this is where you would be booking plant and operator hours and raising sales invoices for the wet hire. Assume Input or Output based or maybe both if you were charging days and only onselling other inputs e.g. Purchases

  2. When a plant item needs to be maintained a log is raised against the plant item all costs e.g. Labour, Stock, Purchases are coded to the log so that we understand the costs of that maintenance activity. As the log is against the plant item then these also form part of the total operating costs of the plant item.

  3. To Back charge this maintenance to the customer you are wet hiring the equipment to we need to invoice the Log and bill all the costs associated with it to the hire job. Ideally we would have an Internal sale feature for this but currently that does not exist so you would have to do a bit of double entry e.g. Bill the log and the client on the invoice would be yourself and then enter the invoice as a purchase against the Wet Hire job.

  4. Now that the costs of the repair appear as a purchase on the wet hire job you can then bill this transaction back to the customer. The end result being :

    1. We have captured the costs of the repair against the plant item as a log.

    2. The costs on the Log have been recovered and charged back to the hire job

    3. From the hire job, we have billed the customer the costs of the repair.