Going Electronic #10

Invoicing and Cost Reporting

What do your customers want to see on an invoice? What about cost reports that go to management? Many aviation companies try to produce invoices and cost reports from their accounting package, but accounting software is simply not designed to produce details down to the job level. The reports that come out of your book keeping system were designed to keep bankers, upper management, and the tax department happy, not help the maintenance manager or aircraft owner review the costs associated with a particular aircraft on a regular basis. Many an accountant has spent sleepless nights trying to design GL accounts and procedures that will give managers what they want. And many maintenance managers keep a hand written book of expenses organized by aircraft because the accounting department can't give them the information they need. That's because it should really be a job for the maintenance and inventory management software. Trouble is, most of those applications are not very good at it either.

That's where WinAir comes in. No Accounts Payable or Accounts Receivable modules are available because it is not an accounting program. But it does do everything in between ? from purchasing to invoicing ? and it does it well. An invoice or cost report can be generated to cover a specific range of work orders on an aircraft and a specific date range. The Cost Report is simply one of the three you can print after an invoice has been generated, the other two being a Summary and a Detail (pictured above) for the customer. The Professional Edition, also allows you to define detailed Departments and Internal Cost Centers that are independent of specific aircraft.

The cost report will list the cost and sell price of every part and every repair, and they will be grouped into the tasks defined on the work orders. Costs are not averaged, they are your actual costs. If you paid $24.87 for a hundred bolts and one of them was used on a particular job, it will show up at a cost of $0.2487. And it doesn't matter whether a job is complete or not, every cost to date will be there - unless it has already been invoiced. Your accounting department can use the cost report to expense out of their inventory account, but since you already know exactly where every penny went, they don't have to worry about the details. You can invoice the same work order repeatedly and only the previously uninvoiced transactions will show up. With the Professional Edition, you can include labour too, itemized by work order and task, and even by employee if you like.

You can generate an invoice any time you like and WinAir will know what transactions are outstanding, even if the work is still in progress. If you only want specific work orders included, you can select them. If you only want transactions for a specific date range, you can select that too. So you don't need to worry about closing off last month before you start this month, just leave the work orders open and generate an invoice or cost report for the period in question anytime you like. Repair charges that are left at zero will not be invoiced, so you can receive a repaired part into stores ? and even issue it out to another aircraft ? before you have received the final repair invoice. When the cost and charge are finally entered, they will show up on the next invoice for the associated work order, nobody needs to figure out where to expense the vendor invoice. For example, consider a task for replacing a fuel pump that is due for overhaul. The issue of a replacement pump will show up on the next invoice at no cost (unless you entered one). The return of the old one might not show up until the next month's invoice, and the overhaul charges not until the month after that, even if the task has been complete for weeks. You can even return an unused part to stores if the issue has already been invoiced and a credit will show up on the next invoice. Because WinAir looks after every one of these processes in real-time, the accounting, invoicing and reporting looks after itself.

If this sounds complicated, that's because flexible and accurate cost reporting and invoicing is complicated. But don't worry, WinAir looks after the details, using it is simple.