Job Costing Overview | Jiwa Training Centre

Job Costing vs Service Manager

Job Costing is suited to businesses that manage project-based work and need to track the full lifecycle of a job, from quoting and budgeting through to costing, invoicing, work in progress, and profitability reporting.

Choosing between Job Costing and Service Manager depends on how the work is managed, what information needs to be captured, and how the customer is invoiced.

Function	Job Costing	Service Manager
Add non-inventory costs to a job	Yes	Only physical and non-physical inventory items can be added
Bill at inventory value	No	Yes
Email from the job	No	Yes
Flexible billing options	No	Yes
Actual vs budget reporting	Yes	No
Manage prepaid hours or labour packs	No	Yes
Manage work through cost centres and stages	Yes	No
Manage work through tasks	No	Yes
Produce finished goods	Yes	No
Progress billing	Yes	No
Generate purchase orders	Yes	No
Work in progress reporting	Yes	Stock is moved to a Service warehouse rather than WIP

Job Costing is generally the better fit where the business needs to:

capture a broad range of cost types against a job, not only materials or labour
manage jobs through cost centres or stages
report actual costs against quotes and budgets
produce finished goods
track work in progress
review job profitability in detail

Service Manager may be a better fit where the work is service-based, task-driven, or requires flexible customer billing, prepaid labour packs, service warehouse stock movement, and email communication from the service job.

Video demonstration

The following video provides an overview of the Jiwa Job Costing module.