Financial & Costing Systems USed By HVAC Companies

Managing vendors is a royal pain. The way we do it is to group the vendors by region. Then assign a vendor number to each vendor in each domain in you accounts payable ledger. Assign job numbers for each job Match them up to the vendor number to the job number. Hope this helps.

I'm not quite clear on exactly what you are asking though. Are you looking for a program that will lay out your project for you, list all the required materials, work out the pricing, show you how much profit you'll make, tell you how long it will take to complete, how many people you will need to hire? Well, that's what the experts are for.

Or are you simply looking for something Like this?

From my experience in the HVAC business, most of the systems are designed in house. A VB programmer sets up an EXCEL based spreadsheet based on all your criteria. The best example would be what the larger companies do when they provide a quotations and cost analysis, Honeywell, Johnson Controls, Siemens, etc. I would think these are the companies that you are competeing against.

Greenja.

Vendor development is an art. It needs meticulous planning and coordination among various agencies. You can use excel or access data base to use the prices of various sub contractors such as ducting,piping,insulation,control panel wirng,commisiniong etc. Time to time you have to update this based on the prevailing market price. Add your margin when you submit your offer as HVAC contractor to the client.

Thank you all for your suggestions. Because none of the projects we do are the same, there is no std requirements list in terms of materials. So we basically can't say at the beginning of the job what our materials are going to be exactly. We do estimate and work around that. Another thing is that we get projects all over the country so we can't have set suppliers. It just depends on the location that job is at and we use the local suppliers there. So I can't fixed cost prices for items of stock bevause we use different suppliers all the time.

We are really looking for a costing system that will help us manage our jobs properly. Right now we are losing lots of money because guys on site are just ordering materials as they please and there are no controls. We want to know at anytime how much material has been ordered for a specific job up to date, and then filter those according to suppliers and per certain period. We are just finding it difficult to find a costing system since we are not manufacturing anything.

Obviously whatever costing system we use, it has to be incorporated with our financial system which is Pastel. Unless we can use one system for both. Maybe an in-house system is the only way to go???

It sounds more like you need a Project Manager that takes complete control over the site and all the requirements. Or a Project Manager that submits all requisition back to the main office for approval. You will have to change totalaircontrol to totalprojectmanagementcontrol.

There should only be one purchasers, if it's not approved, then they are not reimbursed for the expense. Every purchase has to have a purchase order assigned to it. That way you will always know what was ordered and delivered.

Is there some kind of restriction that says you have to buy from a supplier where the work is being done? Couldn't you ship the materials from a trusted supplier to the site? If they are running to the supplier everyday, either the design wasn't thoughly planned or there's some kind of funny business going on.

I have used HCSS HeavyBid for nearly 20 years to develop project estimates that can involve many materials from many different resources. While it may not be the best solution for you, it certainly permits the use of both established and new or one-time vendors. The material must be coded and included in whatever level of detail is needed, then it can be grouped in a way that permits prices from various vendors to be entered and then compared for competitive selection or with your established database of permissible values.

Once an estimate becomes a project, the contents of the estimate, i.e. labor, equipment, material, activity duration, etc., can be printed in report form to furnish to the field so that they can follow that estimate to adhere to the cost structure in it. I have found that this process permits the field personnel to understand what the estimator(s) envisioned and provides the opportunity for them to feed back regarding inappropriate allocations for materials, labor, etc. While this may seem to give the field personnel too much information, it is the only sure way to avoid cost overruns on account of lack of understanding the intended or projected cost elements.

They also offer a product for the cost compilation side of the process that is integrated with the estimating system and can feed cost data collected in the field to various accounting software.

There are likely other systems designed for construction that provide similar uses, but I am not familiar with them.