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Evo-ERP and DBA Classic >> Accounting >> Gov Cost Accounting
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Message started by Joyce U. on 10/17/07 at 09:00:57

Title: Gov Cost Accounting
Post by Joyce U. on 10/17/07 at 09:00:57

Our company is realigning our GL and cost system to comply with Government Cost Accounting Standards based on FAR.
Our current system accumulates direct labor and material into one single COGS account.
We would appreciate any help from other DBA users who do Government Cost Accounting.

Thank you in advance,
Joyce

Title: Re: Gov Cost Accounting
Post by David Waldmann on 10/17/07 at 11:41:14

Unfortunately, DBA is not capable of keeping track of the material and labor costs separately. The best you can do is to use Standard Costs to figure out what they should be.

Title: Re: Gov Cost Accounting
Post by cathyh on 10/17/07 at 15:36:26

I have a fairly elaborate spreadsheet that calculates the labor portion of COGS using the absorbed labor and overhead and the amount of labor in inventory accounts (WIP, Finished goods). Then we do a journal entry to move the labor portion into a different COGS account than 50000 so that 50000 represents just materials. I don't know if our method is up to government standards based on FAR- I'm not sure what those are.

Title: Re: Gov Cost Accounting
Post by David Waldmann on 10/18/07 at 04:23:14

I don't know what the Gov requirements are either, but the one thing I would want is the ability to know the current breakdown of costs per item in inventory.

Title: Re: Gov Cost Accounting
Post by cathyh on 10/18/07 at 08:43:07

I am not sure if this is what others are looking for....
In my world labor is only contained in items finished by work orders and there are several places where this can be seen in DBA for a given month (e.g. WIP summary, BS).
The problem is when you finish production, the cost of a built item goes as a lump sum (actual cost or standard cost) into a GL asset account, and therefore has to come out as a lump sum to go into COGS. In a given time period though the information is available-- I use Access and Excel to compile it. In Access, I use the WORKORD, WOREC, and MTICMSTR files. My excel spreadsheets are done (by hand so to speak!) using actual job cost summaries. We always finish at actual cost, and we do not have a lot of Accessories and Finished Goods Inventory (we generally sell what we finish in a given month) so this works for me.
In my excel spreadsheet, I take the total absorbed labor and subtract the change in labor in asset accounts to come up with a total COGS labor. The accuracy of this of course is dependent on the accuracy of your labor data entry and what you set your labor costs to if you do not use actual hourly wage cost. I would not mind sharing this if anyone is interested. However, from reading topics in this forum, I am sure there are others out there who could create a report in Crystal Reports or Access that works way better to summarize the data that I am collecting.