Financial Module

One of the most important aspects of our business is understanding whether or not we are performing to our financial expectations. Historically this has been prohibitively difficult with aluminium joinery due to the niche nature of the products we manufacture with many products being ordered from numerous suppliers and bits and bobs been taken from stock.

FSM integrates with common accounting systems, its own stock management system and uses all of the information entered throughout the job process to build a complete picture of each jobs income, costs and miscellaneous expenses. This allows you to quickly and accurately backcost jobs to determine their profitability and how they have performed compared to your budgeted expectations from a quote.

In addition to the main backcosting feature it has numerous financial processes within various parts of the system to assist you get the most out of your business, these include:

Budget Comparisons - compare quoted budgets to manufactured budgets to determine cost changes and if these should be charged to clients
Invoice and Payment management - be prompted when you should be invoicing and receiving payments and whether or not certain tasks are allowed to proceed
Construction Claims compliant with the Construction Contracts Act, quickly and accurately create claims and sync them with your accounting system
Cashflow and Invoicing predictions
WIP calculations
Variation Management and Invoicing
Future Cost Recoveries - recover costs against future quotes for a customer for works that couldn't be charged

Budget Comparisons

During the lifecycle of a aluminium joinery job the budget can change multiple times due to client changes, site measures or price increases. More often than not these changes are not captured and the client is not charged for them when they should be. This means you business is giving away profitability without even realising it

FSM monitors budget changes throughout the job and presents the breakdown to the user but it also automatically creates reviews for administrators to check when the budget has varied more than an approved amount.

This ensures all changes are captured and can be dealt with in various ways depending on the situation, for example automatically creating a re-quote and sending to the client to approve, managing a simple price variation, ignoring it or creating a future cost recovery against the client

Invoice and Payments

Never miss invoicing a customer or chasing a payment again! Within FSM you can set up your businesses account types and payment rules, the system will use this along with other information to prompt you when you should be invoicing your clients and how much to ensure that you are invoicing in time to receive payments.

Payments are tracked and logged and the system will constantly remind the correct people within your business when payments are due.

This then allows you to enforce business rules like cash on delivery where staff can book deliveries and installs but the system won't let them proceed unless payment terms have been met, quickly and easily highlighting on each schedule within the system whether a job can proceed or not

Construction Claims

Doing accurate claims that comply with the Construction Contracts Act is a long and complicated process, with quantity surveyors regularly challenging or not paying claims due to a lack of evidence.

Often times within our business we are asking non finance people to construct complex claims. FSM uses real live information about what is delivered, installed and glazed as well as ancillary one off job costs such as shop drawings and variations to construct a claim.

This is a quick and easy process that generates claims for each job but still allows the user complete control over what is claimed. The system can then generate a construction contracts act claim on your template with full evidence about what and how much is claimed and push or pull this information to your accounting system.

This ensures your claims are sent on time and are evidence based so that your clients have no reason to decline the claims, this will improve your cash flow and reduce administrative frustrations within your business.

Invoice and Cashflow Prediction

Due to the constant changing nature of our manufacturing schedule with clients changing delivery dates, suppliers not supplying products and manufacturing not being complete for any number of reasons, the invoicing and cash flow of an aluminium joinery business is a ever changing and fluid thing.

It can be a daunting task to try and create reliable spreadsheets to manage invoicing and cash flow budgets, with FSM it takes live data for all of the jobs factors and account requirements and generates up to date invoicing and cash flow predictions. These can be exported directly from FS Manager into a spreadsheet for your accounts team to use.This will give you visibility over your business finances at a level of accuracy that is just not possible to do manually

Work In Progress

Work in Progress in an aluminium joinery business is very complicated to calculate. With supplier invoices, components, liners and other materials being pulled from stock, labour and various other factors it is very difficult to pull together a reliable calculation. This means your accounts may be inaccurate on any given month misleading you to your financial performance.

FSM uses the link to your accounting system along with its stock management system and time recording to calculate accurate and reliable work in progress information. Using business rules and actual dates for inwards and outwards products and invoicing it will generate reliable and accurate information to be used by your accounts team. This can be exported directly into Excel for further processing. This will save your managers and accounts team frustration, time and ensure the accuracy of your monthly management accounts.

Variation Management

Jobs are constantly changing for any number of reasons whether they are chargeable to the client or not. FSM incorporates a full change and variation management system called NOC for Notice of Change.

Each NOC has it's own lifecycle depending on what it is for and what tasks need to happen within your business, for instance order product, pick up joinery, cut down in the factory, delivery back to site, and ultimately invoice the client.

This ensures that all changes are captured and actions are taken and notes can't be buried on peoples desks and forgotten about.

You will fix errors faster impressing your clients and capture variations you never knew were happening and be able to capture the costs and invoice the client or in the case you can't invoice the client you will be able to assign the costs to a department to review with them.

Customer Cost Recoveries

Within our businesses we constantly do things for clients that they refuse to pay for or we have to do as goodwill. FSM allows you to take a cost from the variation or maintenance system and assign it to the customers account as a cost recovery.

Future quotes will automatically have small amounts applied to them until the costs have been recovered from the client.

This will allow your business to recover costs genuinely incurred that were not through fault of your own while maintaining goodwill with your clients. This feature alone will pay for your FSM subscription fees