Weekly Dynamic: Project Accounting Benefit Allocations

For the last two weeks we've looked at the Project Accounting Cost Allocation added to GP 10 in Feature pack 1. This functionality allows users to take existing costs and allocate them across other projects. Today we are looking at a different animal, Benefit Allocations.

This feature was also added in FP1 (who says you don't get anything for your enhancement $) and is designed to allow companies to add a payroll benefits cost to a project based on the labor time posted to that project.

Start by setting up a benefit in Payroll with Tools-Setup-Payroll-Benefit. A classic example would be the employer portion of healthcare.

Then associate the benefit with a Labor (Timesheet) related cost category. This is done in Cards-Project-Cost Category. Hit the go button icon (window with a little arrow) in the upper right and click benefits.

On the Benefits window, select the benefits to allocate and decide if you want to carve up the benefit amounts based on hours or dollars amount posted. If you use hours, project with more hours get more benefit $. If you use currency amount, higher rate projects may get disproportionally higher benefit allocations, which may be exactly what you want.


Finally, Pick a Misc Log category id to apply the allocation to. You can also send the benefit allocation to a different GL account by clicking the go button again an pressing Accounts. When the Benefit Allocaiton process is run, a Miscellaneous Log transaction to apply those benefits is created. You'll need to post the Misc. Log transactions to see them on the projects.

Most of the work is in the setup so we're almost done.

After project timesheets are posted, there is a routine that needs to be run to apply benefit allocations. The routine is at Tools-Routines-Project-Benefit Allocation. You can limit the allocation by employee and check date. Check date corresponds to a payroll period and ensures that the right benefits are applied in the allocation since some benefits may not occurr on every check.

Click refesh to show what will be allocated and press Process when ready.



That's the basics and it's nice to see that GP has brought benefit allocations to Project Accounting. Don't forget to post the Misc. Log transactions.

This is very new functionality so there may be something that I've missed along the way. If that's the case, please feel free to leave a comment.