Often, the charge total of an opportunity doesn’t represent how much profit you’re making. As well as the products you rent or sell and services you supply, a job might include additional costs or expenses that affect your total profit. 

Use Costs in Current RMS to log these against your opportunity to get a true breakdown of the total projected profit. Some costs are added to an opportunity automatically for you.

To view and log costs, click the Costs view button at the top of the items list.

You can anticipate some costs, so Current RMS automatically adds those for you when you’re working on a provisional quotation, reserved quotation, or an order:

Remember you can set costs for specific suppliers against your products, services, and bookable resources see: 

You may also log manual costs. To log a new cost, click add a new opportunity cost at the bottom-right of the Costs view.

On the “Add Opportunity Cost” screen, provide as much detail as you need:

Cost groups are a way of categorizing your costs. Choose a cost group from the drop-down menu. Create new cost groups in System Setup.

The groups you select here are displayed on the Revenue and Costs Summary screen, so you can get a detailed overview of opportunity expenses. 

For each cost you add, you can specify a provisional cost and an actual cost:

Manual costs can be edited at any point, so you can add a provisional cost now and enter an actual cost when you know the final figure. For example, if you’re putting together a draft order for a gig, you might add an estimation for hotel accommodation initially. Later, you might get a receipt from the hotel and enter the actual cost. 

When you're done, hit the blue Create opportunity cost button to add it.

On the costs view, click the “Provisional Cost,” “Actual Cost,” or “Price” column to change your costs. 

Click the blue arrow to the right of a cost and choose Edit to make further changes. 

Add notes using the Add notes from the drop-down menu.

Tick boxes in the list and use the Set Cost Group or Set Supplier options to set or change the cost group or supplier on all ticked items.

Automatic costs for sub-rentals, sub-contract bookings, group bookings, and external bookable resources are added as provisional costs. If you’ve received an invoice from your supplier and the cost is different, set an actual cost.

To add an actual cost, click the blue arrow next to a cost and choose Set actual cost from the menu.

On the pop-up that appears, enter a unit cost that’s used to calculate the actual cost by multiplying it by the quantity.

Total provisional and actual costs are displayed at the top-right of your opportunity underneath the revenue section. 

Current will calculate total predicted profit for you by taking the total of any costs from the charge total. Actual costs are used where specified, otherwise, otherwise provisional costs are used.

There’s a few things to check:

See: Enable automatic costing for your opportunities

Costs are automatically added for sub-rentals, sub-contract services, bookable resource allocations, and sale items. You can set costs in a variety of places in Current RMS; if you’re not sure why a particular cost was added, check out: How are automatic costs added to an opportunity?

The Opportunity Costs report under Reports shows all cost transactions for your orders.

Custom views would also work great for this! Provisional Cost Total, Actual Cost Total, and Predicted Cost Total are available as attributes when creating custom views. Export your data to CSV and open in Excel or Numbers to manipulate the data further.

Where no actual costs are specified, Current uses provisional costs to calculate predicted profit. Use the Revenue and Costs Summary to get a full breakdown of how profit has been calculated. We have a guide that runs through this in a bit more depth, see: Get an overview of your total revenue and costs