🎞️ What is the costs view?

Current intelligently costs an opportunity so you know how much money you’re making on a job.

Matthew James Finkel avatar
Written by Matthew James Finkel
Updated over a week ago

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

The costs view is where you manage costs for your opportunity.

Use the costs view to:

  • See all costs on your opportunity, including automatically added costs

  • Add manual costs

  • Change costs, including making changes in batch

  • Enter notes against costs

Get started

To view and add costs, click the Costs view button at the top of the items list. It’s available when your opportunity is a draft, quotation, or an order.

Automatically added costs

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

  • Sub-rented products and sub-contracted services
    When an item is sub-rented or sub-contracted, the sub-rent or sub-contract price is added to your opportunity costs.

  • Bookable resource costs
    When a bookable resource like a crew member or vehicle is allocated to an opportunity, the resource cost is added to your opportunity costs.

  • Sale items
    ​
    When you add a sale item, the purchase price against your product is added to your opportunity costs.

Manual costs

You may also add manual costs, great for things like hotel accommodation or other job related expenses. 

Manually added costs are a little simpler than automatically added costs – no calculations are done based on quantity or rate definition.

Provisional and actual costs

For each cost, you may set two cost totals:

  • Provisional cost
    ​
    A rough idea of the cost; the cost subject to change.

  • Actual cost
    ​
    The final total for a particular cost.

When you’re putting together a quotation you might enter estimations for your costs as provisional. Current will automatically add provisional costs for you in some cases too. Later, when your order has been confirmed and you start to receive invoices from your suppliers, you can update with your actual costs. 

Provisional costs are automatically added for sub-rentals, sub-contracts, group bookings, and external bookable resources. Set an actual cost later on, if you like.

For manual costs, you can enter both a provisional cost and an actual cost.

Filter the view

By default, the costs view is sorted by opportunity group (“Grouped”), meaning it mirrors the the order view. Click or tap the Product, Cost Group, Type, or Resource columns to sort the list.

  • Cost group groups costs by their cost groups.

  • Type groups by sub-rental, sub-contract, service, and purchase.

  • Resource groups by supplier or stock type.

See more columns

The costs view adapts to your screen type, so on smaller screens you get just the essential information and on larger screens you can see all the detail.

If you’re working on a computer, make your browser window bigger to see more detail.

Cost totals

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.

Common questions

Why can’t I see any automatic costs against my opportunity?

It sounds like you might be working with an older opportunity, or an opportunity that’s an inquiry, draft, or open quotation.  

How do I report on my costs?

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 views. 

I'm confused about my predicted profit. The figures don't add up.

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. 

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