Archibus SaaS / Leases / Costs
Archibus SaaS / Leases / Lease Portfolio
Real Property / Costs / Cost Administrator
Understanding Costs
Use the Cost Wizard to manage costs associated with leases, buildings, properties, and accounts. Costs are assigned to only one of these entities to avoid double-billing.
Archibus costs are income or expense items, similar to a checkbook’s deposit or withdrawal. You indicate whether a cost is income or an expense by completing either the Amount-Expense or Amount-Income field.
To manage costs, you:
- enter recurring costs that enable you to quickly model and experiment with costs
- generate scheduled costs from recurring costs so that you have an individual occurrence of a recurring cost. You can then track the exact amount of the cost and enter payable information.
- forecast and experiment with cost changes in your cash flow by editing scheduled cost values
- create one-time scheduled costs
- approve scheduled costs so that they become actual costs that cannot be changed.
For example, you might follow this procedure.
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Start out by tracking your expenses and income with recurring costs so that you can generate a general picture of your cash flow.
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Track your expenses in more detail with individual Schedule Cost records.
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Generate Scheduled Cost records from a Recurring Cost record, using the Cost Wizard, so that you do not need to enter data for each of the Scheduled Cost records.
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When the cost is definite, you can make any necessary edits and approve it so that it is a finalized cost.
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If the approved Actual Cost is a receivable, the Invoice Administrator can issue invoices for it using the Chargeback & Invoicing features.
Creating Scheduled Costs from Recurring Costs
There are a few reasons why you may want to generate scheduled costs from your recurring costs:
- Recurring costs cannot be charged back or invoiced using the Chargeback & Invoicing application.
- You might need to record actual dates and amounts to precisely calculate cash flow. For instance, rather than using a Recurring Cost to document that you receive rental income every month, you may want to record the exact dates that the income arrives and the amounts you receive.
- To gain a more accurate picture of how your operational costs affect building performance, you may wish to record the actual amounts of tasks such as snow removal and maintenance.
- The Recurring Costs table does not include fields for recording when expenses were paid. If you want to chronicle when payments were actually made, you need to track the costs as Scheduled Costs.
Use the following table to help you decide which costs to track as recurring and for which to enter Scheduled Cost records.
| Recurring Costs | Scheduled Costs | Actual Costs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Description |
One record that summarizes a regular cost, such as a monthly rent payment or estimated utility. You can also summarize an estimated one-time expense. You enter Recurring Costs using the Cost Wizard or from the Lease Portfolio Console. |
An individual cost that is planned or budgeted, and can be changed at will. These costs provide the exact amount and date of each income and expense in its own record as an individual cost. From the Schedule tab of the Cost Wizard, you can have the system generate scheduled costs based on recurring costs If the cost is a one-time cost, you can manually enter it from the Approve tab of the Cost Wizard. |
Actual costs represent historical events that have already occurred and whose values cannot be changed. Actual costs are scheduled costs that have been approved. You generate actual costs by approving scheduled costs from the Approve tab of the Cost Wizard when these costs are certain |
| Benefits |
Require the least data entry, as you enter one record, rather than records for specific occurrences of the bill; for example, one record that describes a monthly bill for a year, rather than 12 monthly records. Can act as a template used to generate individual Scheduled Costs records when you need them. Can be used to generate cost reports, cash flow reports, and base rent reports. |
Provide the exact amount and date paid or date received of each income and expense in its own record. Since the income and expense items described by Scheduled Costs are not considered Actual Costs until you move them to the Costs table, you can experiment with the values of Scheduled Cost records; this can be useful for forecasting expenses and income and analyzing the impact on your cash flow A Recurring Cost must be converted to a Scheduled Cost before you can approve it, and consider it an actual cost. |
Can be analyzed in reports such as Cash Flow, Lease Financial Summary, Costs report Can be used to generate chargeback reports, using the Chargeback & Invoicing application Can be associated with invoices (if the cost is a receivable), using the Chargeback & Invoicing application. |
| Example | Monthly rent (income) for $1000.00 beginning 1/1/2020 and ending 12/1/2020. | Expected rent (income) $1,025.00 that is payable on 1/1/2019. | Rental income $1,025.00 received on 1/1/2019. |
| Table | Recurring Costs | Scheduled Costs | Costs |