Plant hire chargeout and job costing
Charge the project for the plant it used, and know what each machine costs to own. Both need the same thing underneath: costs, hours and location captured against the machine at the time, not reconstructed at month end.
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What is plant chargeout?
Plant chargeout is charging a project for the machine it used, at a rate, as if the yard hired it to the job. The machine stays owned by the business, but the project carries the cost of the time it held it. Doing that fairly needs three facts recorded against the machine as they happen: what it cost, how many hours or days it ran, and which job it was on. MapTrack holds those facts on the asset record. The rate itself and the invoicing stay in your finance system.
- Costs: Maintenance, parts, fuel and labour recorded by category against the asset.
- Hours: Meter and run-hour readings, plus assignment history for where it was allocated.
- The rate: Set and applied in your finance system. MapTrack supplies the underlying data.
Why does the yard end up absorbing everything?
Because the costs are visible and the usage is not. A machine breaks, the repair invoice arrives, and it goes against plant overhead because that is the only code anyone is sure of. Meanwhile the project that ran it into the ground has already closed out looking profitable. Over a year that pattern makes the yard look expensive and every project look better than it was, and no amount of month-end reconciliation fixes a cost that was never coded to a machine in the first place.
The problem
Plant is usually the second largest cost in a civil or construction business and the least well attributed. Repairs get coded to overhead because that is easier than working out which job caused them. Hours come off a pre-start sheet if they come at all. Nobody can say what a specific machine cost to run last year, or whether the project that had it for three months paid its way. The result is project margins that are quietly wrong in both directions.
How MapTrack addresses it
Record the costs against the machine as they happen. Maintenance, parts, fuel and labour go on the asset by category and can be linked to jobs or projects where you use those. Meter and run-hour readings give you the usage side, either recorded by the crew or fed from a configured telematics integration. Assignment history shows where the machine has been and who held it. That gives finance the three inputs a chargeout calculation needs, captured at the time rather than rebuilt from memory at month end.
How it works
- 1
Decide what you are trying to answer first
Charging a project, or knowing what a machine costs to own. They share data but they are different reports, and building for both at once is how these projects stall.
- 2
Code costs to the machine, not to plant overhead
Maintenance, parts, fuel and labour recorded by category against the asset. This is the step that determines whether any later number means anything.
- 3
Capture hours from a source you trust
Meter readings from the crew or from a configured telematics integration. Be clear whether a figure is measured hours or allocated time.
- 4
Keep the assignment history
Where the machine was and who held it, so a cost can be traced back to the period and the job that produced it.
- 5
Apply the rate in the finance system
MapTrack supplies costs, hours and location. The rate card and the invoicing belong where your accounting already lives, connected by integration or the public API.
Where this usually falls over
Chargeout projects fail on data capture rather than on the calculation. The arithmetic was never the hard part.
Costs coded at the time, on the asset
A repair invoice coded to plant overhead is unrecoverable later. Coded to the machine, it feeds both the project view and the ownership view.
Hours with a known source
Meter readings measure use. Assignment history measures allocation. Saying which one a number came from is the difference between a report and an argument.
Machine costed and job costed together
Damage follows the job, wear follows the machine. Keeping both views is what makes the yard defensible at review time.
The rate stays in finance
We do not try to own your rate card or your invoicing. The gap worth closing is the data underneath it, which is the part that is currently missing.
The data underneath the numbers
Code the cost to the machine
Capture costs, hours and location against the asset as they happen, and let finance apply the rate.
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