Vouchers in IFS Maintenance and IFS Service Management

Vouchers are created at the conclusion of a work order when costs are transferred to IFS/Accounting Rules before further transferring them to IFS/General Ledger. Transactions are created when costs are reported for the available cost types. The identity of the transaction is displayed against the relevant work order posting line. For the Material cost type the transactions can be viewed in the Inventory Transaction History window. Transactions related to External, Expenses, Personal and Tool and Facility cost types can be viewed in the Work Order Transaction History window.

In order to create vouchers posting controls should exist for the following posting types in IFS/Accounting Rules:

• Time report - T1 and T2

• Time report overheads - TO1 and TO2

• Tool and Facilities - TF1 and TF2 

• Cost of Sold Services - T3

• External - TP1 and TP2

• Expense - TE1 and TE2

Maintenance Transactions

As mentioned above, transactions are created when costs are reported for the available cost types. Both the debit and credit lines are displayed on the transaction history whereas only the debit line is displayed on the work order.

The posting lines related to a transaction can have one of three statuses:

• Valid - Indicates that the posting line can be transferred to IFS/General Ledger.

• Error - Indicates that the financial information related to the posting line contains an error. The adjoining field contains a description of the error.

• Transferred -  Indicates that the posting line has been transferred to IFS/Accounting Rules before further transferring them to IFS/General Ledger. The voucher numbers will be displayed against the relevant posting line.

Personal Cost Retrieval

Unlike other cost types, for Personal costs, the costs are retrieved in different ways depending on the information entered as shown below.

*Refers to the actual cost defined per employee in IFS Human Resources. Actual costs are only retrieved if specified to do so in IFS Human Resources (Menu Path: Employees and Organizational Definitions/Organization Definitions/Company Details).

** If applicable. In order to apply overheads, you need to connect the maintenance organization to a cost source in IFS/General Data for Inventory and Distribution. The cost source in turn should have an overhead rate (%) specified. You can also specify if the cost source is mandatory to use for all maintenance organizations for a particular company.

Transfer Maintenance Transactions

Once costs are reported and authorized, the posting lines should be transferred to IFS/Accounting Rules before further transferring them to IFS/General Ledger. The transfer will only take place if both debit and credit posting lines for the particular transaction is in the Valid status. The task can be done directly or scheduled as a background job to be executed automatically at predefined intervals.

Note: The AUTO_AUTH_SIGN_EXT and AUTO_AUTH_SIGN_EXP properties defined for the MaintenanceConfiguration object LU in theSystem LU Values/Object Property tab control whether manually entered costs belonging to the External and Expense cost types are automatically authorized.

Redo Invalid Accountings

When you have corrected the relevant erroneous financial information, the invalid posting lines should be updated with the corrections (i.e. posting line status = Valid) so that you can transfer them to IFS/Accounting Rules.

Cost of Sold Services

If you are using IFS Service Management, the work and material consumed internally will be sold as a service to the customer. In such cases it is important to be able to carry out a financial analysis on Costs vs. Sales accounts in IFS/General Ledger. Therefore CSS postings are only applicable to work orders that have a customer connected to it or if the work order is connected to a project and the project in turn is connected to a sales contract in IFS/Contract Management.

All work order postings have a cost type, but only real costs (i.e., cost types that have a transaction identity) will be transferred to CSS. These cost types include; Personal, Tool and Facility, Material, External (that come from supplier invoices and some manually entered costs - depending on the settings) and Expenses (that come from IFS Human Resources and manually entered costs - depending on the settings). Costs belonging to External and Expenses costs types that are manually entered are transferred only if the MANUAL_EXTERNAL and MANUAL_EXPENSE defined for the MaintenanceConfiguration object LU in theSystem LU Values/Object Property tab are set to BOOKING.

The status of the CSS posting of a work order posting is displayed by the CSS Type. A work order posting line can have one of the following CSS types:

• EAM - Indicates that the work order posting is not to be invoiced to a customer.
• Not Posted - All new posting lines in IFS Service Management will receive this type. Indicates that the related CSS posting should be created.
• Posted - The related CSS posting has been created. Note: Costs that are considered to be false, (external, expenses, fixed price - costs that do not have a transaction identity) will have the CSS type set as Posted automatically. For all other relevant posting types the CSS Type will be set to Posted once the CSS postings have been successfully created.
• Partly Posted - CSS postings are only created for a part of the transaction.

Creating and Transferring CSS Postings

In order to create CSS postings:

• Vouchers should be created for the relevant work order posting line (Booking Status of the WO posting line = Transferred, and the transaction has a voucher number)
• The CSS Type of the work order posting line should be Not Posted or Partly Posted.
• The work order posting line should be transferred to IFS/Customer Order and;

• The status of the customer order should be Delivered or above OR  the status of the work order posting line should be set to Not Invoiceable and the work order completed.

Once created, the CSS postings can be viewed in CSS Postings Analysis. Next step is to transfer them to IFS/Accounting Rules before further transferring them to IFS/General Ledger.

Note: Both the creation and the transfer of CSS postings can be scheduled to run as a background job at predefined intervals.