This article explains how the owner project (organizational project) feature works in Next and how it's used for financial tracking. The article describes the most common use cases, including equipment tracking and labor cost tracking, and illustrates with concrete examples how costs and credits are allocated between execution projects and owner projects.

What is an Owner Project/Organizational Project?

An owner project is a feature in Next used to perform financial tracking on items or hours. The feature generates a cost in the work order or ÄTA where it's reported and simultaneously creates a credit in the owner project. This is particularly useful if you want to track the cost of, for example, equipment, or if you want to reconcile standard costs against actual costs.

Use Cases

Equipment Tracking

The most common use case for owner projects is linking items to an owner project. Here's a concrete example of how it might look:

• You have equipment in your price list — for example, a wheel excavator called Volvo EW160. The cost of the equipment is 700 kr per hour excluding operator. Think of it as an internal rental rate for the equipment.
• You create a new project that you call Volvo EW160 and place it in the appropriate location.

• In the price list, you add the project as an owner project on the item. See the example image below, where the owner project is called M1002.
  

  Item list — note the columns for cost, price, and chargeability.

• When the equipment is reported back in the field or via the client, the project where the reporting is done receives a cost corresponding to the number of hours the equipment has run. For example, 10 hours results in a cost of 7,000 kr in the execution project.
  

  The Order Lines tab shows item lines with unit cost, price, and chargeability.

• At the same time the cost is recorded in the execution project, a credit is created in the owner project — in this case M1002.

What's the benefit of this? If you use your owner project fully, you can track the equipment's finances well. For example, you can add all ongoing costs directly to the owner project — report time for cleaning and maintenance, and post supplier invoices related to the equipment against the owner project.

When you add costs, a charge is made against the project. In the example above, 10 hours of equipment time at 700 kr resulted in a credit of 7,000 kr in the owner project — a kind of reverse revenue. See image 1.

If you then add a cost for, for example, insurance and maintenance totaling 5,000 kr to the equipment project (owner project), the project receives a recorded cost of 5,000 kr.

The Costs tab shows documents — note the ability to split documents.

The credit can be seen as an internal rental rate credited to the project, while costs in the form of hours and supplier invoices are charged to the project. These are then calculated against each other.

In the concrete example above — with a cost of 5,000 kr and a credit of 7,000 kr — this gives a result of 2,000 kr for the equipment. The image below shows key figures from the project card. A negative cost is a good sign — it means the equipment is operating at a profit.

Financial summary — note the rows for Budget, Recorded, and Forecast.

Labor Cost Tracking

In the same way as owner projects on items, you can use organizational projects on users in the user register. Select the user and scroll to the Organizational Project column and choose the project you want to use — for example, a personnel project.

When the organizational project is set on the user, the cost of the user — based on the role you report as — will be entered as a credit against the personnel project. When you then track the personnel project, it might look something like this:

The cost list shows documents linked to projects; note the ability to split documents.

The principle is the same as with owner projects on items. The advantage is that you can reconcile the cost in the projects against the actual labor cost and adjust the standard cost for hours accordingly.

For this to work, you must project-code all labor costs against the personnel project.

Where It Doesn't Work

Owner projects don't work with tracking on absence projects. Costs recorded on an absence project are not calculated the same way as other projects. The cost is always recorded as a booked cost but is not offset by any credits.

Advanced — InternalHourCost

In Next there's a setting called InternalHourCost. It controls whether an item from the price list should generate a cost in a work order or ÄTA. Below we explain the different scenarios where this setting might be relevant.

Background

The setting applies to items from the price list in Next and nothing else. On each item in Next you can enter a cost/unit where you specify the cost of the item to the project — that is, what it costs the project to use it. If you have, for example, equipment that costs 600 kr per hour in operation, you enter 600 kr as cost/unit. For each hour the equipment is reported, the project is charged with 600 kr in cost. However, this may not always be desirable, especially not when you calculate costs in an ÄTA. Based on this, the InternalHourCost setting exists, which allows you to control whether and how a cost from an item should arise.

InternalHourCost = 0

I don't want any costs on any items or order lines at all in Next.
This setting does exactly that. Regardless of how or where you report an item, no cost will be generated. This is the most unusual scenario and means that order lines never generate a cost in your projects.

InternalHourCost = 1

I want costs on items and order lines in Next — but only if the item is retrieved from the price list and also has an owner project.
This setting is generally our recommended setting. It works great both for cost tracking and to ensure that you can make calculations on ÄTA without including a recorded cost.

InternalHourCost = 3

I want costs on all order lines and items in Next, whether or not there's an owner project.
That's exactly how it works. Whether you add an item from the price list or create a manual order line on an ÄTA or work order, there will be a recorded cost in the project. This usually aligns with how you want it, but can cause problems if you work a lot with ÄTA and need to calculate without a cost being recorded.