You can use the Quoted vs Actual table to monitor your project budget and profitability closely. It helps you track in detail whether you’re earning and spending more or less than you initially predicted in your quote.
To ensure that the Quoted vs Actual table accurately reflects all project-related costs on a quote line level, link all relevant cost documents with quote lines. This gives you a better understanding of which cost estimates were off and makes it easier to pinpoint what’s eating away at your profit margin.
If you create your bill directly from the original quote or a purchase order created based on that quote, the bill is always linked with the respective quote line. But you can retrospectively link any bills and expenses that are made either from scratch or from some other document in Scoro, or imported from Xero, QuickBooks, or Expensify.
This article will show you how to link and unlink your cost documents to quote lines.
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1. Linking a cost document to quote lines
To link a bill or an expense document to lines from a quote:
- Check whether the cost document and the quote are linked to the same project.
- If they're not, modify it and select the correct project from the dropdown field.
- Link the cost document to the quote - you can do it three ways:
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From the cost document detailed view - open the relevant bill or expense and click the Link to quote button.
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From the bill or expense list view - click on the numerical value in the Note quoted column. If you don't see this column, click View > Data columns and tick this column to show it in the list view.
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From the project detailed view - open the project, scroll down to the Bills or Expenses section and click on the numerical value in the Not quoted column.
The Not quoted column helps to keep track of costs that have not yet been linked with any quote line. So if the value of this column is anything other than 0, it means that some project-related cost document(s) probably still need to be linked with quote lines in order to get an accurate overview of project profitability in the Quoted vs Actual table.
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From the cost document detailed view - open the relevant bill or expense and click the Link to quote button.
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A linking modal screen will appear, which shows the cost document lines on the left and quote lines on the right. You can start linking the costs to the quote lines:
- To link the whole cost document with a single quote line, simply drag and drop the cost document onto the relevant quote line. If linking is successful, the cost document lines become grayed out, with a link icon in front of them.
- You can also link your cost document line by line if a single bill or expense covers various products or services on your quote. Simply drag and drop the lines one by one to link them with relevant quote lines.
- To link the whole cost document with a single quote line, simply drag and drop the cost document onto the relevant quote line. If linking is successful, the cost document lines become grayed out, with a link icon in front of them.
Pro tip! Use the search bar in the quote line linking modal to find relevant quote lines faster.
Note! The quote lines in the linking modal show the line description by default, but you can toggle the descriptions off by clicking the gear icon at the top-right corner and untick the Display quote line description checkbox.
2. Linking a single cost document with multiple quotes or projects
You can also divide your cost document between several quotes or projects, i.e. link the lines of a single cost document with different quotes. For example, if you purchase Google ads for three different projects and receive one consolidated bill for it, you can divide the costs accordingly between these three projects.
To be able to divide costs between multiple projects, you need to use the Project on each line option with bills/expenses in Scoro. This allows you to associate each bill/expense line with a different project, which means that you can consequently link that line with any quote(s) linked to that particular project.
Once you have assigned all cost document lines to correct projects and saved your changes, open the cost and quote linking modal in any of the ways described above.
First you need to select a quote to link with from the right. This opens the detailed quote line view that lets you drag and drop lines for linking. Cost document lines that can not be linked with the currently selected quote are blurred out for your convenience.
3. Unlinking the cost document
Tto unlink any of the cost document items from the quote lines, click on the link icon on the left side of the cost document line.
You can re-open the linking modal at any point to unlink any of the lines.