You can use the Quoted vs Actual table to keep a close eye on your project budget and profitability. It helps you to track in detail if you’re earning and spending more or less than you initially predicted on your quote.
To make sure that the Quoted vs Actual table reflects all project-related costs accurately 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 pin down what’s eating away at your profit margin.
If you create your bill directly from the original quote or from a purchase order created based on that quote, then the bill is always already linked with the respective quote line. But you can retrospectively link any bills and expenses that are created either from scratch or from some other document in Scoro, or imported from Xero, Quickbooks or Expensify.
Follow the steps below to start linking.
1. Link the cost document with the project
First make sure that the cost document and the quote are linked with the same project, since linking always takes place on a project level. You can easily link your bills and expenses with projects by opening them in the Modify view.
2. Open the linking modal
You can access the linking modal from three different views:
- Open the relevant bill/expense in a detailed view and click the Link to quote button.
OR - Open the bill/expense list view and click on the numerical value in the Note quoted column. If you do not see the Not quoted column, make sure that you have the respective data column enabled under View > Data columns.
OR - Open the detailed view of the project, scroll down to the Bills or Expenses section and click on the numerical value in the Note 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.
3. Link costs with quote lines
In the linking modal window, you can see cost document lines on the left and quote lines on the right. You can also make use of the search box to find relevant quote lines faster.
Linking a whole cost document with a single quote line
To link the whole cost document with a single quote line, simply drag and dropthe cost document onto the relevant quote line. If linking is successful, the cost document lines become grayed out, with a linkage icon in front of them.
Linking cost document lines with different quote lines
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.
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.
4. Unlinking
If you want to unlink any of the lines, simply click on the linkage icon in front of the relevant cost document line. You can re-open the linking modal at any point to unlink any of the lines.