Tracking Costs Against Tasks in NetSuite OpenAir

Many OpenAir users track their hourly employee costs against specific project tasks.  There are a few ways to do this. However, the simplest method is to use one of the three cost levels that can be assigned at a user level, enter the value to be used as that employee’s cost, then report on their hours multiplied by that value and grouped by tasks.  (Tip: For those who aren’t familiar with the three user cost levels, there’s a switch that can be enabled that expands the default user cost tracking form to use three levels – Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary.  This allows an organization to have a user’s actual (and very confidential) cost tracked in one level, and a more generalized cost in a separate level that can be used for less confidential reporting.  There are numerous other uses for these levels as well.)

What is less commonly known is that expense and purchase costs can be tracked at a task level as well.  OpenAir has other options that can be used to allow or require task selection on an expense receipt or purchase item.  Once this is enabled, reports can be created that will show the total cost of the task, either rolled up or broken down by labor, expense, and purchases.

In the Administration module under Expense Settings, click the Other Settings option and you’ll see two checkboxes relevant to this:

For purchase items it isn’t quite as straightforward.  Enabling tasks to be selected on purchase items requires a switch to be activated by OpenAir Support, specifically the switch, “Allow purchase requests to be associated with tasks”.  That seems wrong – why would you enable a switch that allows purchase *requests* to be associated with tasks when what you want is for purchase *items* to be associated with tasks?  The answer is that invoking this switch turns on the ability to add tasks to both purchase requests AND purchase items; those features are not handled by separate switches.

Once these are enabled OpenAir users can add tasks to the receipts or purchase items that can then be used to track all of a task’s costs, not just the labor/hourly portion of the cost.