What this Covers:
- Background of cost head rebuilds (from plot/house type to development level)
- Purpose of using “Plot/House Type” Rebuild processes.
- Reasons for using these processes.
- How to do these changes, and what method should be used under certain scenarios.
Contents
Processing Changes – Plot Level 4
Background
These processes are ideal for changing circumstances on active/inactive developments that have already been setup.
The same principles can be applied when entering new developments, however the focus of this will be to amend cost setups on existing developments.
The assumption is that, generally, when a new development is added, most of (if not all) the required cost codes are setup at point of creation. If we decide that we want to add more, it can cause confusion, because our plot-specific cost codes we have added then do not line up with the specification for that house type. This means that when we run a bulk-update to force either our plot or house type changes across the development(s), we may end up unintentionally removing costs because there is a conflict between the cost heads allowed via the spec, and the actual cost heads on the plot.
The ideal way to go about making these changes will be explained in this guide.
Processing Changes – Plot Level
Plots are the lowest level at which changes to the cost structure for said plot can be made. For example, assuming the cost heads are linked to a payment stage, we are more-or-less free to add and remove cost heads at will, although it is not recommended to remove cost heads that already have cost data assigned to them because this causes a discrepancy between the costs that were originally stored on the plot, and the corresponding postings on the general ledger. Effectively, the history can be removed from plot cost data by removing cost heads.
Making Changes on the Plot Level
Our cost heads will need to be linked to a trade code, and a payment stage (vice versa) before we can add them to a plot. This is because COINs uses the trade codes to “group” the costs together.
If we need to amend a small number of cost heads to include a payment stage, once we enter the payment stage against it the relevant trade code will be auto-filled.
Manually adding a cost code: (Contract Status | Setup | Setup Maintenance | Standard Cost Heads
In this example I am enabling VAP and adding a payment stage to cost head 2340:
“Linked to VAP” should be ticked:
VAP Details Tab: (Linked to a build stage, not relevant to this but is a requirement. Will be “00” for most prelim/post-plot-completion costs)
Adding Payment Stage Details:
Once the “Trade” field is entered (“XXX” in this instance), the rest of the details will auto-fill depending on how the trade code setup was completed
Adding the cost head to the Plot:
(VAP | Development Maintenance | Development Maintenance)
Enter the desired development and plot we wish to amend:
Add our cost head at the bottom:
Important Note:
The cost head we are adding needs to be included in the spec for that plot/house type.
These can be viewed on a plot basis by entering the “Specification” tab:
The cost head I added was 2340, which is regarded as a “Professional Fee” on our system.
If I open the “Professional Fee” spec, I can see that in the “Associated Cost Head” field we have “2*”. This means that any cost head starting with a “2” will be added to this plot, once we run a Plot Rebuild.
If the cost head(s) we have added are not included in a specification for this plot, COINS will attempt to remove them.
Plot Rebuild (Adding Cost heads from Plot specs)
If numerous cost heads need to be added to a Plot, the best method to do this is to either add them to an existing plot specification (as in the above screenshot), or creating a new plot specification for that plot.
The general process is as such:
- Create Standard House Type Spec. It could be worth setting up variants here specifically for certain kinds of plots (e.g. non-sellable, sellable)
Add the required cost heads by using a wildcard:
- Apply the Specification to the House Type (in this case, “Non”):
Selecting the code for the spec we have setup:
The “Associated Cost Heads” will pull in automatically depending on how we setup the specification in step 1. It is possible to amend the cost heads here, but can cause problems in that we have a plot-specific spec that deviates from our standard, and depending on how we run our rebuild could potentially strip out or add extra cost codes that we don’t want. That will be covered in the “Plot Rebuild” section.
- Once the spec has been added to the house type, we need to “Recreate Unit Cost Heads”:
We will then see that the cost heads are now applied to this house spec, in the “Cost Heads” tab
The next step is to rebuild our actual development plot costs, based on our changes here.
Plot Rebuild Processes
After adding the specifications to the relevant house types and developments, the final step is to “Rebuild” the plot cost heads from the specification.
Navigate to Development Maintenance, select the relevant development and plot number
Select “Plot VAP Rebuild” at the top of the screen:
We have changed the spec for a plot, so therefore we want to choose “Rebuilt Plot Cost Heads from Plot Specifications” (the others can also be used, but this depends on how you have gone about making you changes and what you require):
It is important to make sure that you run this in “Report Mode” first, so we can review the changes being made before we then re-run the process and actually change anything
At this point, COINs will generate a report notifying you of the changes it will make. If everything looks good, then we can rerun the same report with “Report Mode” disabled.
If we notice any problems, we can go back and review the changes that have been made to any specs.