How are Costs Handled in agCommander

Standard Costs or Default Costs or Inventory Purchase Costs

You enter the cost of consumables or the running costs of an asset or the cost of an operation with a starting date in the input costs management system and maintain those manually.

When you first add a new consumable (for example) you can set up an initial cost. There is an Input Cost table and in that table we store the Cost and the Start Date. All reports and on-screen displays that show costs will do a lookup and find the cost for an item as at the date it was used in your records.

An example of adding the initial cost....

If you choose to use the Inventory of Consumables system in agCommander, you could set the initial cost of consumables while recoding the initial entry (or purchase) for that consumable in the inventory record, by ticking the check box shown here... 

Once the initial cost for an item has been set up, any future cost changes can either be added by clicking on the "$" icon (See below) for that item or by using the Input Costs Management system or, if its a consumable, by recording a new Inventory Purchase record and choosing to tick the box shown above.

Input Costs Management Screen

Look for the Input Costs Management tab under Cropping > Configuration. There's a video button on that tab that will run you through the "How To.." for this screen.

Updating an item's cost individually

If you only need to update the cost of a few specific items, you can do that under their configuration screen listing... Look out for the "$" sign in the Action Column of the grid. Click on that icon and a popup window appears with a history of the prices that have been used for that item over time.

Ad Hoc Costs

This concept was initially designed to enable you to enter a cost for a job performed by a contractor. This has been changed and it now enables you to enter an ad hoc cost for any machinery event, even if it was performed by your own equipment. See in the image below the Default Cost is $400 per Tonne for the selected operation, but you can override that with an Ad Hoc Job Cost.

Important Note:

All costs are stored in a big lookup table that consists of a Start Date and it's corresponding Cost.

That same Lookup Table also has a field called "Job Number" and when you enter an Ad Hoc cost, that field is populated with the JobNo of that job and when reports are generated, it looks to see if there is a cost in the lookup table with a JobNo .

If there is a Ad Hoc cost associated with the JobNo, it uses that cost and ignores your Default Cost.

So.. when we have an AdHoc Cost that table gets Date + Cost + JobNo.

How costs are used is in this order:

1. is there an ad hoc cost? if yes Use That

2. is there a cost/hour or Ha for the asset used use that

3. If none of the above, use the default Operation Cost

Inventory Purchase Cost

You can tick an option when purchasing inventory that will post a new record to the Input Cost table with the cost associated with that purchase and the purchase date.

This is somewhat redundant because there is an option (Use Default or Standard Costs or Use Inventory Costs) on all reports that involve consumption of consumables and which display financial information. The other potentially undesirable side effect of ticking the box shown below is that if I am not tracking Agras by batch number, then all my applications of Agras from Sep 9th 2021, onwards will be priced at $550/Tonne, even if I have 1000 Tonnes in my fertilizer shed priced at $450/Tonne. 

Machinery and Manual Tasks Costing

Standard Costs of Operations

Machinery operations and manual tasks can have a standard cost assigned to them. The “Cost Per” unit can be Per Hour or Per Hectare or Per Item (where for machinery an “item” can be a tonne of grain harvested, or a tonne of fertilizer spread, or a litre of spray mix sprayed, and for a manual task an “item” can be a vine pruned, or a bin picked, for example) 

Asset Costing

Operation costs can be set up for your Assets. The “Cost Per” units are the same as machinery with the addition of Per Unit of Water applied in irrigation.

PLEASE NOTE: If you choose not to apply a cost to your assets, the operation cost will be applied to the jobs. If you do set up costs of operating your assets, then those costs will be applied to the jobs, upstaging the operation cost.

If you are using the irrigation facilities in agCommander, and you want to keep track of the cost of irrigating, you need to set up your Water Sources or Pumps as Assets. The cost of operating Irrigation assets can be either a Cost Per Hour or a Cost per your choice of Units Of Water (KL, ML, L)

For most machinery asset types (all but Irrigation), it is optional to apply a cost. 

Labour Costing

Labour costs are set up as a Cost Per Hour by default.

Manual Tasks

If a Manual task is being performed on a Cost Per Item basis, the Operation Cost Per Item will be used.

If you assign a cost per hour to staff, their cost per hour will upstage the manual task’s cost per hour.

Machinery Operators

The labour cost of machinery operators will only be applied if an operator is assigned to the job of operating a machine and that operator has been set up with a cost per hour.

When generating any consumable type reports where costs are displayed, you have the option of using Default Costs (or Standard Costs) or Inventory Costs if you are using the Inventory of Consumables.

The Inventory Costs option uses the Weighted Average Inventory Purchase price of an item between the start and end dates of the report. That is, it takes into account the cost and purchased quantities to arrive at the weighted average cost.

PLEASE NOTE: The Weighted Average Inventory Purchase price of an item will be used regardless if you are tracking inventory or just using the Inventory system to record purchases and regardless if you are updating the default input costs or not when recording a purchase.

If you are tracking inventory by Batch Number for any of your consumables, you have an additional option for the costs used in consumable usage reports. You can set the program to show the precise purchase price of each consumable. To enable this feature, set this option on under Cropping > Options

Having done that, the Report Options will then show like this ...

Please check out this Knowledge Base article