Real Estate Portfolio Management / Cost Administration / Cost Administrator

Scheduled Costs

A Scheduled Cost is an individual cost that is planned or budgeted and can be changed at will. Scheduled Costs are stored in the Scheduled Costs table. When you approve them, they are moved to the Costs table (where they are considered actual costs that cannot be changed.)

Since the income and expense items described by Scheduled Costs are not considered Actual Costs until you move them to the Costs table, you can experiment with the values of Scheduled Cost records; this can be useful for analyzing chargeback scenarios, and testing the impact of large expenses on your cash flow. However, you must approve scheduled costs (converting them to actual costs) before you can generate chargeback or issue invoices.

The Scheduled Costs and Costs tables have the same format and provide a formal distinction between planned costs and confirmed costs.

How Scheduled Costs Are Created

Scheduled costs can be created in the following ways:

You can generate records for future charges from your Recurring Cost records

You may have developed Recurring Costs to represent regularly occurring costs. You may then decide that you want to represent these costs with individual Scheduled Cost records; for instance, so that you can approve these costs for invoicing or chargeback, or to have more precise dates for calculating cash flow (a Scheduled Cost record can include the Date Paid). To do so, you can schedule the costs from the Schedule tab of the Cost Wizard. This creates Scheduled Cost records from Recurring Cost records, reducing data entry. The system assigns Scheduled Cost records created from Recurring Cost records a Cost Status of AUTO-RECURRING.
You can manually enter Scheduled Costs using the Approve tab of the Cost Wizard. This is useful for one-time Scheduled Costs that do not recur.

You can enter any cost that you want to record in its individual record using the Approve tab of the Cost Wizard. Complete the Amount - Income or Amount - Expense field with the amount of the income or expense and complete the Cost Status field with BUDGETED if the cost represents an estimate or is being used for "what if" scenarios. Enter PLANNED if the cost represents an exact amount that will occur.
The system creates scheduled costs records for rolled up and prorated costs when you generate chargeback

When you generate chargeback from the Chargeback Cost Wizard, this action creates Scheduled Cost records that represent each lease, property, department, or building's rolled up cost or prorated share of a cost. Scheduled Cost records generated from this action have a Cost Status of AUTO-ROLLUP (for rolled-up costs) or AUTO-CHARGEBACK (for prorated costs). To work with charged back Scheduled Costs, you must approve them, which moves them to the Costs table. See Chargeback Overview.