USA job costing/financial structure questions

[DaveL]

Hello everyone, I am knew to the forum, new to accounting, and the new (and only) accountant hired by a local corporation doing several million in revenues annually!

I am a year away from finishing my degree, but I ended up landing this career through word of mouth, and I think I will be a good fit, but right now the corp is too big for their current financial structure.

Right now, they do job costing once a quarter, in hind sight, by going through the job file, finding all of the receipts and labor charges, and filing out expenses and labor in a note book.

The problem is, the CEO hired me to do job costing real time, so they can keep track of their growing business, and growing number of complex jobs, and it's up to me to design and implement a system for job costing.

We have 3 project managers/estimators, that bid contracts, and then make the P.O's. We also have supervisors that monitor the sub contractors at the job sights. No one in this entire circle sends their labor/hours, P.O's, credit card charges, or any other expenditures real time, or even close to real time.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how i could incorporate an accrual based system that gets this information to me, and then to the CEO in real time? Before they hired me they tried software, but none of the project managers/supers were able to adjust to it, and I guess the office manager didn't have the time or power to enforce it/train the individuals.

So now the PM's and supers are just emailing any financial/labor info as they get around to it.

Thanks for your help!

 

[DaveL]

A little background about me, I was in the Navy for 8 years, and the pinnacle of my career was implementing/tracking equipment maintenance through a complex database. After that, I worked in research, and designed several databases to keep track of records and projects, but now I am eager to learn how real life accounting works, and not just how the text books portray it!

Thanks again!

Regards....