It depends on whether the project is invoiced as:

a list of major deliverable milestones with progress payments, i.e.:

 - Provide drawings   10%

 - Build prototype    30%

 - Deliver equipment  70%

 - Commissioning    90%

 - Documentation and support training 100%

In this case, you can use a basic Sales Order with a few line items and the agreed price of the project - Price $100,000 x Quantity 0.1000 subtotal =10,000 invoiced and will leave 90,000 on the Sales Order for future invoices. 

The Projects module in Sage 50 will help track what went where, and what it cost (In a nutshell, use Item Assembly or an Invoice screen to take inventory items and apply them to a WIP G/L account and Project, Level II and Level III are a couple of 30 hour courses and it wouldn't hurt to have a semester of Cost Accounting)

Or a series of invoices from collection of time sheets / work orders with components pulled from inventory, special purchase orders for non-standard / non-stocked parts, and various... stuff "for job X" that has to be billed out at cost plus over a period of time.  

YSP Kelly said:

I could use time slips to keep track of labour but it doesn't add inventory to the sales invoices I would have to do it manually.

Yes, as you see, Sage 50 Canadian is not a Work Order Management System. Time Slips can be added fairly easily (provided you don't have 75 open jobs in one month for one customer, as we do) but Materials and Supplies can not. 

We try to use Sales Orders and just keep updating the Sales Order with any additional items picked from inventory or special ordered, because there's no good 'what to bill' report anywhere in Sage, and no work flow to bill out Materials or Supplies directly from vendor invoices.

So this is going to be a lot of manual work - every purchase order / purchase invoice has to be manually added to a Sales Order / Sales Invoice.  There just is no automation except possibly some third party add-ons.   

YSP Kelly said:

Some of our projects could take over a year to complete so it would be difficult to not miss something.

Our jobs / projects vary from about 3 hours to 3 months, so we use paper folders for time sheets and special orders / contractor invoices, and run a custom ODBC report that pulls a list of every inventory item that is above the order point and has no bin location (we use one of the Additional text fields for a bin location) to help find items that weren't billed. 

The built-in quantity or the (in Quantum) Item Price Comparison report can only tell you what is below the order point, so it's only of use finding what to order, or after exporting to Excel and doing your own calculations and lookups from other reports.

I hope that helps, please post back!

Randy Wester