Think of an extra as a Job within a Job that can be tracked separately while still being able to combine it with the MainJob. For example, say you are building a house and the owner also wants a swimiing pool in the backyard. The swimming pool could be set up as an Extra so it could be tracked separately from the house, but still can be reported together when running reports associated with MainJob (house)

Thanks Denise.  We currently setup a new cost code to track this instead of using "extra's".  Since I'm unfamiliar, can you tell me the benefit of doing it as you explained?  Perhaps we should change our ways!

We use extras for jobs that have multiple phases/add-ons; for example, we have one job that continues to have new phases added onto it. The owner utilizes the same cost code/item# in each phase (example, 070001 is their code for Mobilization & Demobilization, regardless which phase), so interally we use the same cost code and just differentiate by the phase.

Thanks for your responses! I was wondering how they are billed? Can they be billed under seperate contracts/purchase orders? Can we bill one in quick bill and the other in contracts?

Wondering if you've ever received a more indepth response to your questions. I'm looking at using Extras for the first time, and don't know if I need to set up the "sub-jobs" with a different (and separate job number) or if it can just be given an identifier (say by address or school name) as the ID. Our main job is for a school district, and there will be several schools where we're performing work for which we'll need to track costs separately from our GC's. We're hoping to use Extras to accomplish this, but we have no experience with this feature in Sage.

I attempted to do a Sage Live Chat last week to get some questions answered, but I didn't get exactly what I was looking for.

I believe they can be billed to separate contracts but not one to quick bill and one to contracts because that is set on the main job level. 

We used Extras with a school district where we built 64 playgrounds at 64 elementary schools. So, the main job followed our naming convention of YY-XXXX-00, and then each extra was named with the name of the elementary school where the playground would be built. Ex. Woodridge Park Elementary The main job had all of the overhead costs on it if they truly couldn't be billed to an individual playground.

Each extra had the same cost codes and could be run separately to see how the playgrounds were doing individually. The main job could run to show how the whole job was doing at any given time. 

We use them generally for change orders, so we can track the change order separate from the original contract item and re-use cost codes as many times as needed in each extra. We have also used them to track a job within a job, i.e we had a main house contract and the wife wanted to pay for a gym separately. We were able to use the extra to track the costs separately (like a change order) bill her out as a separate customer, but have all costs connected to one job and one contract.