Costs administration

When you learned about Creating cases, you learned that the case category designates the type of work being done in the case, for example WorkCover or ergonomics.

We also learned at Controlling costs that categories control the way costs are added to the case.

Case Manager is designed so that:

• categories store many important settings that influence how the case is handled and which costs can be added
• each business can create their own categories, customise settings and link them with customised lists of the costs that can be added to this category of case

Thus, selecting the category of a case is very important and has many implications.

How do you set up categories and link them to costs?

The answer is to use specific Case Manager lists. Here we will briefly cover:

• the Category List: the list of case categories
• the Activity List: the list of case costs

These are linked to categories

• the Charge Code List: the list of charge codes that can be linked to these costs

These are also linked to categories

Create a category at the Category List by selecting Lists > Other Lists from the main menu, then selecting Category from the List Type dropdown list.

Click the Add New button , enter a name for this category and save it.

There are many settings for a category, as we mentioned above. These specify how aspects of the case's billing process will be managed: costs, estimates, invoices, and so on. You have leaned about these at Costs and estimates and Accounting.

You can return to the category settings later. Here we are focusing on linking categories to costs.

For future reference, you will find information about categories, including details of all category settings, in the rest of this site starting at Case categories.

Costs are stored in the Activity List, which is accessed by selecting Lists > Activities from the main menu.

Every cost is defined as being linked to one or more categories. If a cost is not linked to a certain category then users will not be able to add it to cases with this category.

To create costs at the Activity List:

1. Click the Add New button .
2. Enter the name of the cost.
3. Choose the type of cost.

We have already seen at Types of costs that there are 3 types of costs: activities, fixed charges and items.

Note that we use the terms activities and costs interchangeably in Case Manager, except when we are talking about types of costs, as we are here.

4. Enter the charge rate for the cost.
5. Select a charge code for the cost if desired.

These must have been previously created in the Charge Code List

6. Link the cost to one or more categories in the Category dropdown list.
7. Click Save.

Note that this list contains all three types of costs -activity, item and fixed charge - but it is called the Activity List. That is because activity is used in Case Manager to refer to costs generally.

For future reference, you will find information about the different relationships that are possible between costs and charge codes at Charge codes and activities.