 The LabWare LIMS Charge Manager allows commercial laboratories to manage their complex day-to-day requirements from quoting and contracting work through to raising invoices and interfacing with corporate accounting solutions. By utilizing the LabWare LIMS Charge Manager you are able to define as many taxation systems relevant to the countries your organization works in, whether the country's tax is represented as a percentage of the total sale price (e.g. Sales Tax of 6%, Goods and Services Tax (GST) of 10%), or whether the country's tax is represented as a fixed tax regardless of the sale price. The LabWare LIMS Charge Manager allows you to quote and invoice your customers in any currency and allows you to define the exchange factors between these currencies and your base currency. These currency exchange factors can be automatically maintained by setting up a Schedule to routinely obtain the exchange factors from a public listing. Account information for customers such as whether the account is on hold, where invoices for this account are to be sent to, whether copies of invoices for this account are to be generated, etc, are maintained in the LabWare LIMS Charge Manager. Within the LabWare LIMS Charge Manager standard prices or a price list can be defined for your cost items that are sold within your laboratory. These cost items may be associated with many things, including:
- For individual results or assays (e.g. Gold, Lead, Listeria, Salmonella)
- For a method or analysis
- For a group of commonly assigned tests
- For a product and its specifications
- Based on the instrument(s) used in the analysis
- For freight / shipping / courier costs
- For labor or services
LabWare LIMS Charge Manager also provides the ability to break down each cost item's price into individual components for further costing analysis, such as preparation costs, instrument setup costs, consumable costs, labor costs, etc. Information such as the part number, percentage margin, competitor prices, etc, can also be recorded about each cost item. Once your cost items are defined in the LabWare LIMS Charge Manager, quotations can then be defined based on your customers' testing requirements. As these cost items are assigned to the quotation, you have the ability to override the standard cost item list price or specify up to ten levels of volume price breaks. When a quotation has been accepted it becomes the basis of a contract in LabWare LIMS. Information about the contract can be captured such as the account / customer, payment due days, the quotation currency, the billing / invoicing currency, the discount or surcharge percentages, the effective date of the contract, the contract's expiration date, the contract's current purchase order number, the invoice interval and unit for the contract (e.g. every 7 days, every 1 month), the quotation and invoice report format, and the quotation and invoice report type (e.g. PDF, HTML, Word, Excel). It is also possible in the LabWare LIMS Charge Manager to associate a master contract with a contract. The master contract is used as a hierarchical method of pricing for contracts.
- In the simplest scenario, if the cost item is found on the contract, the contract cost item details will be used.
- In the next scenario, if the cost item is not found on the contract, the master contract will be checked for the cost item. If the cost item is not found on the master contract, the master contract's master contract will then be checked, and so on, until a master contract is not specified. If the cost item is found on any of the master contracts, the master contract's cost item details will be used.
- In the next scenario, if the cost item is not found on the contract, the master contract will be checked for the cost item. If the cost item is not found on the master contract, the master contract's master contract will then be checked, and so on, until a master contract is not specified. If the cost item is not found on any of the master contracts, the default cost item details will be used if the contract's "contracted items only" rule is set to false.
The "master contract" concept can be extremely useful when you need to quickly create a special contract for an existing customer.
Most commercial laboratories also have the requirement of interfacing to their accounting solution to allow the laboratory invoice information to be available at the corporate level. LabWare LIMS address this requirement by allowing you to define routinely run Schedules to interface to External Systems. The LabWare LIMS Charge Manger also allows you to drill down to obtain more information. The example diagram below demonstrates this capability. In the diagram below an account has been selected and expanded to show all contracts / quotations for that account, which has then been expanded to show all invoices for that contract.
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