Phases, cost codes, cost types, and billing rules

Define how job costs are organized — phases, cost codes, cost types such as labor, material, subcontract, equipment — and the billing rules applied to each.

Plans: Advanced and above
Availability: Available
For: Accountants, Bookkeepers
In KontoCore: Projects → Cost structure

What this does

A cost structure is a reusable list of phases and cost codes. Each cost line is tagged with a cost type (labor, material, subcontract, equipment, other).

Billing rules define how billable costs are marked up for time-and-materials or cost-plus billing.

How to

Set up

1Open Projects → Cost structure → New template.
2Add phases and cost codes; set default cost types.
3Add billing rules (markup per cost type) if you bill T&M.
4Apply the template to new jobs.

Corrections, voids, and reversals

Inactivate unused codes instead of deleting; codes with history can’t be removed.

Permissions

Administrators and accountants maintain templates.

What happens in your books

Codes are reporting dimensions; GL accounts still come from the source document.

Common mistakes

Creating a new code for every job instead of a shared template, which breaks cross-job reporting.

Troubleshooting

Code missing on a bill

It’s inactive or not part of that job’s structure.

Job budgets and revisionsBuild a job budget by cost code and type, approve it as the original budget, and track revisions and change orders without losing the original.Job costingAssign labor, materials, equipment, and other costs to projects and compare them with budgets and billing.Job billing, progress applications, and retainageBill jobs by progress against the schedule of values or by time-and-materials from billable costs, with retainage held per line and billed-to-date always derived.Job detail and closeoutUse a job’s detail page to see contract, budget, committed, actual, billed, and remaining amounts, and close the job out cleanly when work is done.

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Last reviewed October 6, 2026