Wow, this is a heck of a discussion. I complain a lot about my previous employer but when it comes to equipment and job costing I must say they did a great job! I will establish one definitive rule here "the total cost of equipment must be kept track of by accounts receivable" why? they pay every invoice for the entire company they have to cost it to wherever it goes I don't care if its a new computer for the office or the trip for the owners to con/ag in vegas or the pipe for the job or the hydraulic pump for the excavator it all gets entered by accounts payable into the correct cost account... now as equipment manager it is your job to be sure that every invoice has an equipment number on it that the shop purchased! how did I do this? my vendors which is used the most had a note that popped up on there screen which said PO required at that point I gave them an equipment number, now I did have many invoices which didn't get equipment number for whatever reason, at this point about once a month when accounts payable was reconciling invoices against statements to be paid they would call me and say there is a $326 invoice missing say from the kenworth dealer at this point I would have to think back and maybe talk to the other mechanics or look at work orders or time cards or whatever to decide that it was say an alternator (this process which is time consuming makes you very good at being sure you got equipment numbers on every invoice). Now at this point you get a report from accounts receivable and you decide how many hours machine has run over the year and plug those numbers together and have a cost per hour!!!!! This number however is not anything by itself that sell/purchase decisions can be made!!! the largest cost of owning a machine is its devaluation for many years and if you are still putting considerable hours on a machine the point where the devaluation and the repairs (not operator error broken stuff and not maintenance) are equal is where you replace or retire it.. Lets deal with the tire invoice question were the operator/driver takes care of this work himself first on a licensed vehicle in regards to creating numbers to sell/purchase a replacement vehicle these numbers are not important, why? because these tires will get ruined or go flat if the truck is new or old, regardless of that you want to keep track of this! ok then the accounts receivable does not pay that invoice unless it has an equipment number on it!!! This will come to you at the end of the month and you will have no idea what truck it went to so she tells you it was a flat repair for a 11/24.5 tire you then know it went on a large truck and you cost it to (heavy truck misc) at the end of the year when you get that report and there is $12000 is this account you divide it in proportion from whatever truck cost you the most and whichever cost you the least (I hope I made that clear).. so in regards to filling out a time card so it gets costed correctly, my time would look like this x-y-z (example) x=equipment number y=what you did z=job location, x equipment is self explanatory , y could be repair, parts ordering, driving, labor, fabricating, operating, estimating, we split sewer pipe from water pipe, sub grade from finish grade on and on, the more numbers you have the better you can estimate the next job these numbers were consistent through the entire company everyone used them, obviously a mechanic would use repair mostly but parts ordering sometimes and driving a lot also, job location was important because we all had base wages which were paid in the shop while driving and all private work, on government jobs you were paid according to "davis bacon" or certified payroll rate this changed all the time depending on which job it was and yes your payroll department has to take care of all of this.....I got to go ask more question I will try to answer...........TIO