The keeping of an accurate segregation of expenditures and a detailed
distribution of costs for an organization handling the amount of work
and the character of work handled by the Highway Department is a matter
of the greatest importance. The Highway Department seldom has under way
less than eighty or ninety separate and distinct jobs. These jobs are
scattered all over the State, and few of them are of sufficient size to
warrant the employment of timekeepers on the jobs to keep exact records
of expenditures and costs. The records for all of these jobs must be
kept in the main office where it is impossible for those keeping the
records to be personally familiar with the details of the numerous
expenditures made on each of the many jobs.
To secure proper records of expenditures, therefore, a system of cost
keeping must be used which requires little attention from the engineers
and superintendents in charge of the various jobs, and at the same time
gives sufficient information to those keeping the records in the main
office to enable them to segregate all expenditures so that detailed
information as regards total expenditures, monthly expenditures,
expenditures from different funds, expenditures for different purposes,
unit costs, etc., are readily available at any time, and in such form
that all jobs may be combined to give total expenditures of various
kinds, so that the Department is always Informed as to the financial
status of each job and of all jobs.
The system of cost keeping now in use by the Department has been evolved
from a number of other systems in use on work of a similar nature, and
is a system specially devised to meet the requirements of the
Department. For every cent expended by the Highway Department or under
its supervision, there appears in the cost records, entries which give
at a glance the name of the County in which the expenditure is
incurred, the name of the particular job, whether it is an engineering
cost or a construction cost, the particular part of the work involved,
the fund from which it is paid, and a reference to the original invoice
or statement upon which the payment is made. These records are so
arranged and so summarized each month that almost any desired
combination of costs is available, such as the totals for each county,
for each job, for each fund, for engineering, for construction, for
surveys, for administration, for construction engineering, etc.
The expenditure tabulations given in various parts of this report, and
especially those in the part devoted to the Financial Report, give a
good idea of the results being obtained with the system in use although
they do not give the detail which is readily available in the records
themselves.