Hi Rick,

I have come across a similar use case and I came up with the following flow (on V17):

I will illustrate the project sales / material consumption flow:

Pre-requisites: analytic accounting enabled.

I set up a product as type: service which creates a project and a task. In this case, the client sells different types of construction services with fixed-price arrangements which would cover all their costs, i.e. Materials, labor costs and any other miscellaneous / employee expenses incurred during a project as well as their potential mark up.

I have then set up a custom operation type with type of operation set as delivery. The destination location is then set as an inventory loss type of location:

Configuration for the operation type:

Configuration for the destination location:

Note that I have added a Cost of Revenue type of account so that when the journal entry is created, the entries are automatically reflected in the P&L.

On the SO, they will add only the service product which will have the fixed selling price. This creates the corresponding project and a task. At the same time, an analytic account has been created, linked to the project.

Once we have the analytic account, for automation purposes, I create an analytic distribution model to link the Cost of Revenue account, the customer and the analytic account:

In this case, my Cost of revenue account has the above prefix. Whenever a delivery is validated and the journal entry created, with the above configuration, the Analytic account should be picked automatically against the account.

We then deliver materials. Create the delivery and set the delivery address as the customer's address:

Example of the material delivery created:

Once validated, journal entries will be created to accommodate for the change in stock valuation. Let's look at it from the journal items view:

Because of the analytic distribution model, the analytic accounts are added automatically to the entries. NOTE that this assumes there is no other project being done / sold to this customer concurrently. Otherwise, you may need to assign the analytic accounts manually to each line depending for which project that delivery was made.

To then check the profitability, head over to the analytic accounts menu and select the analytic account you'd like to view the progress for:

You can see the margins / profitability summarized above and the specific lines of income and expenses which have been made below.

I hope this helps!