We thought it would be helpful to explain the different names and terms we use in the product. If you can't find a definition in the glossary let us know and we'll add it in!
Global billable rates
A set of global billable rates can be set (in the admin section). These are set per role (position/rank) and can be set in each currency you operate in. Each person has a role (set on their posting) and that will determine which rate from the Global Billable Rates to draw from.
Custom Billable Rates
A special rate card can be created and made available to projects for one or more companies. The rates are set per role with the rate card being created for a single currency. The custom rate card can only be used for projects that are set to run in the currency of the card.
Employee Default Billable Rate
Each person can have a default charge rate set (on their posting). If you are going to use Global Billable Rates you don’t need to set employee defaults they can draw from the global rates
Cost Rates
Each person can have a cost rate set up against their profile. The costs are based on dates and can be changed overtime (eg at a performance review). The cost rates are very much a “behind the scenes” affair, and aren’t generally made visible to many people. Some customers set the cost of a person as their salary plus benefits, and possibly a contribution to overheads.
Company
These are your customers, clients, accounts. Essentially the business/organisation that you will be working with and issuing invoices to.
Account Manager
Every company (and project) has an account manager. They are likely the ones responsible for the relationship with that customer.
Contact
Contacts are added to companies. Contacts are people, primarily the people that invoices will be addressed to and issued to.
Project
Projects are created within companies, and are the main container for a piece of work you are doing.
- Invoices are created for projects.
- People are resourced to projects.
Project Manager
Every project must have a Project Manager. They are the person who is responsible for delivering the project to the customer. Generally they also maintain the project, budgets, resourcing, forecasts, invoices etc.
Budget (for a project)
When looking at a project, the budget is the total amount of funding available for the project. A project could be made up of a single budget, or have a budget breakdown. The budget of the project is the sum of all budgets within that project.
- Revenue forecasts are entered against budget lines for a project
- Invoice lines are linked to budgets
- Timecodes are created within budgets
Timecodes
This is what people record their time against. A project/budget can have one or many timecodes. Ideally you'd create timecodes to the level at which you need to report on. You might think of timecodes as tasks.
Resourcing
Resourcing is about booking people's time to work on a project. It is entered as a number of hours in a week that they are expected to work on a project. Calculations can be done from the resourced hours.
- The hours x billable rate feeds into the projected burn, highlighting how much of the budget will be consumed.
- The "cost" of resourced hours is also calculated, based of the benefits and costs data entered. This helps with calculating margin.
Forecasting
This is revenue forecasting. Think of a forecast as an indication of the amount that will be invoiced. Forecasts are entered within projects, against budget lines, within a month. So a forecast of $10,000 in May indicates the intention to raise an invoice in May for that amount.
Projected Burn
This is a calculation used in a few places. It is a combination of the actuals and future values, combined timesheet entries and expenses.
Actuals
- Worked (amount): Billable value of time entries up to and including today
- Expenses (amount): Billable amount of billable expenses up to and including today
Future
- Remaining Resourced (amount): Billable value of all future resourced hours (including any remaining resourced hours for this week that have not been logged as a time entry)
- Future Expenses (amount): Billable value of future dated billable expenses
Contractual status
A project needs to have a contractual status. You can apply your own rules and definitions, but this is how I describe them:
- Signed: Your customer has formally approved and work, ideally signed a contract or similar. It would suggest there is low commercial risk of having invoices paid.
- Unsigned (committed): You may choose to use this status when you have received informal approval from your customer (verbal/email etc) or if your management sanction work to start on a project before your customer has indicated they will sign. It suggests some commercial risk of payment of any invoices you raise.
- Unsigned (opportunity): These are projects which you might just want to get onto your radar. It can be used as a way to include "leads". A suggestion is to create opportunity projects when you want to enter some resourcing and/or forecasting so people are aware of something that might come up. Opportunity projects will let people record time. Invoices can not be raised.
Project type
Simply, they are treated as either Billable or Non billable.a project can't be changed from billable to non billable once it has started.
- Billable: Use when you intend to be raising invoices. Can have forecasts entered and invoices raised. Resourcing and time entries on billable projects are used in overall utilisation calculations.
- Non billable: Use for any internal projects you have. There is no ability to enter forecasts or raise invoices. Many of our customers create a non billable "client/account management or BDM" project within their customers which they use to track how much non billable work effort spent on a customer. Work on non billable projects impacts utilisation.
Utilisation
This is measured for people, based on how much work they are doing on billable projects. It is calculation as the number of hours on billable projects divided by their capacity. If people have a billable target, utilisation is measured against the target, calculated as hours on billable projects divided by their target (capacity * a %)