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Standard Hours (Per Task)Target Effective Rate (Global)Standard Price (Calculated from Standard Hours * Target Effective Rate)
Standard Hours: Used to calculate the billable rate. Default is sourced from the (Full Workload) but can be modified per staff member based on needs/structureAvailable to Assign: manual control to ensure that staff members are only assigned to projects if available. This will not remove them from projects they are already assigned to.
Terminology
About the concepts in this doc
Disclaimer - this doc is not built by a professional services expert. However, it was built alongside a team creating a professional services plan. Please send me your feedback if you have recommendations or requests, or if you would like a bit of help getting things set up.
Projects
Projects are a parent-level container for a series of work. Generally, we would expect the project to be run by a project manager.
Tasks
Tasks are individual units of work associated with a project. Tasks come from a standard library of tasks (see ). Tasks are added to projects and assigned to Staff.
Key Metric: Effective Rate
Variables
Staff
Staff are the team members who are responsible for performing tasks. Key metrics
Key Metric: Billable Utilization Rate
Variables
Quoted prices
Quoted prices are not actually calculated. They must be manually input. However, you can reference the standard hours and standard prices in creating that quote.
Quoted price exists at the project level and at the task level.
Calculations
Effective Rate
Effective Rate is the estimated/actual per-hour fee that you are charging for your work.
How it’s calculated: Effective Rate takes the hours on a project and calculates the rate of those hours against the price.
If a project is 10 hours and quoted at $1000, the effective rate is $1000/10 or $100.
If in reality, the project takes 50 hours, the effective rate is actually $20/hr.
For each task, the quote tool shows a calculated rate based on standard price and standard hours, but it’s the responsibility of the user to add the actual quoted amount. The real effective rate takes the input quote amount and matches that up with the actual hours against the project. Once the task is completed, the effective rate becomes useful for metrics.
Billable Utilization Rate
Billable Utilization Rate is the percentage of a staff member’s time that is being applied towards revenue-generating tasks.
How it’s calculated: Billable Utilization takes the hours for a team member during a week and calculates those hours over a default work week for that team member.
If Jon has a standard week of 40 hours and does 32 hours of billable work, he is operating with an 80% billable utilization rate. This rate can exceed 100%, as Jon might complete 80 hours of billable work in a week. It’s probably best to check in with Jon to make sure he’s not burning out, but his billable utilization rate will be high.
In the section, you can set your target billable utilization rate. This will not change the calculation for the rate, but it will modify some of the dashboards, filters, and formatting to highlight where the utilization rate is below target.
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