Managing Jobs with Xero Practice Manager: 3 Tools for Managing your Job List

This article is an extract from the book 'Everything you need to know about Xero Practice Manager'
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Daily stand-ups or weekly progress meetings can be a great way to identify obstacles people are facing, share workload, keep your team focused and review jobs in progress. Below are three suggested tools you can use to manage these.

1. Jobs I’m Managing

As a job manager you want to make sure you and your team are across all of the in-progress jobs you are responsible for. The ‘Jobs I’m Managing’ tab inside the job manager allows you to hold a regular stand-up meeting to quickly review the jobs in progress, allow your team to share any obstacles or delays, balance workload amongst your team, and progress jobs as quickly as possible through the job states.

You can open and drill into each of the jobs as they are discussed by opening them in a new tab in your browser. A great place to host these is in front of a large screen, standing up in a semi-quiet private location like a meeting room. Regular stand-ups not only show your team that you care about their work and making their lives as easy as possible, but provide a catalyst for ensuring your team are updating their job states and submitting time sheets.

The downside of this report is that it doesn’t show you the financial status of each job without drilling deeply into each one. This can make these meetings take longer than they should. You might want to instead use a ‘Jobs in Progress’ custom report.

2. Jobs in progress custom report

A custom report every job manager should have is a jobs in progress report, which displays the financial status of each job they are managing on a single page. This allows the job manager to view the current status and due dates of a job alongside its budget, estimated/actual/remaining times to date, invoiced value and profitability.

Here is how it is built:

Report type: Job Report

Fields to display on report (in order):

• [State] State
• [Client] Client
• [Job] Job Summary
• [Job] Budget
• [Job] Actual Cost
• [Job] Billable
• [Job] Invoiced

Criteria for the report:

• [State] State: excludes – Completed, Archived, Cancelled etc
• [Job] Manager: equals – {Job Manager Name}

Rows are: Grouped and subtotalled by the first field

You can also add any other additional fields you feel will be valuable for these meetings, such as ‘Last Time Sheet Date’. This custom report will allow job managers to manage by exception just those jobs which are approaching budget or due date to ensure all jobs are delivered on time and within budget. To see which areas of these jobs are approaching due dates or budgets, you will need to open each job individually and click into the job financial summary. This additional step can make these stand-ups longer than they should be.

For the quickest and easiest possible way to run a stand-up meeting, use the Open Job report in Link Reporting.

3. Open job report

The Open Job report in Link Reporting is just what your job managers need to run these stand-up meetings. It allows them in a short space of time to not only identify the jobs that are approaching budgets and due dates, but also the tasks within these jobs that are approaching their task budgets and due dates. This report is an amalgamation of nine different custom reports in XPM, to give you every piece of information you need to manage your job list. The Open Job report uses very clever algorithms to help your job managers quickly identify the jobs and tasks that are in trouble. This allows you to avoid write-offs before they occur, which can massively improve the performance of your practice overall.

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