Scheduling and Capacity with Xero Practice Manager: Job task estimated times

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Job task estimated times

In order for your scheduling and capacity planning to work, it is essential that every job task has an estimated time that reflects the budget for the task. Whether you are using Practice Ignition to roll over your jobs, or using recurring jobs in XPM, your job templates will determine the tasks applied to your jobs each year and the estimated times on these.

The estimated times on your templates may be standard for some tasks, eg. GST or coaching meetings, but may need to be updated each year for others, such as annual accounts. The way we estimate these task timeframes changes depending on the nature of the task.

There are two types of tasks on each job template:

Standard tasks

Standard tasks on a job template describe a task that doesn’t vary much in duration from client to client. A task like quarterly coaching might encompass a 1.5-hour meeting and 2.5 hours of preparation, regardless of who the client is. We can apply a time estimate of four hours to each of these tasks inside our job template.

Variable tasks

Variable tasks on a job template describe any task that varies in duration from client to client. A task like annual accounts will vary depending on the complexity and volume of transactions in the annual accounts being prepared. Time estimates for these tasks will need to be calculated from the budget of the engagement. The challenge we are faced with is that we are unlikely to have expressly priced each line in our proposal to the customer, we may have just provided them a list of services and a single price, such as $3,000 per annum.

Let’s take a look at an example:

Say we have an annual engagement for Barry’s Boxers & Briefs Limited with a budget of $3,000 that includes preparation and filing of annual accounts, with six bi-monthly GST returns. The job template we apply to our recurring jobs in XPM or our engagement rollover in Practice Ignition may look like this:

• Annual Accounts – Preparation
• Annual Accounts – Review
• GST -– April/May
• GST -– June/July
• GST – August/September
• GST – October/November
• GST – December/January
• GST – February/March

A job template like this may be called ‘Annual Accounts + Bi-Monthly GST’. Some of the tasks in this template may have time estimates that don’t vary much from client to client. Others will vary depending on the complexity, volume or scope of the services being delivered.

For tasks we can estimate ahead of time, we can save ourselves time each year at job rollover by adding these estimated times to the job template. GST is a great example here. We may determine that on average a GST return takes two hours to prepare and file. We can add this two-hour estimate to the tasks on the job template. We may also determine that it takes 1.5 hours to review a set of annual accounts so we can add this estimate too. These tasks will be ready to schedule as soon as the job rolls over each year.

To arrive at an estimated time for ‘Annual Accounts – Preparation’, however, we need to approach it a bit differently. We have to figure out what time budget is left after we have allocated the times to our standard tasks. Another challenge we have is that all of our staff are billed out at different rates that reflect their skills and experience. We are unlikely to know who will be performing this work yet. So to do this we’re going to need to use a task rate for each of our standard tasks. These task rates can be found in ‘Business > Settings > Tasks’ and represent the average billable rate of the people who typically perform this task. Because our organisation settings are set to ‘Staff Billable Rates’ for our invoicing, these task rates are very rarely used – except here.

Our task billable rates might be:

• GST $100 per hour
• Annual Accounts $150 per hour.

Here is an updated view of our job so far:

We first need to calculate the remaining budget after allocating the standard times to the tasks on this engagement. This is represented above as ‘Y’ and can be arrived at by subtracting the total billable value of those tasks from the value of the engagement. In the example above, we can calculate the remaining budget for ‘Annual Accounts – Preparation’ as $1,500, being $3,000 – (6 x $200) – $300.

By dividing by the known task billable rate for annual accounts services, we can calculate the estimated time for ‘Annual Accounts – Preparation’ based on the budget remaining. In the above table, this is represented by ‘X’ and is 10 hours, being $1,500 / $150. So we can estimate that based on the budget for this engagement, we need to prepare the annual accounts for Barry’s Boxers & Briefs Limited in 10 hours.

Now that we’ve done all this hard work, in the next article we'll look at how we can speed this up.

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