Scheduling and Capacity with Xero Practice Manager: Creating your Monthly Capacity Report

This article is an extract from the book 'Everything you need to know about Xero Practice Manager'
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Custom reports for scheduling

There are three custom reports required to roll out scheduling within your practice.

1. Scheduling report

This custom report displays the jobs that require scheduling. The jobs are grouped under each client so you can click through to each job and allocate a date, duration and staff member(s) to each task. Once tasks are scheduled, they will display on the ‘Monthly Capacity Report’, and the ‘Staff Workflow Schedule’ for the staff that have been assigned the task.

2. Monthly capacity report

Once the jobs have been scheduled using the ‘Scheduling Report’, they will display on the ‘Monthly Capacity Report’. This report will allow you to compare the total allocated task times by staff members for the month, enabling you to easily see if someone is over or under-booked for a month.

3. Staff workflow report

This report is designed for individual staff to identify which jobs and tasks they have been assigned for the current month and to view the estimated task duration. Each billable staff member will have their own version of this report showing their jobs.

Monthly capacity report

The ‘Monthly capacity report’ shows you how much work you have scheduled for a month across your practice, organised by person. We define the month and the report will list all of your staff with how much work they have been scheduled for that month. This report is useful for practice managers to see where there is capacity or who is overbooked for the month. Your practice manager can then reschedule the work if required.

Here is how it is built:

Report type: Job Task Allocation

Fields to display on report (in order):

• [Task] Staff
• [Job] Client
• [Job] Job Number
• [Job] Name
• [Task] Name + Label
• [Task] Due Date
• [Task] Allocated Time
• [Task] Actual Time
• [Task] Remaining Time

Criteria for the report:

• [Task] Due Date: is on or after – {the first day of the month you are reporting on}
• [Task] Due Date: is on or before – {the last day of the month you are reporting on}
• [Task] Completed: is {No}

Rows are: Grouped and subtotalled by the first field

This report allows you to see the amount of work assigned to each staff member for the month. It is a good idea to run this at the beginning of the month, looking at the previous month, to see what tasks are overdue and still need to be completed. You may then want to run this report looking at the tasks due both last month and this month, to see if anyone is overbooked. If they are, we can easily click through to these jobs and shuffle work around.

You will be using the scheduling report to schedule all tasks once jobs rollover. You will be using the monthly capacity report on an ongoing basis for rescheduling tasks to different dates or different staff.

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