Scheduling and Capacity with Xero Practice Manager: Creating your Staff Workflow 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.

Staff workflow report

The ‘Staff workflow report’ lists all the tasks a staff member has been assigned for a month, along with the estimated time they have to complete the work. Each staff member will have their own unique report. So if you have 25 staff, you will build this report then copy it 24 times while updating the staff name in the criteria each time. This gives our staff the ability to login and view their own work schedule report. This report provides visibility of the work staff have on, as well as acting as a tool for practice managers to assist staff who are falling behind in their workload.

It is important to note here that this report is fundamental to the use of XPM. This is the list your staff will be looking at every day to see what work they have on. It is their to-do list.

Here is how it is built:

Report type: Job Task Allocation

Fields to display on report (in order):

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

Criteria for the report:

• [Task] Staff: includes – {staff member’s name}
• [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

Staff can: Change the date criteria for this report

Tip: Have your staff go to ‘Reports > Report Builder > My Reports’ and tick the green star icon to add this report to their favourites. This will have their unique report available to them in their dropdown menu under ‘Reports’.

The above three reports work together to allow us to schedule, reschedule and view staff capacity. The ‘Scheduling’ report is used in those two months leading up to the start of the financial year to schedule the workflow for the year ahead. It is also used periodically throughout the year to check if there are any tasks that are sitting in XPM as unscheduled. This is done by adding new criteria to the report that states ‘Task Scheduled is ‘No’.

The Monthly Capacity Report is used on a monthly basis to check the scheduled workflow for the month ahead. It allows us to easily see if someone is overbooked or has spare capacity. You can use this report to click into jobs and shuffle tasks around to other dates, or other staff if circumstances change. Think of the scheduling report as the report with the unscheduled tasks, and the monthly capacity report as the report with the scheduled tasks. These two reports are used by the practice manager to oversee the workflow in the practice.

The third report is a bit different, as it is not used by the practice manager. It is instead used by the billable staff members so they can see what tasks they have coming up. It is their to-do list. Each billable staff member should have their own workflow report that displays all the tasks they need to complete within the selected timeframe. It is a great idea to get each staff member to mark this report as a favourite so it shows on their dropdown in the ‘Reports’ tab, making it easier to access each day when they login.

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