Job Performance Reporting with Xero Practice Manager: Remaining time

This article is an extract from the book 'Everything you need to know about Xero Practice Manager'
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Reporting on job performance is split into two defined categories:

• Jobs that are in progress
• Jobs that are completed.

Our jobs that are in progress can also be called open jobs. We split our jobs into these two categories because we make different decisions depending on what jobs we are looking at. Our open jobs are changing daily with every time sheet, cost or invoice, whereas our closed jobs are static.

We should be reviewing our open jobs as frequently as possible as they give the best insight into how jobs are progressing. Our open jobs tell us what is happening right now, and can also give us insight into the future profitability of a job. If we keep a close eye on our open jobs and address issues as they arise, we will be running a much more efficient and profitable practice. We ultimately want to understand two things about our open jobs:

• Are we going to go over budget?
• Are we going to miss a deadline?

We want to answer these two questions for all our open jobs, as easily as possible. Doing this allows us to easily identify issues early so we can address them before they get out of control. We want to catch our potential write-offs while the job is open, rather than finding out once it is completed with an enormous write-off.

Open jobs tell us what is happening, whereas completed jobs tell us what has happened. If we look at what is happening, we can take quick and decisive action when we identify risks. When we look at what has happened, we can understand our mistakes and make changes for the future.

We manage our open jobs by exception. We look for indicators that suggest our job might go over budget, or miss a deadline. As long as those two events do not occur, our workflow moves smoothly like a well-oiled machine.

If we are not monitoring these indicators throughout the year, we may find ourselves eight weeks from financial year end with only half our tax returns filed, resulting in the team working evenings and weekends to catch up. What happens next? A third of your team say to themselves ‘never again’, and hand in their resignations. You are then scrambling to replace them while creating the exact environment to repeat the cycle.

There are three indicators you can use to see if a job is likely to go over budget:

• Remaining time
• Remaining budget
• Projected write-offs.

Remaining time

The remaining time on a task is your estimated time less your actual time for that task. Your estimated time should represent the budget on the job. So if we have a budget of $2,000 and your billable rate is $200 per hour, you’d expect the task to have an estimated time of 10 hours. We can then track the estimated vs actual time on the task to give us our remaining time.

You can do this a number of ways in Xero Practice Manager (XPM). One option is to create a custom notification so you are emailed when a task hits x% of its estimated time. This email notification is sent to the job manager, or the staff on the job. The downside of this option is the volume of emails can become overwhelming and just get ignored.

Another way to monitor remaining time is to create a ‘Job Task Report’ using the report builder and show all tasks on jobs that are not completed.

Here is how it is built:

Report type: Job Task

Fields to display on report (in order):

• [Job] Client
• [Job] Job Summary
• [Task] Name + Label
• [Task] Estimated Time
• [Task] Actual time
• [Task] Remaining Time
• [Task] Due Date

Criteria for the report:

• [Task] Completed: is - {No}
• [Job] Manager: is - {the Job Manager Name you wish to run this report for}

Rows are: Grouped and subtotalled by the first field

This XPM report will show you your remaining time for the tasks on the jobs, for the job manager you have selected. The downside of this is the list is very long and you also are not able to drill into the time sheets in the report, making it difficult to analyse. The best way to allow your team to actively manage the remaining time on job tasks is to use the Open Job report in Link Reporting. You can help your team succeed by providing them the information they need at www.linkreporting.com

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