Why is my Practice Performance report different to Xero?

The Practice Performance report is a grouped up team performance report that includes all team members regardless of whether they are mapped in the staff mappings for not. It is used for monitoring your practices average hourly rate. The way we influence this metric is using all the other reports in Link Reporting.

All of the human reports like the Practice, Team and Individual Performance reports use the term 'revenue' to represent the revenue contribution of a person or team to practice. This is different to invoiced value. Unless your practice is 100% time/cost there is no invoiced value by team member for you because your invoices on fixed fee and retainer type engagements don't have time on them. The best reflection of an individual and teams contribution to a practice is 'revenue' which is the billable value adjusted by the net write ons/offs. This is what is used in the practice, team and individual performance reports.

For all fixed fee and monthly invoicing type engagements there is a timing difference between when the effort goes into a job (billable value) and when the write on/off is able to be recognised (at the end of the engagement). Write ons/offs are their own WIP transaction and therefore have their own date. This date can differ from the timesheet date and/or invoice date depending on the type of engagement.

If your practice was 100% time and cost your revenue figure would match your invoiced figure found in the WIP performance report. The invoiced value in the WIP performance report will match exactly what is in your XPM. This should be very close to what is in your Xero (blue) with a few acceptable reasons like Xero subscription revenue or other revenues you may not attribute to jobs. If your invoiced value in XPM is wildly different to your invoiced value in Xero (blue) then please do get in touch as something is not right here.

Regarding the costs part of this equation: Because XPM is unable to retrospectively update your staffs direct cost rates we have base rate mappings which are able to be updated retrospectively. This means you can get historical client and job profitability reporting for as long as you have been using XPM even if your base rates haven't been added to XPM correctly. Base rates represent the direct cost per hour of a persons time and provided your hourly rate calculations are correct, these should be close to the monthly and annual wage/salary for this person. The main reason this would differ is people working longer or shorter than expected.

Why don't we use a fixed annual salary for this calculation? Great question. Check out the article below 'death spiral':

https://support.linkacademy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001215095-Avoiding-the-Death-Spiral-Actual-Costs-and-Excess-Capacity

The short answer to all of this is that Link Reporting focusses on management accounting not financial accounting. The purpose of Link Reporting is to allow you to make better decisions regarding your clients, jobs, people and services using information that is not available in your Xero (blue) or XPM.