Measuring Job turn-around time with bundled services and fixed fees

This is quite tricky with bundled services and fixed fee engagements as we use the Job-Task ie 'Annual Accounts - Preparation' to identify if something is done or not; not the job start/due/completion date. It's not much easier for people who invoice in arrears on a job-basis.

Job Tasks have the following date fields available:

* Job Task Start Date
* Job Task Due Date
* Job Task Completion Date (the day the box gets ticked)

We also capture in the Link Reporting Open Jobs report only the date time was last entered on a Job Task. Note however that this is '-' or zero when no time is yet entered on a future task.

To measure job-task turnaround time we would need to use some combination of the above in order to arrive at days. Something to think about is what to do when a job-task is completed prior to the job-task start date. Do job-task-days go negative? Negative numbers to funny things to averages so they might be best excluded. If someone is working 'ahead' of the work scheduled for them this is either really good, or at the detriment of another job.

Job Task Start and Due dates are typically at the beginning and end of the month so this isn't always when our team are able to start that particular job-task. We could instead measure job-task first timesheet date and job-task last timesheet date to encourage team members to have all the information required before starting a job. But this would be a low positive number (good) even when the job-task was late (bad).

A happy medium might be the date of the first timesheet entry on a job-task and the date the job-task was completed. Unfortunately 'date first timesheet entry' is not an available field in XPM job-task table, it can be derived however from the time table.

The good/bad news is that there is no practice management tool in the Xero ecosystem or elsewhere that reliably measures job turnaround time in a way it can be used/improved. The closest would be FYIdocs but they would need to add staff-assignment to a job state to do it properly. A practice would also need method of capacity planning to ensure people are working on the right things not just picking up random easily available jobs.

If a practice is 100% time/cost invoiced in arrears (almost nobody these days) then this would be more easily measurable because we would have a job per job-task (but we'd still have a multi-staff per job apportionment problem and a capacity planning 'working on the right things' problem).

Your best bet right now would be to build an XPM custom Job type report with the below fields and parameters:

Fields:
[Job] Job Manager
[Job] Job Summary
[Job] Start Date
[Job] Due Date
[Job] Completed Date
[Job] Days to Complete
[Job] Date Time Last Entered
[Job] Date Last Invoiced

Criteria:
State includes: Completed, and
Completed Date is on or after 1 July 2022, and
Completed Date is on or before 30 June 2023

Grouping:
Field field

Articles in this section

Comments

Articles in this section

Related articles