Cost Tracking and Billing

TimeScope accommodates virtually any labor cost tracking and/or billing requirements. You can implement cost tracking or billing at any time, and you can utilize it within all or selected organizations.  

Rates

In order to begin tracking costs or billing, you must first define rates. TimeScope maintains separate sets of rates for labor cost tracking and billing purposes, thus supporting profitability analysis. You can create rates by employee, project, activity, client, cost center, job title, or organization. Each rate has an effective date, thus allowing you to accommodate unlimited rate changes over time. You can also create fixed fees for project or milestone (subproject) billing, and overhead rates.

For complex rate management, the rate domain feature allows you to create rates that apply to combinations of employees, projects, activities, clients, cost centers, job titles, and organizations. If you are using multiple types of costing rates, or multiple types of billing rates, you can establish Rate Priorities.

Hourly vs. Salaried Employees

Each employee is categorized as either hourly or salaried via the Employee Type field on the employee form. By default, time reported by hourly employees is costed and billed by multiplying time worked by the applicable rate. Time reported by salaried employees is costed such that the period cost equals their salary, regardless of how many hours they have reported for the period, whereas their billing charges are calculated by multiplying time worked by the applicable billing rate. The administrator can modify this behavior by editing the Costing Method and Billing Method properties on the Employee Type forms. The administrator can also create additional Employee Types.

Rate Calculation

Normally costs and billing charges are calculated when time is approved, however, they can alternatively be calculated when timesheets are saved or submitted. The financial properties of the timesheet style form defines when costs and billing are automatically calculated. If you create or change rates that apply to previously entered time you will need to re-approve timesheets for the appropriate date range to force recalculation of costs and billing using the updated rates. For convenient mass re-approval, use the Approval command of the sidebar menu, and set the Approval Properties date range to span the entire period for which you wish to recalculate.

Fixed Fee and Milestone Billing

You can establish fixed fees for billing by project or milestone (subproject). You create fixed fees using the Rates option in the usual manner, but you define the rate basis as Fixed Fee. The billing is calculated when the status of the project or milestone has been changed to Complete.  You can manually change the status by editing the project form, or it can be automatically changed when all assigned employees have reported completion of all tasks within the project or milestone via the Percent Complete column on the timesheet. The administrator can install the percent complete column onto the timesheet via the Columns tab of the timesheet style form.

Overhead Rates

You can apply overhead to employee time by creating a rate and setting the rate basis to Overhead. Normally, if overhead is tracked, it is done so on a departmental basis, in which case an overhead rate is created for each department. Overhead cost is calculated separately from labor cost by multiplying the overhead rate by time reported.

Overtime Rates

Each employee is assigned to a work shift. The shift definition contains work hours by day of week. It also allows entry of overtime markup percentages separately for labor cost tracking and billing, which the administrator can designate, if appropriate. 

Billable Designation

In order for a particular time entry to be billable, the project, employee, and activity must all be billable when the time entry is recorded. Project and activity billable disposition is determined via checkboxes on the project form and the activity form, respectively. Employee billable status is controlled via the Employee Type setting on the employee form. To make an Employee Type non-billable, the administrator must set the Costing Method and Billing Method properties to "None".

Non-Labor Expenses

Non-labor expenses can be entered via the expense sheet, or imported and charged to projects. Thus, asset acquisitions and other costs can be reflected in project costs. For billing purposes, markup or markdown percentages can be established via the expense tab of the rate form.  

Rate Security

User roles can be configured to prevent unauthorized users from accessing rates, and from viewing rates and costs on reports. Separate costing and billing rate tabs better organize rates, which can be securely administered by different users via the user roles function. For organizations where human resources regulations prohibit use of employee rates you can develop project costs without specifying employee rates by creating averaged rates by department or job title.