A project management blog for manufacturing and engineering
Using this technique, you can customize the client invoices you send to your customer.
The video below describes client invoice templates, which are really just RTF documents. Because you can open RTF docs in Word, you can put your own logo in, or rearrange the template to look any way you like.
Tags in the document are replaced with actual data when the invoice is run.
If your company has many employees the timesheet can get a lot of projects on it. You can choose your favorites and only see those!
Follow these steps to integrate Microsoft Project with Standard Time®. (scroll down for the video)
MS Project will open the MPP file and pull down your tasks into Standard Time®. You won’t see them in the timesheet right away. There is one step you must take first.
Click the Project Tasks tab to see the new tasks from the MPP file. At the far right, you will see a columns labeled Timesheet. Check the boxes for each task you wish to see in the timesheet. Any task without this checked will not show up in the timesheet.
Now that you have integrated the timesheet with MSP, you can send your ‘Actual’ hours back.
Choose View, Refresh Project Tasks. That will open a dialog that lets you send your timesheet hours to MSP.
The three biggest benefits of using Standard Time® are keeping track of billable vs non-billable hours, keeping priorities in-line and keeping on budget.
Of course there are a lot of timesheets on the market. But most are either borderline shareware, or those ‘million-dollar’ implementations that vex you and your budget for years. Finding a good timesheet in the middle is hard.
So what is the best and easiest timesheet on the market?
Click the video to find out!
Human resource managers should take a look at this. Send this video link to them and tell them you liked it.
This system automatically accrues hours for PTO, vacation, sick, and other reasons. You just set the rules and let it alone. As weeks go by, the system is adding new hours to everyone’s bank of PTO time. Users can then request time off and have it approved.
Watch the video for more info.
If you’re in a consulting organization, it’s important to know how many hours each employee works. It’s also important to know if those hours are billable or non-billable. You can likely paying employees whether they are bringing in billable hours or not. So it’s important to maximize billable hours, if you can.
Let’s show a few extreme examples to illustrate the point.
Example #1: Pay period of 168 hours. And only one billable hour. Billing rate $100.
That is only 0.6% utilization, and an effective billing rate of $0.60 per scheduled hour. You can’t live on sixty cents an hour. 🙂
Example: 2 Pay period of 168 hours. All 168 are billable. Billing rate $100.
That is 100% utilization (which is nearly impossible), and an effective billing rate of $100 per scheduled hour. Pretty nice! But also pretty unrealistic.
When bidding for projects, you win some and you lose some. It’s like any sales process. Each project has it’s own percentage of win/loss.
Of course, that can be frustrating. You perform a bunch of research, develop a preliminary project plan, and then develop a project propsal, only to learn that somebody else go tthe job. Or worse, the propective client goes dark and you never hear from them again. They don’t come back and thank you for all your hard work in developing the plan and proposal. Instead, they just ignore you. They’ve obviously moved on, but don’t have the couirtesy to tell you.
That’s life. 🙁
But at least you have a nice project funnel to predict possible future revenue. And it works from that percentage of win/loss you enter into each project. Consider the following scenario:
Project A: Win percentage: 90%, $45,000
Project B: Win percentage: 75%, $80,000
A sales funnel says you about 82% chance of winning a deal, and the expected revenue is about $100K.
Of course two projects is not really enough. You should put a lot more projects into the funnel for the estimation to be accurate. The more projects in the hopper, the more likely the averages are to be real.
Check out this video too:
https://www.stdtime.com/videos/revenueforecast.htm
This video will show you how to change terminologies in Standard Time®. They can be changed throughout the entire system or in a specific place. It can be customized however you choose.
For instance, let’s say you use the word “Program” or “Plan” instead of “Project.” Or, the word “Assembly” instead of “Category.” Use the techniques in this video to change them in the system.
If you are billing clients for projects, you definitely want a system that gracefully handles multiple billing rates.
Ultimately, you want to potentially have different rates for each project, and for each user or role on the project.
Let’s say Josh is the project manager on the Alcoa job. And Alice is the engineer. Rates for Josh and Alice will not likely be the same. Now let’s take another example. Ted is the now the project manager on the Union Pacific job, and Josh is taking a lower engineering role. Again, the rates for Josh and Ted are not likely going to be the same. They have different roles, so their billing rates should be different.
The video below is describing this exact scenario.