Professional services firms need specific management information to properly manage their firms. Two key performance indicators are “utilization rate” and “labor inventory”. Today, Projjex has added two new management reports that provide this critical information.
In addition, you can now record expense budgets by project and task, and then see comparisons against the actual expenses incurred during a project.
New! Labor Inventory Report
To help you manage your resources and your business, the new “Labor Inventory” report tells you how many unbilled person-weeks of time you have remaining in a project.
For example, let’s say you have a project that’s got 400 budgeted hours. And let’s say you’ve already charged 100 hours against that project. If you normally bill 30 hours a week, the report will tell you that you’ve got 10 person-weeks of billable time remaining in that project (i.e. 400 budgeted hours MINUS 100 billed hours EQUALS 300 hours remaining DIVIDED BY 30 hours per week EQUALS 10 person-weeks).
As you use this report to assess all of your projects, you can better manage your firm’s resources: if the sum of person-weeks in all your projects drops too low, you’ll know that it’s time to increase your marketing efforts or adjust staff levels. As the number of person-weeks gets higher, it’ll be a signal to start hiring.
To see the new “Labor Inventory” report:
- sign in to Projjex
- click on the “dashboard” tab
- open the “Project Status Summary” section
- click on the print icon to the right of the project that you wish to run this report for
- select “Labor Inventory Report”
- confirm the options and…
- …click the “Create Report” button.
Note that the “Labor Inventory” report is only available to administrators.
New! Individual Utilization Rate Report
“Utilization Rate” is an important number for firms that charge their time to clients. It shows the billing efficiency of an individual or a firm. There are two methods to calculate utilization rate:
The first method calculates the number of billable hours divided by the number of hours recorded in a particular time period. For example, let’s say that I recorded 40 hours of time this past week but only 30 hours of that was billable. My utilization rate would then be 30 / 40 = 75%.
With this method, however, it’s easy to see how this utilization rate can be gamed: if I stop recording non-billable time, my utilization rate will always be 100%.
The second way to calculate utilization rate is to take the number of billable hours and divide by a fixed number of hours per week. For example, let’s say that I recorded 32 hours of billable time in a 40 hour week. My utilization rate would then be 32 / 40 = 80%.
Note that with this second method it’s possible to have a utilization rate that exceeds 100%. If I recorded 50 hours of billable time last week then I’d have a utilization rate of 50 / 40 = 125%.
Projjex’s new “Individual Utilization Rate” report calculates both of these values for your team members and for the group overall.
To see the new “Individual Utilization Rate” report:
- sign in to Projjex
- click on the “time/expenses” tab
- click on the “admin” sub-tab
- click the print icon at the top right
- select “Individual Utilization”
- choose the people that should be included on the report and click the “Next” button
- confirm the options and…
- …click the “Create Report” button.
Note that the “Individual Utilization” report is only available to administrators.
New! You can now record budgeted expenses…
…and compare them with actual expenses. Add or edit any task or milestone and you’ll see a new field called “Budgeted Expense”. Use it to record any positive value that represents the expenses that you believe will be incurred for that task or milestone.
Then use the “Project Status Report” to see an up-to-the-minute comparison of actual and budgeted expenses. This really helps you keep track of everything related to your project!
And More to Come Next Month!
Even though we live in one of the most beautiful places in the world (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada), and even though summer offers an unbelievable variety of activities (hiking, biking, fishing, climbing, sailing, boating, snorkeling, scuba, cottaging…) we’ve decided to forgo our summer holidays so that we can bring you even more great features… 
Have a great summer (or winter if you’re on the other side of the line)!
Regards,
Alex Glassey and
The Projjex Team
Here’s how to reach us:
Support email: support@projjex.com
Suggestions: feedback@projjex.com
Telephone: (888) PROJJEX or (888) 776-5539
Send postcards to: 1-974 Sutcliffe Road, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada V8Y 1M8
Follow along on Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexglassey
