This tutorial will help you gain more powerful reporting and analytics on where time is being spent on your business and with your clients.
Below you see the Task Billing Rate breakdown Report. It gives you a breakdown of the billable and non-billable time spent in your company.
Follow these steps:
1. Start by creating a billing item type that will be used to track time spent per task. For this example, we'll call the item type "Junior Designer" and the external name "Design".
***Note*** With item types you can create multiple variations of one billing name, which will help dive into more detail when reporting. I.e You could have an In-house Junior designer that bills at $50 per hour and an Intern that you also bill out at $50 per hour. When sending the client and a CE you wouldn't want them to see "Junior Designer" or "Intern", you'd prefer them to see just "Designer". You can do this by setting the External Name on the item type as Designer and the Name as Junior or Intern.
2. Once you've created your item types move over to your company settings and in the groupings setting check the box "Task Billing Rate Required" and hit save.
***Note*** Checking this box means that when anyone creates a task they will be forced to choose a billing rate associated with that task. This will help to ensure all work tracked in Magnetic is linked to a specific billing type. These billing types can be set as billable / non-billable by default when creating the item type above.
3. Next, it's important to identify who in your company are time tracking users. We know everyone hates to track time, so Magnetic reminds you when you log in the next day if you forgot to track time the previous day. Go to the "Manager Users" settings, edit each user that needs to be a time tracking user, set a number of hours they must track per day and check the box "Receive Reminders to Track Time".
4. While you're in the user setting, you can also set a cost to company rate per user. This rate is their actual cost to company per hour and will be used in various recon reports to determine the true profit / loss on work done.
***Note*** Users with this feature activated will receive a notification at the top of their screen when logging in. If they haven't tracked enough time, it will tell them how much time needs to be tracked. I.e if a user is set to 8 hours of capacity per day and they only tracked 5 hours yesterday, then today they will be reminded to track the remaining 3 hours for yesterday's work.
5. For drastic measures when users just refuse to track time, you can force them to the timesheet if they didn't track time the previous day. The system will lock them out of doing anything except tracking time. Once the correct amount of time is tracked they will have full access to Magnetic again.
6. Now that you're all setup, your team can go ahead and track time to tasks. When you're ready, you can pull a "Task Billing Rate Breakdown" Report which will give a clear indication of time being spent internally and externally.
If your staff is struggling to remember to track time, then you can force them to track time by changing some settings.
Next Step:
Force users to select a task billing rate
Pull a User Profitability Report at the end of every month
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