The Subconsultant Reports By Job report option gives a selection of summaries of all subconsultant work for a selected job.
From one menu choice in the reports screen three types of reports can be produced – Subconsultant Fees and Costs by Job, Subconsultant Fees and Costs by Job Detail and the Subconsultant Invoice Supplement.
The Sub-Consultant Invoice Listing report option can be used to get a summary of sub consultant claims and invoices for all or selected subconsultants, between two dates.
You can choose to view all sub consultant invoices, just those that have been fully processed, or only those still waiting to be fully processed.
The Subconsultant Purchase Orders report gives a list of purchase orders for all subconsultants.
Reports are an important feature of Abtrac wherein the information within can be extracted and presented in a meaningful way. Reports also help list useful items and/or assess your company’s performance.
In this article, we will have a look at the ‘Clients and Jobs’ Reports, which comes first in the reports’ list. From Reports >> Performance Reports >> go to ‘Clients and Jobs’ to get a list of reports for clients and jobs.
The purpose of this functionality is to categorise the reasons for write offs and write ons, and therefore more easily report on them. The starting point is putting together a list of valid reasons.
Continue readingOnce you have started using Tasks for your jobs/projects and timesheets, you can learn from them over time.
Tasks (also known as Stages, Phases or Matters) can be used to see how good staff are in getting through work allotted to them, as well as how good you are in your estimates.
You can analyse data entered against tasks either as hours worked or a budget amount.
Even if you don’t have a budget or estimate for a task (be it a variation, or something that you are charging at an hourly rate) it is a good idea to assign the item of work as a task to your job/project. You can leave the hours and fee value equal to zero.
Later on you can look at the actual time and cost assigned to the task and get a better idea of budgeting for the next job of the same type. Or you can use the tasks to simply know approximately how much time these variations to jobs typically take (and how they can affect staffing and scheduling of other jobs).
After using Abtrac for about 18 months, one of our clients, told us “I work out the budget very scientifically and then I add on 30%”.
He had learnt after using Abtrac for that period of time that he was under-quoting and thus writing off to that extent on nearly every job/project.
We would recommend reading this article about Actual vs Budget reports in conjunction with our Creating and Managing Tasks article, and also this one here which includes a glossary of the data within the Actual vs Budget reports.
When you set up Abtrac, we recommend you create a non-billable client for your own company.
For this client, enter all the administrative and leave jobs(projects) that your staff may use, and any jobs that you would like to track time against.
If you are using AbtracOnLine reports for KPI’s it’s possible to balance the reporting of employees working overtime by looking at scaled cost rates.
Scaled cost rates spread an employee cost across their actual hours worked, as opposed to cost rates which work with the required hours for the period.
The following reports in Abtrac include an option for scaled cost rates:
Scaled Cost Rates are a modified version of the cost rate. They effectively scale back the cost rate across an excessive number of hours to those specified in an employees required units per timesheet.
This screen is useful when you need to update timesheet details in bulk, it eliminates the need to open and edit the individual users’ timesheets.
This timesheet maintenance screen is most typically used in the following situations:
This feature enables you to forecast fees and resources (hours) for a period estimated in the Tasks/Stages/Phases screen.
When you provide the estimated Start date and End date of a Task, Job Forecast will disperse the estimated fees and hours within the given period on a monthly basis.
You can then edit them and forecast the resources in a way that suits your cash flow. You can even forecast the Subtask resources for each Task.
Getting started with your invoicing normally starts with a few reports to see who you are invoicing and for how much. This can then be checked with job (project) managers to confirm they are ready to invoice the clients and if they are happy with the amounts.
There are two basic reports that can get you going. Unbilled Work Quick Summary and Timesheet Entries.
Sometimes you have leftover time for a job/project that you just can’t invoice. The best way to clear that time is to write it off.
You can do this in two ways:
Before you start using Actual vs Budget reports it’s useful to understand where the data they display comes from. We’ve included a definition for the relevant columns, (including an example calculation where applicable) in this article, to be read side by side with Creating and managing tasks, and Actual vs Budget Reports.
Your business details can include information for multiple branches/offices in Administration >> Settings >> Office Settings in AbtracOnline.
These Offices or Branches can also be applied to each employee, job or project and carried through to invoicing and analysis.
You can then run reports by office – comparing performance and profitability between branches and managing workflow.
It is also useful when you have one tax entity but different physical addresses, and different invoicing and accounting requirements between locations.
There’s also an option to limit access for Abtrac users by office, enabling them to only view and edit offices to which they have been assigned.
When using multiple offices in Abtrac, there are a few things to bear in mind.
Continue reading
You can export any data from Abtrac to Microsoft Excel for analysis via the ‘Reports’ screen.
In some instances, for commonly exported screens and reports, the data is ‘pre-cleaned’ and will export in a similar format to the report preview.
In other instances, the export may result in ‘messy’ data, where the formatting is not as expected. This export format depends on the report data and your version of Microsoft.
You may need to ‘clean up’ the exported file in order to remove blanks and groupings from the original report. Read on for tips on using MS Excel to tidy up your exported information, and how to export data from reports and other screens in AbtracOnLine.
