Monitoring Your Project Costs, Rates, and Utilization in Cloud Coach

Brandi Johnson

Jun 29 2015 5 min read

Effective project management requires the management of project scope, timelines, and costs. With Cloud Coach, along with the tracking the projects and task that your team is working upon, you can also:

  • capture the cost to your business of the work they are performing
  • measure how effectively your resources are being utilized
  • bill a client or cost center for the work you performed.

Costs, weekly working hours, and rates can be set up against your users.  

  • Cost per Hour: The cost to the business of an hour of that employee’s time. This can be set up as a loaded cost based on the actual salary and overhead costs for the employee.
  • Weekly Working Hours: Expected working hours for an employee in a week. This is set to 40 as standard, but if you have a part time worker who only works 2 days a week, you can set this to 16 for them. This information is used for utilization calculations in resourcing and reporting.
  • Standard Rate per Hour: The default billing rate for an hour for this employee’s time.
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Variable Rates

When you set up your Cloud Coach users, you will assign a standard Rate per Hour for each work type. Of course, just because someone’s standard rate is $150/hour, you don’t have to bill them that rate on a particular project if other commercial arrangements are in place.

For example, Charlotte’s standard rate of $175 is was automatically applied to this project when she was assigned to work on it.

However, on this project, we have negotiated a rate of $245 for resources of Charlotte’s experience. You can override the rate card to reflect this new higher rate.

Rates By Task Type

You can also assign different rates for a person doing different tasks on the same project.

If Charlotte works on one task typically performed by a senior person, and one task typically performed by a junior person, then a different rate can be applied for each task accordingly.

  • Senior tasks billed at $245/hour
  • Junior resource tasks billed at $175

Calculating Bill Data and Cost of Delivery

To calculate the bill rate and cost of delivery of your projects, Cloud Coach starts with the rate and cost values, and apply that to the time that users have entered on project tasks.

We then add any variables to rates, such as travel time that may be billed at 50%.

The cost, rate, hours and variables information then gets passed through the Cloud Coach rating engine, providing the cost of delivery for the project and the rated bill data that can be used for invoicing your client.

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Measuring Utilization

Using Cloud Coach’s rating engine and the information entered earlier on weekly working hours, we can establish utilization for our resources for the week (or month).

In this example, we break our time into billable hours, exempt hours, and non-billable hours.

  • Billable Hours: hours captured against customer delivery projects
  • Exempt Hours: Sales support hours
  • Non-Billable Hours: Administrative work
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The utilization is then calculated by taking the weekly working hours, and what percentage of those hours is covered by the billable and exempt hours. In this case, Jack’s utilization comes out at 86% for the week.

AUTHOR

Brandi Johnson

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