As part of our journey to automatically suggest labour charges for reactive callouts and other tasks, we recently introduced a simple tool that alerts office staff when travel or onsite time exceeds the billable attendance fee or labour already on the task—making it clear when additional labour needs to be added.
How it Works:
When time is logged against a task, and it exceeds the billable attendance fee or labour already on the Work tab of the task, the system will:
Calculate the exceeded time you should charge to cover all travel or onsite time which has been logged to the task.
Generate an alert prompting you to review and add the additional charges when viewing that task.
A second iteration on this feature is already in progress, with plans to:
Add Included Travel into your attendance fees, allowing the system to understand when not to suggest charging for travel.
Provide a clear distinction between when you should charge after-hours labour from standard business hours, making it easier to charge seperate rates when a task has both.
1. Make sure you callout fees and labour rates have been set up correctly
1. Make sure you callout fees and labour rates have been set up correctly
Make sure Included Labour and Labour Increment is set for all labour products you want to use in this feature.
Make sure Attendance Fee is ticked for all attendance fees so there is a clear distinction between fees and labour rates.
2. Manually create a task in your task list
2. Manually create a task in your task list
When manually creating a task from a property, task list, remark, or asset, a default Charge Type of 'Time and Materials' will be applied. All current and future tasks with this charge type will want to charge for Time [and Materials] reactively added to this task and hence are included in the labour-exceeded prompt calculation.
If you need to edit the Charge Type of a task, save the task first, then click Update.
3. Complete work & add timesheets
3. Complete work & add timesheets
All tasks with travel or onsite time logged against a task, whether that was added in the field or by the office, will be used to calculate whether additional labour needs to be added.
4. Check the margin review
4. Check the margin review
If the travel and onsite time logged above exceed the Included Labour time of all labour rates on the Work tab of the task, you will be prompted to add the additional labour to the task.
Once saved, all additional labour will be added to the task, ready to invoice.