Tracking the profitability of your tasks across your business in Uptick.
We currently have two main profit reports that can be used by the owners and managers of any sized company.
The 'Work in Progress (WIP)' report. This report is a flat, extremely detailed report for staff to export on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It's most helpful for companies needing to understand how their tasks are progressing, especially for tasks that go over multiple days such as project work or large installs.
The 'Task Profitability' report. This report is targeted at helping owners and managers understand the profitability of any tasks invoiced in the last month, quarter or financial year. You can pivot your data, giving you a much better understanding of which parts of your business are doing better. Things you can pivot on include task category, service group, cost centre, branch, primary technician, client and property.
Setup for basic profit reporting
The following explains the setup needed to gain a fairly accurate picture of your business's profitability out of Uptick and its profitability reports
Permissions
You'll need to add the Can view pricing information permission to staff who are required to see the overall profitability of each task:
You'll need to add the Can view task Profitability permission to staff who are required to also see a complete breakdown of costs of each task, for example, each technician's labour rate and the margin review page.
Hourly Labour Rates
By setting up your technician's hourly labour rates in Uptick, you'll be able to understand actual labour costs being incurred on your tasks. It's minimal effort to set up.
By going to Control Panel > Individual Rates you can set up the rate which your technicians cost you as a business per hour. You will need the Can change technician labour rates and the Can view technician pay rate permission to edit these rates.
At an absolute minimum (but not recommended), rather than filling out each technician's labour rate, you can instead just fill out a Default technician cost rate which will apply to all timesheets where an individual cost rate has not been set for that technician.
Managing your timesheet approvals through Uptick
If you aren't managing your timesheet approval through Uptick then you won't be able to truely understand what you are paying your employees and hence what your actual labour cost is against each task.
Until a timesheet session is approved, the system will not see that session as an incurred cost to your business. These costs will instead be estimates until that happens.
Uptick already automatically starts a timesheet session timer when a task starts being 'touched' on the mobile app, saving the time it currently takes your technicians to manage this elsewhere. The submission process is very simple on the mobile app.
Read more about timesheets in Uptick here.
Product Catalogue
You'll need to set up your product catalogue, the more accurate, the better.
The most important step in setting up your product catalogue correctly is making sure you're labelling your products into the correct category of material, labour, subcontracted labour, equipment and expense. Without doing this correctly, you will not be able to trust the labour/material/subcontracted labour breakdown we provide on your profit reporting as it relies solely on this to understand what's being purchased, used and invoiced.
Finally, setting your best guess of a cost price on the products you stock is fairly important too. This isn't as important to add to labour products. On a task, if you add and perform a material, equipment or expense product and don't purchase it, we use this cost price as an actual cost price for that material as we assume this material is from stock and your catalogue is as close as it gets to what the actual cost of that product was.
Purchase orders
You should be using purchase orders in Uptick for the system to understand the costs of materials and labour you are purchasing.
You must be creating purchase order bills in Uptick for the system to know when these costs have been incurred to the business.
Setup for more accurate profit reporting
The following explains the setup needed to gain the most accurate picture of your business's profitability out of Uptick and its profitability reports.
Stock Control
For Uptick to capture a much more accurate cost calculation for tasks where stocked materials are used, and to stop you from needing to manually keep the costs in your product catalogue up to date, we advise you to use Uptick stock control. This will automatically add the true cost of any stock you are using on a task and calculate that task's profitability accordingly, without this, we rely on you manually keeping the costs in your product catalogue up to date.
Labour time estimates
For routine maintenance
Uptick offers the ability to input time estimates into the properties you maintain, allowing you to compare what was budgeted in that contract vs actuals, helping highlight any contracts that need to be reviewed for increase or underperforming staff. Depending on your level of accuracy, labour estimates can be added to your system across the board or at an individual property level.
For repair estimates
Uptick also offers the ability to add time estimates on material products in your product catalogue. This will help staff quote for labour more efficiently by easily understanding how much time the materials they are quoting for will take to repair.
For reactive callouts
You can also simply add a labour estimate to any task you wish. This is more helpful for technicians to understand how long you are expecting this repair to take.
Read more about setting up estimated duration in Uptick here.
How does Uptick profitability work
To first get a basic understanding, the following explains what data is behind our profitability reports.
To understand your business's costs we use:
Task Sessions to understand your internal labour costs.
A task session has a time, an hourly labour rate and any multipliers that may have been applied.
Purchase orders to understand your external labour costs.
Any products added to purchase orders that are type 'Subcontracted' are seen as an external labour cost.
Due to not all customers using purchase orders, we also include any 'Subcontracted' products on the Work tab of a task as a cost. Do you use both?
Service tasks to understand material costs that come from stock.
Any products added and used on the Work tab of a task that are type 'Materials', 'Equipment' or 'Expense' and that haven't been pulled onto a purchase order are categorised here.
NOTE: We assume materials added to the Work tab of a task are from warehouse/van stock until you pull them onto a purchase order. Doing this will tell us you need to purchase these materials.
To understand the cost price of material stock we:
For quoted repairs, grab from the quote, otherwise
grab from your warehouse (if Warehousing module is used), otherwise
grab cost set against that product in the product catalogue
Purchase orders to understand your purchased material costs.
Any products added to purchase orders that are type 'Materials', 'Equipment' or 'Expense' are categorised here.
When a material is purchased, we use the purchase order to understand the cost of that material:
If that material is on a purchase order bill i.e the supplier's invoice, the cost price is grabbed from the bill, otherwise
grabbed from the original purchase order
To understand your business's revenue we use:
Service tasks to understand what to invoice a task for
Service tasks on a Work tab of a task are what the invoice & reporting look at to understand what will or should be invoiced. This is for both labour and material servicestasks.
Performing each service task tells us what materials or labour was completed/used.
A product is needed on any service tasks that should be invoiced. This is because products are needed for the accounting partner to recognise the revenue so it must be added early in the task setup.
By default, all service tasks are marked as 'billable', but this can be switched off manually if you don't wish to on-charge that cost to the client.
All performed, billable service tasks that have a product attached will be invoiced.
Invoices to understand what your actual revenue was after all credits or discounts were applied.
What do the columns mean in the profitability reports?
The main figures we give you are Quoted, Revised and Actual. Revised can be broken down into estimated, committed and actuals.
Quoted Explained
Quoted Explained
These values will not and cannot be changed once the repair task has been created as the cost, sell, profit and margin figures come from the original, approved quote.
Figures will only appear here for tasks that have come from a defect or service quote.
Revised (estimated & committed) Explained
Revised (estimated & committed) Explained
Definition: Revised will give you the best guess on what revenue, costs and margins you'll make once the task is performed and fully invoiced. It gets more accurate as the task progresses (i.e as supplier invoices are received, timesheets are approved and sale invoices are sent) and is most helpful when viewing project works and other large tasks that take multiple days to perform and/or invoice.
Why is revised helpful?
Once a task is invoiced, Revised will include any costs still left to be incurred. To be more specific, it will include the cost of any purchase orders still waiting for their bills to be inputted, it will also include any timesheets still waiting to be internally approved. If a task has any of these costs left to be incurred, 'Revised Profit' will be a more accurate figure than Actual Profit to understand the final profit this task may produce.
Once a task is invoiced, whether it's for the first or only time, Revised will include any billable revenue yet to be invoiced, giving you a quick way to understand how your profit is unfolding on this task.
How does Revised work technically?
Revised is a sum of a task's estimates + committed + actuals.
Data will move from estimates into commitments and then commitments into actuals as things change on the task. All estimates and commitments should move into actuals by the time the task if fully invoiced. For example, a draft purchase order is raised, once it's approved, the costs move out of the estimated calculations and into committed. Once that purchase order receives an bill, those costs will now move from committed into actuals given it's now incurred as a cost to the business.
NOTE: Once a task has moved into either a performed or completed stage, all costs and revenue still an estimate, will be removed from the report. We make an assumption that, is a task is performed or completed, you will no longer be performing any work that isn't performed already or processing any draft or unapproved purchase orders.
Hours: Current best guess of what hours that will be incurred to the business for this task.
Estimated Cost *Keeping in mind that these costs get removed after the task is performed | Committed Cost | Incurred Cost |
Purchase orders in the following statues:
| Costs not on PO bills on purchase orders in the following statuses:
| Purchase order bills in the following statuses:
Purchase orders with no bills in the following statuses:
*failsafe for people not using POs correctly |
Service tasks that are:
| - | Service tasks that are:
|
Service tasks that are:
*This cost will reduce as task sessions are added and costs are moved into committed | Task sessions that are unapproved | Task sessions that are approved |
Service tasks that are:
| - | Service tasks that are:
*failsafe for people not raising POs for subcontracted work |
Actuals Explained
Actuals Explained
Definition: All revenue and incurred costs you have received as a business.
Costs will become incurred either via:
a purchase order bill has been created to pay a supplier or subcontractor for materials or labour requested.
a material from stock has been used (performed) by the tech onsite.
a tasksession has has been approved on a task for someone to get paid.
Invoiced: Invoices that have been sent for payment to the client i.e this will not include invoiced in a DRAFT statuses.
Net Invoiced: This is true revenue of the task as it takes credits into account.
Invoiced Credit: The value of any credits applied to the task. This will be a positive number. This will include any credits or invoices that have a negative quantity or dollar figure.
Hours: Task sessions hours that have been approved. This is mainly helpful to understand actual hours vs any estimated (duration) hours added for maintenance or reactive works.
Estimated Sell *Keeping in mind that this revenue gets removed after the task is performed | Committed Sell | Invoiced | Invoiced Credit | Net Invoiced |
Service tasks that are:
| Service tasks that are:
*This will also include any per visit maintenance pricing | Invoices in the following statuses*:
excluding any revenue on these invoices that have a negative quantity or dollar figure | Credit Notes that have not been deleted
plus invoices in a Credit status
plus any revenue on invoices that have a negative quantity or dollar figure |
|
*To move a draft invoice into any of the above statuses you must either send the invoice in Uptick (even if you use offline accounting) or push that invoice into your accounting partner and send it there.
Left to be Incurred, Invoice to go, Cash Position & Activity Explained
Left to be Incurred, Invoice to go, Cash Position & Activity Explained
Left to be incurred: What costs are left to be incurred to the business that are expected to be.
Invoice to go: What revenue is left to be invoiced to the business that are expected to be.
Cash Position: Used to understand how much debt, so to speak, the company has gone in to carrying out tasks. Any costs that have been "paid" vs what's invoices have been paid.
Activity: Used to understand future cash position.
Actual Cost: What costs did I actually incur this month that I’ll need to pay.
Invoiced: What did I actually invoice this month that someone will need to pay me.
Left to be Incurred | Invoice to go | Activity | Cash Position |
*Keeping in mind that al estimated costs get removed after the task is performed |
| Actual Cost: All costs which has moved into
Invoiced: All revenue which has been | Invoices in a PAID status - (credits) - (Bills in a PAID status + Task sessions in a APPROVED status) |
Estimated Hours | Committed Hours | Incurred Hours |
Task Estimated Duration | Task sessions in the following statuses:
| Task sessions in the following statuses:
|