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Tip of the week - How to Calculate the Average Hourly Rate on Your Recurring Jobs!

Today’s tip of the week comes from Amy Holdsworth, Business & Information Systems Manager, HTA Advisory — a leading accounting and business advisory firm based in Melbourne.

 

Amy Holdsworth Amy Holdsworth

Here's the scenario: I have just set up my recurring monthly jobs to capture an ongoing fee that I’m charging my client, along with setting up my recurring invoice and linking this back to my recurring job in WorkflowMax - this has cut down on my administration time, so I'm very happy.

Now I want to work out what my average hourly rate (AHR) on these jobs is and track this over the year/period of time.

There are a number of ways to set up the jobs/tasks that make up your recurring agreement. In our accounting firm, we set up our monthly recurring job to capture any adhoc/consulting time with clients. We then set up separate jobs - for example, an Annual Compliance & Tax, ASIC Corporate and Monthly or Quarterly BAS jobs - separately under the same client name, but we obviously don’t invoice these as these jobs are included in our monthly fee.

The other way to do this is for example, use one job with multiple tasks to capture the different jobs, or separate jobs with no invoice. However, short of a manual calculation it can be difficult to calculate quickly the time spent against the amount charged to the client.

Here’s how we do it. You will see a rolling balance every month that will change, particularly if some clients' work is not completed until later in the year. For example, as the invoice totals progress each month and no time is put to any jobs, the AHR will be high. Or if the main work for the client is completed early within the year, the AHR will be low and will increase as the months progress.

In WorkflowMax, go to Reports > Report Builder. The type of report is a Job report > Create

workflowmax1

STEP #1– Name your Report! We call ours:

step1.1

STEP #2 – Select the fields as follows:

step2.1

STEP #3 – Select the criteria

You want the criteria to select any jobs that may have time to them. For example:

step2

You want to select and “include” every client that you have set up a recurring job for.

step3

You need to set the date for the start of the report. Every month the jobs list will grow for the report.

step3.3

STEP #4 – Publish

Select the staff who can view the report. Group the rows by the first field (which in this case is the client):

step 4

STEP #5 – Click on Save and Preview

step 5

On the next page, you will see a list of all the jobs, all the time put to those jobs, and then the totals.

A simple manual sum will show the AHR for this client is: $218.77. As the months progress this amount will increase!

TIP: Prior to publishing this report, go to: Admin > Preferences. Scroll to the bottom, under Reports, change the time format to “Decimal – e.g 1.50*” – Dividing the $AMOUNT by the Time in decimal is much easier to work out!

* Remember to change it back though if your team is used to using hours and minutes!

step 6

Got any questions? Please let us know in the comments below!

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Amy Holdsworth
Amy Holdsworth is the Business & Information Systems Manager at HTA Advisory — a leading accounting and business advisory firm based in Melbourne, Australia. Amy specialises in cloud based products, taking a holistic view and spending time to discover and understand your needs to improve your business and take it in the direction you want.

Amy Holdsworth