In-house staff profile
Hi everyone, Happy New Year!
I have a general question about how you usually handle in-house profiles of vendors.
Do you add rates, like you would with external collaborators, or do you leave those fields empty?
My question mainly revolves around what we would call "business expenses" (or would it be "internal expenses"? Not sure).
An example of what I mean: In our company, all of our PMs are also translators and/or reviewers. Which means that at least one task in each project is usually assigned to them. At the moment we do not add "Payables" in relation to those tasks, and in effect we don't have a clear idea of the "costs" these tasks represent for the company. (We used to calculate, roughly, each person's salary in relation to their weekly hours). Now we would like to have a clearer image on what each employee is costing the company, when it comes to those tasks, if that makes any sense.
How do you handle such things? Do you use rates per person, or have a general cost in mind?
Thanks in advance!
Customer support service by UserEcho
Happy new year :)
Our in-house people are on monthly fixed salary, so we add (hourly) rates for every in-house "vendor".
We create jobs for them as we would for any other (external) vendor, and they report the time spent with each task on Vendor Portal.
We see a few things things based on these reports:
- Did they work enough in a given month?
I.e. did they receive enough internal jobs to earn their salaries? Are there any forgotten in-house people, who don't get enough translation/proofreading jobs? They also see it in their monthly Invoice Specification on Vendor Portal.
- What is their average productivity?
Since they report the time spent and we have a weighted word count for each job, we can analyze the productivity based on person, clients etc. and can make nice diagrams out of it.
- How much internal effort (=money) was spent on each job.
It is an important info when negotiating rates with clients. Before implementing this system, we just had some "feelings" about the profitability of each client. Now, we have some numbers. They might be inaccurate (because of holidays vs. monthly salary, individual differences in productivity etc.), but these numbers are certainly more useful than the "feelings" we had about each client.
That's a very good and not an easy question. We have such calculation but this is out of XTRF (MS BI). We created an algorithm from the size of the job and the job type. It depends on your controlling strategy.
Laszlo's solution seems to be a good idea too.
BTW: we also use MS BI to analyze data - they are exported from XTRF each day.
We don't have MS BI, but sounds like a good idea, so thanks!
As for the profiles, I think we will give it a try like Laszlo said, i.e. add rates per profile, in order to keep track of everything.
Thank you for your answers!
MS BI basic version is free. You "only" have to configurate it. If you want cloud version it's a little bit tricky, but it works.