Transcription
The financials application is for organizations who wish to handle finances surrounding their projects, tickets, and tasks within OneDesk. In combination with OneDesk’s other tools you can easily forecast costs and billing amounts based on the rates you set and allows you to keep track of planned and actual billing amounts and costs in real time.
This video is an overview of what the financials can do and how it works.
Accessing the Financials Application
The financials application is accessible on your left side panel denoted by the dollar symbol. As an administrator-level user you can configure who has access to the Financials application through an individual user’s profile. You may want to hide your financial information from some users. To do so, head to the users application, click on the user to bring up their profile. Then can choose to set a user as having full or limited access. With limited access, a user cannot see the Financials application and therefore will not be privy to the finances of the organization.
Interface overview
Now let’s head to the financials application.
On the right-hand side of the screen you will see the various columns with finances pertaining to each project and the items within. These columns can be customized to your liking, by clicking on the cogwheel and checking them on or off. You can see there are various columns for work, cost, billables, and forecast. Check out our blog or knowledge base articles for detailed descriptions of each of these column options.
For this video I will focus primarily on the planned and actual costs and billables.
Note here you can also determine the calculated columns. By clicking the cogwheel and the Calculated Column option. On the resulting menu, you will be prompted to select the properties which you wish to subtract. Depending on your selection for the first property, the subtraction property will change. For instance, if we select Actual Work as our first property, we can choose between Forecast Work and Actual Billable Work to subtract.
You can see over here, the new column appears in our view titled “AW – BW”. I can move it around as well. Like other columns you can now choose whether to show this column or not from the cog-wheel menu. Please note that removing this subtraction column will delete it and it will need to be added again manually if you wish to see it.
Set cost and billing rates
Now let’s see how we actually start budgeting our work. You can change the cost and billing rates on a per-level basis. These rates can be changed to best reflect the flow of money into and out of your business as you work on your projects, tickets, and tasks.
To change the cost calculations and billing calculations, select the actions menu on the left side of the Financials application, and the “edit cost/billing rates” option. As you can see there are various rates you can set for your cost and billing, such as by team or by project. You can set the rates hourly, with a monthly minimum, or a mixed rate. In the case of a mixed rate, your hourly rate will apply after the minimum is met.
Let’s say I have a company with various teams. My support team here is paid $25 per hour by the company. The development team is $50 per hour and my design team is $30 per hour. Let’s set and calculate our costs.
Next let’s set our billing rates. In this case let’s say my company bills clients based on the project type. Here you can see I have three project types enabled, design, development and support. Let’s set some billable rates. Let’s say for support type projects we have a monthly minimum then charge hourly after. For design and development type projects we charge hourly at 100 per hour. Set and calculate your amounts.
Our company can now plan tasks and projects as normal. Use the Tasks and Projects apps to keep on track and meet goals and deadlines, prioritize tasks, and allocate resources. (See our blog posts or videos for detailed information on project management with OneDesk)
To demonstrate, let’s dock the details of our items on the side here. First you can see the project here is of the type ‘design’ which we set billable rates for. Lets also view our task in that project here called wireframing. You can see here this task is assigned to one of my designers. You can also see the planned work for our ‘Wireframing’ task is set to 6 hours.
Closing the task details,, we can see below that based on my tasks planned hours and my cost rate, my planned cost has been generated. 6 hours multiplied by my design team’s cost rate of $30. As well my planned billable amount is generated for 6 hours based on my billable rates by the project type this task is part of. My project total is calculated by the amount in all the tasks in the design project.
Going back into the task detail panel and scrolling to our timesheets. You can see one of my designers has submitted a timesheet for 2 hours of billable time on this task. This is where the actual costs and actual billable amounts are generated. Finally the profit is calculated based on the actual billable amount minus the actual costs.
Now as a project manager, we can dynamically track whether our planned cost budget is on track with actual costs. With the financials app it’s easy to dynamically estimate or reassess your billing rates. Don’t forget to check out our other videos and articles on using OneDesk. And if you have any questions feel free to reach out through live chat or at support@onedesk.com.