Product Update: Cost & Profit Data Permissions

Capturing every minute of your team's day in Accelo ensures you're able to categorize and bill their time with complete accuracy. Knowing if you're profitable, though, is the game-changer.

Accelo allows you to record the "Cost rate" for each user - where you approximate the cumulative cost to the business for every hour they spend working - and when calculated alongside the billable values, you start to get a picture of profitability across your projects, tickets, and retainers.

More flexible permissions

To date, tracking the cost and visualizing profitability of your team's time has been limited to users with Admin access, as this information is related to compensation and therefore to be considered sensitive. However, we've heard from many of you that being able to add an exception for a particular project or retainer would make life easier for project managers and other senior staff as they need this data to create more effective reports and optimize project plans for the future.

That's why we're especially excited to introduce a new Cost & Profit permission setting, which can be found within the Project permissions as well as Retainers - both when customizing the permissions for an individual project/retainer, as well as in the global permission settings:

What does it enable for a project?

When a user has the permission for the projects module (or just for a particular project), it unlocks a few features:

• On the Overview tab for a project, there's a column which can be toggled between Earned Value and Time. This will be updated to have a third option: Profit. Upon being toggled, the column will instantly change data to show the profit information for each milestone & task.

• The Insights tab will show additional detail, just the same as though they were an admin user. They will see the cost and profit rows in the Financials table, as well as the Profitability circle graphs.

• Cost & Profit data will be included in the Milestones export, and the Milestones & Tasks export.

• And if they have the permission set globally, they'll see more cost & profit data when exporting projects from the project list screen.

Note: This permission won't open up the "Cost" data on the Timesheet Report.

What will it allow a retainer user to see or do?

If a user has this new permission enabled in the Retainer permissions (or just for a specific retainer) then they'll have access to the recently released Insights tab on the retainer. 

They'll also see more cost & profit data when exporting retainers or periods from their respective list screens.

Who can manage these permissions?

Because of the sensitivity of the information that can be revealed, only admin users can see, grant, or remove these permissions. You'll also find that we haven't automatically applied them to anyone, so a user who previously had full permissions for the Projects module won't inherit the permission.

Additionally, if a user doesn't first have the Financial Visibility permission set on their user profile, then these new permissions won't circumvent - a user must have both.