Tired of waiting on accounting for end of the month reports to figure out how profitable your business is? With the new Profitability Dashboard, you can see the cost of your staff to your business and how profitable the work they are doing is - in real time.

The Profitability Dashboard works by showing you the Revenue and Cost values of the time you and your colleagues spend doing client work. By comparing the revenue from billable time logged across the company to the costs of the people logging the work, you’ll be  able to get a real-time handle on the profitability of the world's most perishable inventory: time.

By bringing in all of the revenue (billable time) and costs of team members (that you can filter and select), the Profitability Dashboard displays the revenue and costs collectively in a graph as well as breaking them down by individual team members, so you can see how everyone is contributing to profitability (or a lack thereof) quickly and easily.

Building your (profitability report) posse

While many users will want to see the profitability of all of the team members in their business, Accelo also allows you to select one or more users, groups or other characteristics and then see the profitability of that group both collectively (in the top chart) or in more detail (in the table below).

Adding users to the report is easy - you can search for them by typing their name into the field in the top left of the screen. You can also choose to focus on pre-set lists of team members; groups (like support vs. sales teams), divisions (San Francisco office vs New York office), who the team member's manager is, skills that the user has been tagged with and even access levels are all available through simple checkbox lists.

Whenever you make a change to the users you've selected in the top section, the graph below will automatically recompute, showing you the collective revenue, cost and profit margin calculations in real time! If you want to remove any users from the report, you'll see them all listed easily in a table at the bottom - simply click on the X on the right and the dashboard will recompute automatically.

Choosing Dates & Charting by Week or Day

In addition to choosing who you're including in your profitability dashboard, you're also able to choose the time period to examine in the chart quickly and easily. Simply click on the date box in the top left, below the user search box, and you can choose a date to base your report around. Then just choose whether you want to graph days or weeks before, after or around this date.

While you can choose to include a really large number of days or weeks in the report, keep in mind that the more you choose the longer the screen will take to load (and the harder your browser will have to work to keep up).

Counting Costs: Logged Time or Total Time

While the Revenue associated with people's time is pretty easy (looking at the value of billable time logged), the reality of many professional service businesses is that using the logged time to calculate the cost of people's time really underestimates it: while people might only log 4 hours of billable work in a day, if they're full time they're being paid for 8 hours of work.

To give you a much more accurate picture of profitability, Accelo gives you two options to calculate time cost:

• Logged Time: this is the cost of that team member per hour multiplied by the number of hours logged for that day/week.
• Total Time: this is the cost of that team member per hour multiplied by the number of hours they were scheduled to work at that time.

Accelo uses three different inputs to determine the Total Time a user is considered to have worked on a given day/week.

Work Days

Work days are defined at the company level (which days you're open, how many hours per day is normal) and then they can also be overridden on a user by user basis (ideal for folks working part time, for example). The workdays and work hours are the basis of the Total Time calculation.

Vacation/Leave Days

Leave or vacation days are one-off days that either an individual user (or the entire company) are not working. If the user has a leave day (or there is a company-wide leave day) then the hours that would have been worked on this day are removed from the user's Total Time.

Total Time Cost

The total time cost then takes the hours that should have been worked by a user on a given day (or week) and multiplies it by the Cost Rate for that user, set in the "Default Cost Rate" for each team member you're running your report on.

For example, if a team member is part time (or on vacation for a day) and only worked a 4 day week, and their per-hour cost (usually calculated by dividing their yearly salary plus on-costs by 1900 for the number of hours in the year less holidays and vacation time) is $45/hour, their Total Cost for that week will be $1440 regardless of the number of hours they remembered to log in their timesheet.

Examining just Project, Ticket or Retainer Profitability 

In addition to choosing a specific list of users to compare profitability for, you can also choose to focus on just the billable time logged in different modules in the product.

Be aware that the Total Cost still includes all of the time the staff members worked so you'll probably want to use the Logged Time for assessing profitability on just Projects, Tickets or Retainers; otherwise you'll be looking at a subset of someone's logged time against their Total Cost!

Future Plans

While the ability to see the Profitability of the time you and your team spend working on clients is of utmost importance in a professional service business, we also appreciate there are also other ways to look at revenue (for example, by invoices raised, and including non-time revenue such as materials) and costs (including for example expenses you absorb or materials you have pay for as a cost-of-goods sold).

Our team is currently working hard this quarter on a lot of enhancements to the billing/invoicing systems under the hood of Accelo to allow us to include this sort of data in future reports. They probably won't be represented in a day by day or week by week chart like this (in part because they are "lumpy" - if there are 1000 widgets on a project, what day/week should they be shown in) but we're working on bringing these important aspects of profitability into reports as soon as we can.

Questions? Feedback? We'd love to hear it!

If you've got any questions about the new Profitability Dashboard - or anything else in Accelo for that matter - please don't hesitate to email [email protected]. If you're currently using a Plus edition of Accelo and want to enquiry about options for upgrading your account to get this great new Dashboard (as well as other benefits like custom business processes, triggers, scheduling and of course the new Utilization Dashboard) email your account manager or feel free to ping [email protected] and we'll get back to you as quickly as we can.