Tempus can do a lot more than just report time spent by employees in the field. It can keep track of your billing rates, payroll rates and costs per contract. Combined with your inventory of timesheet hours, this is powerfull sales analysis information.

With this information, Tempus can provide important financial insights for your firm. As soon as your timesheets are in for the week for example, you can see your expected payroll for the period, your revenue and gross margin.

Tempus reports can tell you which clients are most profitable and which sales reps are struggling with margins. Using report information, you can determine your average bill rate per client, per sales rep, per recruiter. You can use those metrics to develop goals and measure progress against the goals. You can help your firm write more profitable deals and you can see the results of your efforts immediately.

This document tells you where to find these features and how to use them.

Overview

The Rate, Cost & Commission page allows you to edit billing rates, payroll rates, commissions and COGS for a single contract.

First, navigate to the the Rate Cost Comm page and choose your contract from the list.

You'll immediately see two panels on the page and a third panel will appear after you choose the contract. The first panel is for commissions, the second for costs and the third will allow retroactive cost and commission application to prior timesheets.

Let's take them one-by-one.

The Commission Panel

In the commission panel you will see a list of the commissionable employees assigned to this contract with a textbox for the hourly commission rate. Enter the hourly commission amount each should receive. (Use the Assign button on the contract page to assign managers, reps and recruiters to the contract.)

The Cost Panel

In the cost panel, enter the details of your potential expenses for this contract.

Consider whether your employee is exempt from the overtime provisions of the NLRA. If so, check the box below the panel. This setting controls how overtime is reported. Exempt employees will not get overtime, non-exempt employees will show overtime for all hours over 40 per week on Tempus reports. In order to accomodate all the ways that overtime can be calculated, Tempus requires an explicit statement of overtime rates and costs for non-exempt employees.

The Retroactive Application Panel

The third panel provides a way to apply costs and commission retroactivly - because sometimes administrators don't get the word immediately. Also, in some firms, accounting associates are charged with entering this data initially and keeping it up-to-date for the life of the contract. This allows some extra time to enter these numbers.

Just check the boxes next to the timesheets that should receive the updates to rates and commissions. Tempus will recalculate the timesheet history for each when you click the OK button.

Finishing Up

You can click the Calculate button any time while you are using this page to add up your commissions and costs and subtract them from the billing rate to show gross margin for the contract.

When you're done, click the OK button to record the changes.

Field Definitions

Here are some field definitions that will help you understand the data requirements.

• Payroll Cost is the hourly rate you pay your consultant in your local currency.
• COGS is usually your overhead for insurance, etc., stated as a percentage of the hourly payroll rate. Enter a decimal value less than 1 with up to 3 decimal places. This value will be multiplied by the consultants hourly rate and rounded down. The result will be multiplied by timesheet hours to calculate COGS for the period.
• Discount reduces the hourly billing rate by an amount in your local currency. It is reported in all of the revenue and cost reports.
• Passthrough, like Discount, reduces the billing rate and is reported in the revenue and cost reports.
• Billing Rate is the amount you charge your client for each hour of the consultant’s work.
• The OT amounts are for overtime calculations. These boxes are enabled for non-exempt employees.

Using the Rate and Cost Information

Tempus reports provide the primary window to all of this information.

All of the reports titled "Revenue and Cost" combine timesheet data with rates and costs to provide a rich view of financial information.

These reports are available to analyze profitability information on clients, consultants, sales reps and recruiters. They are available in summary fashion which generally compress individual timesheeets to a single row, and detail fashion which present each timesheet in the data set as a row on the report.

The report data includes all the information on the Cost panel as report columns. Additional fields are calculated and summed to provide total hours, total payroll, gross revenue, net revenue, gross margin and gross margin as a percent of revenue.

Keep in mind that all of this information can be exported to provide a starting point for your own analysis. Export is available in Excel format or CSV.