Costs - they're half of the profit equation, and from today they join our extensive revenue/billable rate and budget reporting in Accelo! Today we're introducing real-time tracking of costs and gross profit margins to projects in Accelo through our new Costs & Profitability Module, with even more reporting and insights to come in the new few months.
While Accelo has always had "revenue" or "billable" rates (defined by milestone, task, ticket/issue or contract/retainer), until now we haven't had a way for our clients to designate a per-hour "cost" or expense for their people.
With the introduction of the Costs & Profitability Module, individual users can now have costs rates assigned to their accounts, which, when compared with revenue or billable rates can provide real-time reporting on profit margins. Including a cost rate allows for further insight into whether projects are profitable as well as facilitates a more in-depth view of the gross profit margin as a project unfolds. To ensure that Accelo remains flexible our users have the ability to determine and defining all costs based on their needs.
The first step to defining the costs of your users is to create Cost Rates - this is just like defining billable rates, but is specifically for staff costs.
Go to your Admin section, and click on rates.
You will then have the ability to give your costs a title, rate, and designate it as a cost.�When you designate it as a cost, it will be reflected on every user account.
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In the past, we were unable to calculate gross profit margin because we were missing the concept of costs. Now that we updated our Cost Module we can determine the gross profit margin, and it allows users to see the gross profit margin in real-time.
In this first release of profitability reporting, you're able to see the gross profit margin on a per-project basis. Simply go to any billable project, and you can see a new "Cost" option (next to financial rates and hours) to see the cost and profit margin calculations on a whole project (first row), per milestone or per task basis.
There profit and profit margin calculations are color-coded to make it easy to see if you're at risk of running below healthy profit margins for the work your team is doing.
This release has focused on providing our users the tools they need to be successful on a per project basis, however, in Q2, we have exciting plans to roll up this reporting into a more company-wide basis.
As always, any questions, problems or feedback, please contact our support team - [email protected].
