Job type Rates

Rating tables in BigChange are a powerful tool for calculating job costs using pre-agreed selling price rates with customers or set product rates. These tables streamline the process of determining job costs and fixing item and work costs appropriately. BigChange offers two types of rates: those associated with specific contacts and those applicable to specific job types. Both can be used to create rating tables that automatically calculate pricing for financial documents.

Setting Up Rates

Job Type Rates/Contact-Specific Rates

Job Type Rates

The rates that you set help you to calculate the selling prices for jobs or items. In relation to working hours, you can set them up against either planned or actual work time, ie the estimated time you expect the work will take or the actual logged time which it took the resource to perform the job..

• Navigate to: [Top menu] Account settings (icon) → Settings → [side menu] → Schedule → Job Types → [tab] Financial → [subtab] Rates → Add.
• Set rates for planned or actual work time, driving hourly rate, rate per mile, and more.
• Options include overriding contact-specific rates, setting fixed prices, and applying VAT codes.

The rate for a job of this type will be determined by taking these answers and then calculating a total figure.

1. Override contact’s set rates - Where you have set specific rates for individual clients, here you are given the option to override them if needed. You may wish to do this, for example, for a call-out charge where you have a standard rate which is universally applicable.
2. Period – This is the time period where this rate is applicable. For example, the standard rate may be 9am – 5pm Monday to Friday, and an out of hours rate may be anything outside of those times. Select days and times from the dropdown list.
3. Fixed Price – This is a fixed rate. For example, a call-out charge.
4. Driving Hourly Rate – If you charge time for driving to a job, the hourly figure can be input here.  It may differ depending on whether you select planned or actual in field 15.
5. Rate per mile – Allows you to set a cost per mile driven whilst undertaking the job. Again, your choice of planned or actual will make a difference, it will either be an estimated distance or literally how far the driver travelled from their start point, including any diversions, etc.
6. Driving from a fixed location – Choosing “No” will calculate the distance driven from the point the resource says ‘start driving to job’ to ‘start job’ on the tablet. Choosing “Yes” will allow you to choose a fixed starting location, such as Head Office. More relevant when using planned duration (15).
7. Drive Time Rounding – Allows you to choose to either round up or round down the driving time, commonly in 15 minute increments. This is more often rounded up. If 60 is chosen, this will round up to the nearest hour.
8. Driving Multiplier – This option allows you to multiply the final selling cost of travel by a specific number. For example, 1 would be standard rate. 0.5 would be half the standard rate and if you wanted to charge a customer for travel both to and from their location, you would set it at 2.
9. Working Hourly Rate, First Hour – This allows you to set a rate for the first hour, if it is to be different from the following hours. For example, the first hour charged at £45, and then £35 per hour thereafter.
10. Working Hourly Rate, after 1^st hour – As in the above example, this allows you to set the rate after the first hour.
11. Working Hourly Rate Over Planned Duration - This allows you to set a figure for working time which exceeds the planned period of the job.
12. Hourly Rate Rounding (minutes) – This allows you to round your hourly rate up or down. If for example you wanted to round up to the nearest hour, you would choose 60, or 15 for a quarter of an hour.
13. Multiply by the number of resources – If there are multiple resources undertaking a job, you can multiply the hourly rate by the number of resources. For example, if the standard rate was £10, if 4 resources were used, it would be £40.
14. Show working rate even if amount is 0 – This is to be used if you want an hourly rate shown, even if the number of hours worked is 0, eg if you are already on-site and don't want to add driving time.
15. Durations used – You can use either Planned or Actual durations. If you choose to charge the rate quoted, regardless of the duration actually taken, then use Planned. If not, Actual will charge the rate of the time actually worked.
16. VAT Code – You can choose the VAT amount charged here.

If you have a job which has a call out rate which includes the first hour’s work. The fixed price would be the call out rate, the ‘Working Hourly Rate, First Hour’ would be £0 (as this is included in the fixed price), with the hourly rate being input into ‘Working Hourly Rate, after 1^st Hour’.Please note, the VAT Code is set in the Financial Settings by:

Contact-Specific Rates

• Navigate to: CRM → [side menu] Contacts → Select contact → [tab] Financial → [subtab] Rates.
• Set rates, discounts, and markups specific to the contact.
• Decide whether job type rates override contact-specific rates for flexibility.

Applying Rates to Jobs

How Rates Work in Practice

• Example: Fast Repair performing a Boiler Service for Fitzwilliam Enterprises.
• Navigate to: [Top menu] Account settings (icon) → Settings → [side menu] → Schedule → Job Types → select Boiler Service → [tab] Financial → [subtab] Rates → +Add.
• Fill out the rates form.
  1. Has a fixed charge of £60 for service and service parts.
  2. Travel is charged at 50p per mile from the office.
  3. Then labour is charged first hour at £40.
  4. Subsequent hours at £50/hour, rounding up to the nearest 15 minutes.
  5. Travel is charged 50p per mile there and back (driving multiplier = 2.
• Save and view the job on the schedule to see the financial tab with calculated line items.

Lets look at how this works on a job.

Navigate to the schedule and create a new job for a boiler service and allocate it to a resource.

PLEASE NOTE Please make sure the resource and vehicle you are allocting the job to has the working hours and default cost and vehicle costs assigned to them.

Once the job has been complete by the resource.

Open the job and navigate to the financials tab. Here you will see:

A line for the labour and a line fo the travel based on the job rates setup.

The system will work out the cost based on the resources default hourly rate and vehicle costs x the legnth of time on site.

Examples

With each change that is made to the fields in the form shown in Step 2, the cost of the job will change.  Some examples are shown below so that you can see what effect changes have and where they appear.

With the Addition of a Fixed Price

Will cost: £60 + £40 + £12.50 = £112.50[/caption]

With the Addition of Driving Rates

For this function to work you will need a fixed location as a starting point, eg your depot address in order for the calculation to work. Note that travel costs are recorded as separate line items to the main job costs:

Edited Line Item Information

Line item information can be edited for a Job Type in its Templates tab.  You can adjust it to show how costs were calculated, add Job References, etc.

• Navigate to: [Top menu] Account settings (icon) → Settings → [Quick links] → Job type → select job type → Edit → [tab] Templates.

The default Financial description includes 2 keywords (keywords appear in blue when added): (1) the name of the Job Type and (2) a placeholder customer name.

As an example, you will also see that the Job Reference and Actual Job Duration have been added from the list of available keywords, as well as a free text description:

Using a Resource's Address as a Start Point

In the above examples, we showed the start point as the depot address of the company.  However, you may wish to use a resource's home address as a departure point instead, depending on how your business operates or else you may want the mileage to be measured from the previous job's location. Resources' home addresses can only be used if your resources have been added to your CRM, so begin by adding those in if they are not already on the system.

• Navigate to:CRM → [side menu] Contacts → [tab] Contacts → Add.

You can then set it up as desired but in the below example, the resource, David Nathan, has been added to the Group 'Employees' and the company has been added as the Parent contact.

Once all of your resources are in your CRM, their homes can be added as a start point. If you want this to be applied, you can add it to new Rates or edit old ones by ticking 'No' on the Driving from fixed location field

 Now ensure that the start location for your resources is set up to their home address.  This can be done in the Resource card working hours.

• Navigate to: [Top menu] Account settings (icon) → Settings → [side menu] → Resources → Add-Edit → select resource → [field]Working hours.

Click on this field and a new popup window will open.

To use the resource's home address as a start point, tick 'At a contact' and type in the resource name and select it from the dropdown list.

 Resource's home address for travel calculation[/caption] The system will now use the resource's home address as the calculation point from which to work out mileage for a job.