Announcing staff based billing in Zoho Projects

Zoho Projects announced its staff based billing feature recently. I would like to throw some light on it today. Before the launch of staff based billing, we had project-hours based billing only. In the project-hours based billing, the user rate was common to everyone in the project. Now, with the help of staff-hours based billing, different user rates can be given to different users in different roles and make project billing more effective.

Advantages of staff based billing over project hour based billing

Staff based billing clearly gives a flexibility over the conventional hour based billing. Your clients might not have the same set of expectations. The way they would like to get their project billed, differs. Some might want all the details of the tasks and bugs resolved by a user in the invoice. A few might want the consolidated effort of a user in hours and a few might want different user rates for different roles or persons in order to handle their expenditure on the project effectively. Having said that, staff based project billing is a definite winner. It will help you assign different user rates to the people in your team based on their efficiency, experience, and role.

Use case

George runs a consultancy firm. He sets a constant user rate for billing irrespective of his employees' experience and their role in the project.

So, (total number of logged hours in the project * rate per hour) is the bill amount.

Role	Employee Name	Project Name	Rate Per Hour	Time logged
Employee	Amelia Rose	Marketing goals Q4-16	$50	80
Manager	Dan Flinwood	Marketing goals Q4 -16	$50	30
Contractor	Ellen Stuart	Marketing goals Q4 -16	$50	30

As you can see, Amelia Rose is an employee, Dan Flinwood is a manager, and Ellen Stuart is a contractor in the project Marketing goals Q4-16. All the three share the same Rate Per Hour ($50)

Bill amount = (Total number of logged hours * rate per hours)

= (140 * 50)

= $7000

After the launch of staff based billing in Zoho Projects, George sets different rates for the users based on their skills, experience and productivity. Now, [ ((total number of hours logged by user1) * (rate per hour for user1)) + ((total number of hours logged by user2) * (rate per hour for user2)) + ....+ ((total number of hours logged by userN) * (rate per hour for userN)) ] is the bill amount.

Role	Employee Name	Project Name	Rate Per Hour	Time Logged
Employee	Amelia Rose	Marketing Goals Q4-16	$35	80
Manager	Dan Flinwood	Marketing Goals Q4-16	$50	30
Contractor	Ellen Stuart	Marketing Goals Q4-16	$20	30

Now, with the flexibility, he sets $35 for an employee, $50 for a manager, and $20 for a contractor.
Bill amount = [(80*35)+(30*50)+(30*20)]
= [(2800) + (1500) + (600)]
= $4900

Learn more about generating invoices through hour based and staff based modes here.

There are a few perks in addition to the staff based billing in Zoho Projects.

You can also..

Try these features out and write back to us at support@zohoprojects.com.
You can also leave your feedback by commenting here. We hope you had a great Thanksgiving there and we, at Zoho Projects, can't thank you enough for all the love support. #ManyHappyProjects

Cheers,
Kiruthika.

Zoho Desk Resources

Desk Community Learning Series
Digest
Functions
Meetups
Kbase
Resources
Glossary
Desk Marketplace
MVP Corner
Word of the Day

Topic Participants
kiruthika
DotCreek SA

Sticky Posts
Tip: How to print the Gantt View
Though we move from the traditional project management system (using papers) to an online project management system, we still prefer to have a printed copy of the activities/tasks that are to be done in the project. This way, we can carry the to-do lists with us for the meetings and refer when we are offline. The print option, available at the right side of the page, allows the users to print the project information across all the modules. However, this option failed to print all the tasks & milestones
Project Management via Emails in Zoho Projects
We write mails to communicate. In Zoho Projects, we can write mails to collaborate. Yes, Zoho Projects supports Email based project management. The mails that you send turn into tasks, bugs, project comments, forum replies, etc. The following are some of the frequently asked questions that might be of some help to you. What are the pre-requisites to manage my projects through Emails? You need to have a personal / business mail ID that is registered and confirmed with accounts.zoho.com To learn more
Four types of task dependencies
"Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs." - Henry Ford Projects, small or large, are driven by simple work units called tasks. Monitoring standalone tasks might look simple but as the workflow becomes elaborate, tasks may start relying on one another. In project management, this relationship between tasks is termed as "Task Dependencies". Dependency between tasks arise
Task and Project numbering
Zoho Projects now generates a unique number for each project, task, and issue added. The auto-generated ID is a combination of a prefix and a number which is assigned by Zoho Projects. The unique IDs for projects, tasks, and issues will be useful to track, identify, and search easily. You can modify the settings to enable or disable the Project and Task IDs. Learn more on how to modify Prefix & ID settings for projects and tasks. Issue IDs cannot be disabled, only its prefix can be changed (tasks
Task Inline Editing Enhancement
Hi All, Today, we have made an enhancement in task inline editing. In 4.0, task edit is moved in a single screen in a pop-up. We designed this in-order to make the task edit across the product to be the same. Let it be in Feeds, Tasks & My Tasks tab, Calendar & My Calendar tab, a click on the task title will open the popup and user can edit the values. Customers pointed us the inline editing was very useful to them & how much they miss that in 4.0. Based on the feedback, we have rolled out this enhancement.