Labor Code Setup Overview

Use labor codes to classify the types of work that your staff performs. Labor codes are a key element in project control operations.

In Vision, all labor costing and budgets are based on labor codes. These labor codes classify work for a project or task in categories or levels that you define. Examples are department and phase (level of progress, service, or staff level). Labor codes are entered on timesheets to identify each hour of labor.

You can establish a labor code structure that is configured for your firm. No labor codes are shipped as part of Vision.

Before you can set up individual labor codes, you must specify the labor code structure in Utilities > Key Formats > Labor Codes. You determine the number of labor code levels, the names of each level, the delimiters between levels, and the number of positions within each level.

Use the Labor Code Rate tables to assign billing rates based on the labor code to which the employee posted time. Labor Code Rate tables are the only billing tables that let you capture multiple billing rates for the same person on the same job.

Labor Codes Examples

Labor codes are structured by levels. Vision can be configured with a labor code structure of up to five levels. Most firms need one, two, or three levels.

Some typical labor code levels are:

• Departments, such as Architectural and Environmental. This is usually a one-digit level.

• Phases, such as Pre-Design and Survey. This is usually a one-digit level.

• Services, such as Marketing Studies and Field Survey. This is usually a two-digit level.

• Staff Level, such as Principal, Non-Technical, Senior Engineer, Engineer. This is usually a one-digit level.

• Non-billable labor code. Some firms designate a level to distinguish billable from non-billable labor. This would only be necessary if you bill for time and materials contracts and typically do not bill for most of your labor. You can always choose not to bill labor during the Interactive Billing cycle. This is usually a one-digit level.

A labor code is an abbreviation used to refer to the labor that takes place. The code can include letters or numbers. For example, you can assign A as the labor code for Architecture and S as the labor code for Survey. If you have a long list of items to code, you can assign numbers. For example, 63 could represent Model Construction and 58 could represent Hydrogeological Survey.

The following table provides two examples of a three-level labor code structure, with a total character length of five.

Labor Code Section	Labor Code Label	Number of Digits in Code	Labor Code Example 1	Labor Code Example 2
1	Department	1	A Architectural	E Environmental
2	Staff	2	01 Principal	04 Technical
3	Service	2	63 Model Construction	58 Hydrogeologic Survey
Full Labor Code		5	A0163 Architectural/Principal/Model Construction	E0458 Environmental/Technical/Hydrogeologic Survey