Billing Rates in Planning

Billing rates are what the client will pay for the services your firm provides. You specify billing rates on a plan-by-plan basis.

Running a plan at billing rates can be useful for discussions with the client about the progress and outcomes of the project. Some firms prefer billing budgets for managing projects because they remove the "uncontrollable overhead" and firm's profit from the project manager's reports.

For a time and materials contract, you determine what your client will pay for staff time or for the expenses related to a project. For fee contracts, you can calculate the implied billing rate if you know how many hours are expected to complete the project.

You can establish a default labor category for an employee in the Employee Info Center. You can then use billing rate tables to override this default category on a project-by-project basis. If there is an override specified for an employee, Planning uses that override category to look up the rate for the employee.

Your system administrator enables billing rates with the Enable reporting at billing rates option on the General Tab of Accounting Company Configuration.

Provisional Labor Rates

A provisional rate is a temporary rate that is used for time that has been entered but not yet posted in Vision. Vision uses this provisional rate in calculating both cost and billing amounts for labor. You establish provisional rates on the Accounting tab of the Employee Info Center. If you use Vision Multicurrency, special rules apply.

Effective Dates

Use the effective dates feature in Vision Billing to schedule labor rate changes on a firm-wide basis. The term derives from the optional Effective Date column in labor rate, category, code, and override tables.

If your firm uses the effective dates feature to set up multiple rates for a labor category or an employee's billing rate, Vision Planning uses the most recent rate and the nearest date in the past. Vision will use today's date to determine effective rate for all line items in the plan, regardless of the start and end dates for the line items.

For example, if your firm sets up multiple rates with these effective dates:

• 1/1/2013

• 7/1/2013

• 4/1/2013

If today's date is 1/13/2014, Vision uses the rate entered with the effective date of 7/1/2013.

Billing Rate Options in Planning

Choose from the following billing rate planning methods:

• From Employee Provisional Rate — Allows employees and their billing rates to be planned. No rate table needs to be specified because all employees and their provisional cost rate will be retrieved from the Employee Info Center.

• From Labor Rate Table — Select this option for the firm to specify the billing rates to be used for each employee. Many firms use this approach to apply average billing rates to several employees.

• From Labor Category Table — Select this option for the firm to specify a single billing rate to be applied to all employees who belong to a labor category group. For example, all Project Managers would be billed at the same rate for planning purposes.

• From Labor Code Table — Select this option for the firm to specify the labor codes to be used for each employee. Labor codes can have multiple levels. They can classify work on a project, phase, or task in categories, or levels, that you define, such as department, progress, service, or staff level.