Effortlessly Manage Your Bill Book Sample for Security

Bill book sample for Security

hi everyone and welcome to our five minute webinar series where we try to give you some valuable information on top trends and insights into security workforce management about five minutes in our last video we tackled pay rates for security officers today we're going to cover the other side in Billings just a little background on our analysis we decided to take a look at the shifts across the physical security industry back in December 2019 we felt it provided a good sample set for the analysis combining both normal volumes as well as increased volumes to kind of give a nice snapshot of those peaks and valleys in doing so we actually analyzed about 200 guard firms across 500 divisions managing 12,000 unique clients from that group we looked at about 83,000 security officers working over 2 million shifts from that set of data we were able to review and analyze the pay rate and billary data for that group so just as a note this data's been aggregated it's been anonymized and generalized since share privacy and security we want to make sure to protect the data for our clients and all security professionals so in short no one was harmed in the making of this presentation so today let's take a look at the bill rate portion of the analysis so why is it so tough to understand a bill rate well unlike the pay rate it's not required and it's not reportable component of your business you know paying your employees is largely regulated with minimum wages and wage and labor laws and Fair Labor Standards so there's a lot of reported information on what is the appropriate and competitive pay rates bill rates are component unto itself and since no one's really reporting it it's a closely held metric it's also a competitive thing companies want to be competitive they're gonna keep their rates held closely to their chests you want to be able to compete for business and make money and keeping those rates makes a big difference after all your product is the service and keeping your rates for services rendered secret is key that's why security firms don't necessarily post their rates on their website last but far from least is the variable expenses you know bill rate is actually and result of not just paying your officers and then markup on price there's a multitude of variables and expenses that are indirect that need to be factored into the final bill rate these are gonna change depending on your business and it's a very fluid component to getting your end result so before we go further let's explain what exactly needs to go into a bill Reid okay so I think this is an important part of the discussion because it is a variable that is hard to track in general pay rates are the first component of this equation and in truth it is the majority of the expense on average we saw officer pay make up anywhere from 67 to 75 percent of the final bill rate amount and it's something that could be considered unique to this industry you know the officer is the primary product and it's also the primary expense so without those officers you're not able to operate and getting the pay right is an important part of ensuring you can make money the game that's played and the balance that's taken is how much can you offer to pay your officer before you cut into your margins and profits adding to that final bill rate is the more variable or indirect costs this includes items such as taxes and workers compensation which can actually make up about 10% of the final bill rate as well as some other indirect costs what are these others well uniforms equipment paying vacations and PTO s as well as medical and benefits those are kind of the obvious ones some of the not so obvious is hiring fees in onboarding fees baking these into the cost to hire and retain talent and as well as the training and certification that your officers need to adhere to an update these are important areas to actually factor in to your final bill rate and lastly if you have a good idea of what you incur and non-billable over time you can try and build those costs into your bill during all these elements are what ultimately makes up this bill rate so what does the data say about that end result so here again we see a similar bell curve much like we do with the pay rates only take an account the bill rate itself so what's important to note here is that on average you see the bill rates are about 50 to 60 percent higher than the pay rates remember pay rates are only one component of the expenses that fall into the final bill rate so that doesn't indicate a profit margin just where the mark-up is you would have to look at your indirect costs determine what the total expenses this particular bell curve does have a longer tail on it which shows that there's a little more variability on these rates you look at different rates on industry sectors or Union versus non-union contracts different skill sets and locations these all contribute to the building and I think what's important here is to see where the curve shows the majority of rates look at your internal expenses and then see how you fit one thing that does impact margins here is turnover which is very interesting concept and let's talk a little bit about how turnover can have an impact on your business as well as your bill rates so here's the thing about turn it's one of the single most challenging aspects of the operational side of a security business and it was one of the number-one areas of improvement in a benchmark study we did last year well in of itself turnover can drive a halt in operations between filling posts and incurring overtime and much more the impact turnover has on profit margins can easily be felt especially if you're actually factoring in the indirect costs around turnover into your final bill rate so every time you lose an employee taxes and workers comp are automatically impacted you also have to factor in the cost to recruit hire and train any replacements then you have to factor in any uniform or equipment costs that come with the lost employee and their replacement and if you have a resource issue you might be incurring non billable hours while you're waiting for a replacement these are all indirect costs that weigh in on the ultimate margins you try to maintain with your bill rates all from employee to remember okay so that's all for today thanks for listening and stay tuned for more five minute videos around the pay rate and bill rate report as well as some other topics we're going to bring it forth in the industry and I want to thank track voice valiant and silver track for providing support and solutions for this type of data also if you want to download the full report you can actually do so by clicking on the link in the description below and then lastly if you like this series and you want to get notified when we release more of these go ahead and click on the subscribe button down below once again thank you and have a great day