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Bill making format for Facilities

hey what's up everyone i hope you're doing awesome so budgets can be super messy overly complicated and a pain to where you just have no interest in ever looking at them ever working on them and i can tell you it's a mistake and if you've had that experience in the past i'm sorry i have to and it sucks right where you dread having to worry about why your numbers are where they are how they get there uh what's causing them to get there and you just have to hold your hands up like you have no idea what's happening it's it's infuriating it's frustrating but if you start to track what you're doing how you're doing it where it's going and understand why it is the way that it is budgets can actually be a joy to work on i know that sounds like i can't believe i'm saying that uh because who wants to sit there and just crunch numbers all day but it's such an integral aspect of the facility manager's role or chief engineer whatever your specific title is that really paints the bigger picture and allows you to speak much more intelligently on almost every aspect of your department because you now understand every facet of what's going on and you can associate numbers to it and if you don't know your job in numbers you don't know it well enough it's absolutely true so so not only is it your people and their labor but it's where their labor is being spent it's materials it's where the materials are being used it's utilities it's what's causing the utilities to be the way that they are so on and so forth again it can be unnecessarily complicated and complex but it doesn't have to be uh and i hope that what i'm going to show you here simplifies it i tried to condense this as much as i could so if there's anything that i've touched on that you're more in that you want to know more about or there's something of a topic of interest just shoot me a message or make a comment and i'd be happy to send you something or make another video on that specific topic if enough people chime in i'd be happy to dive deeper into that so let's get right into it first i wanted to say thank you to those who filled out the little survey really helps me you know i don't want to make content for the sake of content i want to ensure that the stuff i'm putting out uh topics i'm covering are things that you're actually interested in so thank you very much really helps give me direction on what's most important to you right into it so there's not really a great place to start so you can kind of go with this in no particular order one of the very first things you can do and one of the most simple things you can do is simply to just do a data dump don't necessarily be worried about what you're putting on there just start to list out everything that begins to cost quarterly annual semi-annual whatever it might be right so here's a great example you just start making a list you can say may maintenance call whatever you want again don't be too held up on what you call it in particular just start dumping it out there right and as you can see right here you can say location notes and the multiplier and a cost and so all that means is you know what is this for okay this is for building one two three four what is it it's an hvac pm um i forgot to put you know cost here but here is the cost so this is um gonna be obviously a dollar so you say okay it's four thousand dollars to service all of the buildings is this a quarterly you multiply that by four right because you're doing that four times a year and there's your annual cost you simply just go down and just start just start uh listing everything that you have right and then that's going to help build your initial budget um just for services that you're doing services that you're going to be doing in the future etc one way to start off with this let's say you're starting with a zero based budget that you don't have one you're you're the generator of this the first thing you can do is go to your accounting department and ask for a list of all the expenses that facilities have incurred um you can set a time frame on there right i wouldn't go more past a year year and a half anything past that is probably not that relevant and they should generally be able to produce a ledger for you that's going to give you a list of everything that your department has paid for over that period of time from then you can look at it and you can evaluate it you can say oh it looks like so-and-so came to do some window cleaning that was a one-time thing oh looks like that's more of a seasonal issue we should schedule that more frequently i'm going to put that in the uh budget as you know two times a year right and then it a lot is automatically changed to 3200 annually so on and so forth so that's the very first thing you can do just start data dumping listing anything you want to do um maybe it's you know uh all buildings you know ppe evaluation and this is where something you'd have a third party consultant come in uh they charge a hundred dollars an hour they're there for 30 hours so you can say okay it's gonna be you know three grand right how many times you want to do this oh this is a semi-annual approach you know six thousand dollars a year pretty much that simple okay going on to the budget um this kind of ties into your data dump so once you have a general list um you can start populating some of these tabs in here and so again you just really want to list everything you can possibly think of that you've paid for in the past sometimes your accounting when they give you this information it's going to auto populate a lot of this for you so you don't have to think of everything there's also a lot of other templates and i'm happy to share this with you if you find it useful but as you go through it s m service and maintenance agreements service and maintenance agreements applies so let's say yeah you're a facility manager for a company and you're responsible for the janitorial aspect do you purchase supplies or do they purchase supplies doesn't really matter you still need to break that out so you can anticipate those costs uh if they purchase it ask them to provide you a separate invoice and then you can simply just put that in there as a separate line item as granular as you can be without getting into the minutia of things where you want to go you don't need to get down to the gnats ass as they say on certain things but you really want to break it out as clear as you possibly can begin to list everything you can think of because if it's occurred more than twice chances are it's something that you should probably include in your budget um r m repair and maintenance right that's a really common term in here exterior paint literally just start going in there any covert supply tool expenses so on and so forth again if you find this helpful i'd be happy to send it to you teeny stands for travel and expense but literally just start listing everything that you possibly can and categorize everything to the best of your ability a couple notes i wanted to share with you this is probably one of if not the most important equation you should learn for forecasting and for forecasting and what that equation is is this let's say you have 31 days in the month of january and you're at the 20th day so you would then take 20 divided by 31 tells you you're at approximately 64 of that month okay so that number right there uh depending on the day and how many days are in the month will allow you to determine labor uh estimated spend utility uh material forecasting overall department budget if your boss comes you and says um how much are we going to spend this month on labor it's really pretty simple you say okay the total labor i've spent this so far this month uh has been ten thousand dollars we're at the 20th of the month you would literally take 20 divided by 0.64 and that will tell you how much your anticipated spend in labor cost is going to be now again this isn't exact but it's really intended to help just forecast that out there the same is true with materials on a project let's say that instead of a month they can tell you hey we're at 64 percent complete and how much have you spent on a material oh you've spent x amount of dollars you can take that divided by that number again and that's going to forecast that number for you so i would learn this it's going to really revolutionize uh how the way you're able to forecast and it's really is that simple and you can do it and almost apply it to everything so you can forecast out your utilities your consumption your water usage your electrical usage your labor uh any project so i mean it's just it's so applicable to so many different things i absolutely love this equation anytime you're asked in a budget to estimate the cost of something and let's say you've actually obtained bids it's safe to take that bid multiply it by 1.5 because unless people pull the trigger on something immediately something always changes right it's always going to be material shortage it's going to be project changes it's going to be a scope change whatever it might be multiply the the estimated cost by 1.5 almost all of the time if not if not 2x when it comes to time estimation if anybody ever asks you i know this is budgeting but if anybody ever pushes you for timing pretty safe to just double the time that you've been given if they say oh it's going to take three weeks for us to this new electrical panel i would say oh you know what it's probably closer uh to double that when it comes to dealing with anything that's bureaucratic so if you're dealing with utilities if you're dealing with the city if you're dealing with uh any large entity you're probably going to even want to triple that i can tell you right now one of the more recent projects we went to a new meter head they give us a lot of push back they say oh it's going to take up to 22 weeks to this and you're like 22 weeks or is this insane oh by the way you might need to get a new physical address for this section of it and you're like what right so there's a lot of unforeseen so uh three times the the length two times the cost it's really going to set you up for success because you never know what's going to come better safe than let's move on to utilities um so again for those of you you probably already know the word p l profit loss just a simple balance ledger statement um what do you do to build a budget here pretty straightforward you go to your accounting department you look up your accounts online you're going to be able to call all of your utility companies and they should absolutely be able to produce uh bills for you that are recent um so you just based off historical data right you can go back and say january february march etc ask them some simple questions hey do we have any incentives this year any electrical upgrades we do any rebates do you do you expect to encounter any tariffs in the future any additional uh price increase for whatever reason what would what will be a safe number to budget try and ask for an account manager your dedicated account manager to really help forecast into that a lot of times they'll just multiply by five ten percent um it's it's tough to say with utilities it can change on a moment's notice if you live in drought areas obviously forecast that you know with with a rider to x degree moving on um another great thing so this kind of ties back into those other blank sheets so this is just another operations expense simple template you can go in um your fte for those of you who don't know fte stands for full-time employee uh as as they go through here um you can input again your payroll should be able to give you all of this information if they're not providing this for you already you can just data dump everything that's possibly in there i'll go into allocation of labor anything that's in parentheses is generally issued as a credit for you so when you're reading this number you're saying all right expense expense expense credit so that means we've allocated four thousand sixty four dollars worth of our employees labor to uh two other departments other than our own the same can be true with this number as well so you'll take your total less those numbers and that's your total payroll every state has uh and every company offers different benefits this is just generally like what they would run i'm sure you could calculate this number into this and come up with a general percentage and that way you can just say a full-time employee although they might make twenty dollars an hour if we have a percentage that is just over ten percent right fifty thousand ten percent of let's say eleven ten to twelve percent so you can say if you're paying someone twenty dollars an hour chances are after benefits if they're full time closer to 20 22 23 an hour and this is again where you would tie in all that other list so you can see we've kind of just continued to build on these bricks where it takes employee benefits and adds all the other um expenses in into this pretty straightforward you go through your enter your historical data in there and that's going to kind of give you a benchmark to what you've spent now when it comes to budgeting there's a couple different schools of thought there's zero based you're building it based off what you view what you expect to come in the future you don't have any historical data maybe it's a new company maybe a new position or maybe they just did poor record keepings in the past and then there's um you know the historical based which is obviously saying this is what you've done in the past this is what we're going to do moving forward and we're going to just add a small percentage finally how do you account for the recaptured labor so this is something that is really one of the most wonderful and underrated things you can do as the department head is to start tracking your employees time and not necessarily from a cost standpoint but where they're spending their time so here's what's great uh most payroll services will provide for you uh the total hours worked they'll tell you that they're rate it'll automatically do these calculations i i didn't have to do any of these for example so if you have a tech number one that comes in he worked 168 hours here's his rate his ot rate uh then it goes into gross pay so on and so forth so this is this is really great because it provides the text their hours worked and these sick hours it really just helps kind of put smaller pieces to the puzzle so you understand how many people on your team what your overtime rates are uh how many hours of overtime vacation hours just just really gives you the full picture so that you're just more well educated on uh your department as a whole great tool to have you want to generate these reports as often as you can paper transfers so once you have your team's time and you know how many hours they've worked you're going to have to schedule pretty regular meetings with them at least once a week if you have supervisors on your team you're going to have to pull them aside and ask them to meet with parts of your team as well because chances are if you have a large team you can't meet with everybody all the time and you have to ask them simple questions and if you issue workloads you also have to ask them to notate on their where they're spending their time so labor transfers uh are really a great thing to start implementing and i would encourage you if you're not doing it now to start doing this tomorrow so let's say you have tech 1 and he he or she is working on a specific project for your team and let's call it building a deck for operations let's say the operations team needs your team to do it well chances are they have a budget and chances are that you can bill it against theirs and charge it against theirs rather than yours because they're taking advantage of your team their skills uh and even though your labor is a sunk cost to your department it doesn't mean that you should be the one having to foot the bill for them generally if you work out with your your supervisor or your manager nine out of ten times they will say you're absolutely right this is something that if we weren't able to provide this in-house this team would have had to outsource this and this would have been a special project that they would have had to pay for uh regardless so we might as well credit your department back so you say okay building deck for operations you circle back up with your three team members that have been doing that up that deck uh you have all their rates from your adp or your payroll report and you can say hey tech one how long did you spend doing that that deck you say oh you know what i only spent eight hours on it this week hey person number two how long did you spend no i spent eight i spent eight right so every week you can track your time and say oh it looks like they only had to repair or build uh for three three of my team members eight hours one full day 24 hours total i need to send a bill or at least on my gl which stands for general ledger uh i need to recode their inventory to that department and again most of the ap departments are happy to do this uh their department heads are happy to do this uh and this really reduces your overall labor because they're gonna get a credit so even though they were on your books you're actually getting them at a net zero because it's being built back to another department and what's more amazing than the facility team giving a credit uh to their department so it's it's pretty cool so as you can see you can literally just create a simple sheet project name project location you put in their gl code uh most of the time they're you know pretty pretty long numbers that con that associate to that specific department you would put it in there um for that for that specific it's a great thing it really is moving on so now that you've done your payroll you have an idea under your labor transfers you look at your materials you say okay my material transfers on that special project again you look back at your your one you say okay it looks like they build a deck for operations hey tech one what did you buy for this deck oh special uh coated deck screws fasteners it might be okay where did you buy it uh home depot and the amount was oh they were really expensive i paid uh 199 dollars for a bucket of 500 screws whatever right so the same thing is true now you know for the project you can say it looks like deck project for operations and there you go so at the end of it you have this you can put it on a shared drive you can share it with all the teams you can you can list yourself as the owner editor and then the other people just as viewers and then you set up weekly meetings with other department heads and you let them know where they're at in terms of labor just keep the other team members as viewers on it so they can see you update this you know frequently and then just come up with a cadence that you're going to send it out to them uh every friday or every whatever day of the week you want just to kind of keep them updated as to what's going on regarding their projects okay order log here's something else you're going to have to start keeping track of too let's say that you do have an established budget even if it's one that you've created on your own from those simple templates and let's say you've gotten it approved you say okay for the month of november we are going to allow you based off of the numbers you've given us 48 190.59 it's pretty straightforward you start from the top and you just start tracking all of the items you're ordering i know it's arduous it's painstaking but the benefit of doing this is that if you do have an ap team and they send you a gl or a ledger to review at the end of the month you have your order log you can cross-reference the two of them and you can assure that they match up i would also tell you that if you do work for a large organization and you are responsible for your financials 100 of the time there are items in your gl that do not belong to your department so being able to go through this and say wait a minute you charged me 400 for [Music] these parts are materials that uh are meant to have been coded to another department you can go back and say look i've been tracking this it's not it's not right uh i never bought that please recode that to a different department get it off my books your boss the ap team will absolutely love you for being the champion and the defender of of your department's budget so going through you know if you order something from a pool company you put in the the amount you say with the pool uh and spas the pass inspection whatever that is let's say they give you a list and they say oh you need virginia virginia grand bakery any new new drain covers and you need to increase the flow rate so you bought this this will automatically deduct from the other amount so let's just change that to two thousand dollars you can see it would change everything subsequent below that um pretty straightforward pool depot pool company go to home depot you literally just put in all of your orders uh it's it's as simple as that okay and that is really the overview um just to highlight this again the thing you're gonna love and if you take away nothing from this other than this equation it's going to change the way you run your department because it's really just an unbelievable equation that when i learned it it it absolutely made my life better in every aspect and they said how many team members you have this month how much is how much are you going to spend in labor and no matter what day of the month as long as it was past the fifth or seventh day of the month where we had some aggregate of data that we could actually base our our information off of not just one day's worth of data you can really forecast pretty pretty well out so if they say hey whether it's projects materials or labor that equation is really going to help you so if you want any of these templates if they will be helpful for you just let me know i'd be happy to send it and share it with you you know they're pretty comprehensive i've tried to include everything that i could possibly think of and things that you've purchased in the past and you depending on your fm role they vary so much that they have so many different items that you're responsible for so i would absolutely encourage you to to take this you're welcome to have it and make it your own but from there i i hope that sheds some light into what you should be doing and how you should be doing it because again if you don't know your job in numbers you don't know it well enough so whether that's what's your overtime rate what your how much money are you recapturing for your department how much money are you spending on projects what's your estimated utility consumption uh and then tying this into the bigger picture you're also able to pick your largest items and then start to tackle them so if you realize that your gas in january is crazy high then you can start to evaluate it is it really usage maybe it's your degree heating days um maybe there's an opportunity to integrate a different boiler system maybe a heat exchanger uh you know an economizer what can you possibly do to to help help with that as a variable speed pumps you can really start to address why is it so high and then tying into your kpis your key performance indicators a lot of bigger companies want to push for metrics that they want to ensure you understand your cost per kilowatt uh per square meter maybe it's your cost per deca therm per per square foot whatever whatever the specifics are you're going to be able to understand it you're going to be able to put exact figures to it you can say my building is a million square feet it costs us fifty thousand dollars a month in electricity thirty thousand dollars in gas you can take those divided into it figure out your your square footage uh consumption um and really start to address a lot of these problems head on it's also going to help you identify these anomalies that come in let's say your department says hey we just got an electrical bill for 30 000 and you say wait a minute that doesn't make sense uh 10 months out of the year it doesn't go above 22 000 what happened right you can really start to ensure that what's actually happening is what they're saying is happening and it's not just an error on somebody else's part so you don't just passively overlook a bill that come it comes in well thank you so much for making it to the end i hope that wasn't that painful i really tried my best to condense it down but it's so important that you spend the right amount of time on this because doing the legwork now is going to save you full amount of hours at the end and it's going to make your life so much easier so thanks thanks for sticking through this it's really going to pay off again if you took nothing away take that equation it's going to change the way you run your department i i swear if you haven't already used it and then from there if there's anything else i can offer it would be don't over complicate it just put everything down on a simple sheet if you don't have a template and just write the frequency next to it in the cost and do a simple equation and that's going to give you a great start so thank you so much for watching please like subscribe share and i look forward to seeing you in a couple days have a great one