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Subcontractor bill format for organizations

good afternoon and good morning everyone thank you for joining our latest webinar session uh on subcontractor management in open air my name is ron bro president ceo and i'm happy to uh present this today so today's agenda we'll talk about subcontractors um what kind of access do we typically see with our customers how do we track um do we use how do we use profiles and subcontractoring what's the benefit there we will also talk about capturing time as well as capturing costs for contractors for reporting and for profitability purposes uh what type of information do we see you know information do we share with contractors through dashboards and reports and then what kind of internal reports are we seeing from customers to keep track of contractors and what kind of work they're doing and how they're impacting our projects so we will uh talk about all these things and a few other items so when we talk about subcontracting management you know what does that concept really mean right so as part of a professional service organization um most of them use a subcontractor to fill gaps and when they're maybe their employees are all busy or they're bringing in a skill set that uh they don't have internally so we uh there's always the challenge of how to work with contractors inside of your psa system and some of the challenges include you know how do we cost some contractors so some might be hourly some might be fixed fee you know some may have a very special skill set uh you know so there's always that challenge understanding availability is always a trick you know unless you you are working with that contractor you know you may not have access to calendars uh knowing you know what their skill set or profile is um whereas you're doing searches although they may not be working for you at the moment so that's a good information to have and then you know how does it how do you balance open air licensing versus the use of contractors so we'll talk about a few tips and tricks we see with customers and then obviously you know everyone wants to make sure that you know if you have a non-employee logging in or access to open air making sure that they're very limited um as to what they can see or do so we'll talk a little bit about roles and filter sets so we basically there are two different approaches we see with subcontractor man usage one is you know we run in a subcontractor we're going to set him up with a user license and he's going to basically enter time and behave the same as our employees so we are set him up he'll give access to projects and tasks and then they'll enter time at the same cadence as your employees so that's a pretty typical when you have a small amount of contractors or if you have contractors that are you know that are critical to the execution of projects and and you want to be able to manage them just like you do any other uh employee record um another another uh situation we've seen is where maybe you've hired a a company to provide you with a number of folks and you don't want to generate you don't want all these different disparate folks logging in and entering time and having to pay for licenses you know maybe they're seasonal or temporary for a particular time period and so in that scenario we see where you know maybe you just set up one user account for that particular vendor and then have the vendor or have someone enter on behalf of the vendor the time and or expenses uh for that uh for that one license uh you can use the notes feature to enter in you know who which of the contractors did the work uh so you have some individual visibility there and then you know you're only paying for one license versus multiple um and still being able to build that time and also capture those costs to your projects you can use both approaches if you have some subcontractors that you treat like employees and manage them then you know you can use a user account and if you have the other scenario where you have multiple being provided by one or many vendors then you can have that set up as well and have a combination of approaches here you just have to understand you know what are the pros and cons of each approach right so you know an individual approach you're gonna have much more visibility uh to be able to see uh hours and more transparent uh to who's working on which projects and doing what hours versus a general vendor user you'll have less availability sorry less visibility as to the work they're doing so you just have to kind of balance you know which approach makes the most sense for your scenario in any way you do it it's always a good idea to tag your users as a vendor because there's many types of reports you'll want to either focus on these users or exclude these users from different like maybe utilization report so you know you can the simplest way to do this is just to create a custom field it gives a user type on a user record and be able to set as a full-time employee part-time employee or a contractor and then be able to use that field for reporting and filtering throughout the system more common what we see is using a feature entity tags uh entity tags think of a custom field with a start and end date and so being able to track like employment status for example so for this period of time i was an employee and then maybe i transition to a contractor or vice versa we have a lot of scenarios where you'll hire someone as a contractor and then bring them in as an employee after a period of time and so rather than having to set up multiple users for the same person you can use these entity tag groups to transition folks from one employment status to another and that gives you a lot of reportability to be able to exclude the time they were a contractor for say utilization reports and include the time their employee and within the date parameters so entity tags are really good you can also do searches for entity tags now we'll talk about that later in the presentation but definitely recommend you know trying to use entity tags they can be very helpful for a lot of reasons so everyone's worried about a limiting access for contractors generally we see that it roll is a very limited role right we we they may only be able to log in and enter time and expenses and they only see the time and expense module say we have some contractors that actually are hired as project managers so they have more permissions but not quite as many as our full-time project managers so you'll have to craft your roles to you know suit your situation as well as your filter set you know if you want to limit the contractor to only seeing their selves inside of the different modules or their projects if they're behaving as a pm only so we want to limit what data they can access um inside of the roles as well as the filter sets uh one call one word of caution um i don't know if you noticed this but a lot of times when you create a new user and you'll get an auto ad assignment group and a lot of customers will have a all employee assignment group that everyone gets it may get auto added to when you create you may want to make sure when you're creating contractors that you are not that you're removing them from any assignment groups they get auto added to this will limit their being able to enter pto hours or see the ptf projects or admin projects on their timesheet so just a word of caution there if you are using any auto ad assignment group make sure you pay attention to those we're seeing a lot of customers with interest in tracking skills and and building out those skill profiles and open air and you know there's no subcontractors can participate and it's recommended they do participate um and for a lot of reasons you know a lot of times when you're searching for skills you may be you may want to expand your search to include subcontractors or to include exclude include inactive users so if you've had contractors in the past with certain skill sets do work for you you know maybe you want to pull those up as a search maybe you want to go find out if those subcontractors are available to work for you again and so you can you can now search for inactive you can search by entity tag as well so being able to say you know search for subcontractors in particular um as well um and you can also now search for by hourly cost so we'll talk about how to manage costs for contractors but you can uh actually go in there and search costs to pull up both contractors and other users through a cost search that's new as a release in 2019 so this talks about the searching for inactive you can see here on the left screenshot you have the resource type filter which gives you generic and active users that you can determine what the scopes and then on the right uh entity tags being able to select the effective rate of an entity tag so being able to uh that was really helpful in searching for particularly if you're searching for a contract or maybe would be very uh good use of those tags as you're managing the cost of contractors there's a lot of challenge there's challenges we run across there right so you know my contractor sends an invoice um i don't i don't i'm not a tnm shop but i want to get the cost applied uh to my project so that i can derive you know profitability and margin so you know there's a couple of different approaches we've seen you could actually have someone go in and create an expense report against that project you can have an item expense item for subcontractor costs and go in and create that expense report against that project for the amount of cost for that invoice period vendor invoice period so that's one way to get that in you can actually use approval processes for those to have project managers approve those costs against their project also in open air there is a purchase there is a purchase module and within the purchase module you can create purchase requests if you're looking to request some subcontractors you can create vendor pos so if your contractor is giving you uh all in number for the work they're going to do and then as you receive invoices each month and you fulfill those pos or then fulfilling costs each month against that project for reporting purposes and so the purchasing module also you know is a typical module we see syncing with financial systems so if you run a financial system where you're issuing vendor vendor bills and vendor payments you know that's a place where you would likely want to integrate between open air and that financial system to bring in those costs into your system if you are doing a lot of time and material billing and your contractors are providing time um either entering it directly um and or if they're entering it through a proxy um obviously you can assign costs uh to the user record and have that cost uh apply to all those hours entered however uh you know we'll talk about in a minute how to make sure you're getting the correct cost and we have customers that have all three approaches deployed where they'll have some subcontractors that are providing hours some contractors that are coming in as fix fee and they need a combination of these approaches to be able to get in the right cost into the system one thing to note if you are entering time and bringing in purchase items or expense reports make sure you're not double costing your projects and you're excluding one cost or the other because you don't want to double cost your project and skew your margins um so when there's some entering time directly um you know generally it's controlled by a task assignment or a booking similar to we would employees you know you can actually you know if you have late timesheets alerts which probably most users do you know you want to make sure you can control those who those go to um because contractors may not enter time every week they may enter time one week and skip a week and then enter time the next week so you want to control those alerts um and also there's a feature um that i'll walk through in the system of how to reconcile time entries from vendor invoices um that is really helpful for us as for most customers so we'll talk about that i'll actually demo that in open air real quick um if you're looking to control timesheet alerts there's a few tricks that we've used there's a timesheet required setting on all users and then you can filter your timesheet alerts by that setting so that can be useful to say our subcontractors are not required users but all our employees that are doing project work are so it's a way to be able to include exclude that your class of folks or types of folks you could also use departments that's a filter you can add here in this alert and you have all your contractors in a subcontractor department um so that's another way to uh to to exclude you could also use bookings or task assignments so if someone's not if you're booking your resources and they're not booked within a period then maybe they don't get an alert because their timesheet's not due so there's a lot some options here you just want to make sure you're sending the right alerts to the right folks the right time cost override so this is a common conversation we have around how do we track costs for contractors accurately obviously open air has uh costing at a user level for multiple cost levels if need be so there's three costs that you can utilize and if you sign an agreement with your contractor that they're going to bill you at one cost for every all the work they do then that's the way to go but a lot of customers will negotiate on a contract by contract basis based on the type of work and the particular project um so in that scenario you may have a cost that the contract that the subcontractor uses for 90 of the projects they work on but then on this one project they're going to give you a different cost that you want to track so you can enable project cost override it's a switch that allows you to basically override the cost of the user for a particular project and so you can actually go down a level there i don't it's so rarely seen but occasionally you can actually go down to the task and put an override there and so what the system will do is when you have these turned on you know when it's when the time sheets being approved the system will first look to the task to see if there's an override then it'll look to the project see if there's no right there and if those are both null then it'll go to the user and pull whatever the hourly rate is there so it's how the workflow works behind the scenes and you can do cost override for all three costs primary secondary and tertiary can all be used in this process so this is what i refer to earlier this this is a really a cool little feature that not a lot of customers are aware of and in the business cases you know i got an invoice from my contractor who you know said he worked 40 hours last week and i want to go in and validate the hours on the timesheet to the hours he entered in open air so this is assuming that he's entering it or a proxy is entering in time for that contractor and you're receiving an invoice for those same hours and you know do they reconcile um or do i need to accrue uh costs uh in my financial system so how do i make open air help me do that so this is one of those i'm gonna jump into open air and and walk through that process so let me pull up open here real quick so under the timesheet module there's time entries link that allows you to basically see a very granular daily view of time entries across timesheets across periods you can you know it's a great way to be able to quickly grab how much time was spent by a user or by project by client et cetera filtering on improved hours all hours etc so in this scenario i'm looking at july of 2020 and i'm looking at larry nelson he's my contractor and i can see larry uh submitted an invoice for the first half of july and i went through and validated uh that those hours matched and now i've got an invoice for the second half of july and so now i'm going to go through and look at my invoice and say okay well the 20th works the 21st 22nd 23rd but he entered eight hours on the 24th but he didn't invoice me for those so i'm going to go ahead and mark these four entries this process and that way i can then you can recreate a report a contractor accrual report that basically will allow you to bring in any time entries within a period that have not been reconciled so to reconcile these i'll go through and grab the ones i'm good with and then i can use bulk actions and i can set my reconcile to paid and i can put invoice 456. so these fields here are part of the setup on how to get this feature working there's a couple of custom fields that you have to set up on the time entry and when you do that it it enables this this these fields reconcile their notes come through and then you can then have the uh this action shows up as well as part of this switch and gives you this ability so now what i can do is i can go in and i can say okay in july show me any hours larry entered that i haven't been invoiced for um and then so i maybe i want to go in a crew and i know the cost because i have the cost stored in the system so now i can run a report this is and filtered by anything not reconciled and i can see a dollar amount for larry for july that i can then go in a crew for so great little way to reconcile your contractor's time out internal invoice now a lot of customers don't even ask their contractors to invoice them they just pay based on the time entered and approved inside the system so um and then you use the same uh feature that way but i go in and you know go in here and run a report show me all hours entering the system that have yet to be reconciled for a period i say okay they've got 32 hours so now i'm going to go in and mark these as paid on a certain date and then that way the next the next payroll i do i can you know pick up anything that was entered even if they go back and enter a time sheet the previous period you know i could pick those hours up because they weren't reconciled so again another way to use this feature with or without vendor invoices as part of the process okay so some of the reports that you know we share with contractors uh is you know what schedules they have in the system so again building out those reports building in filters in those reports so the contractor is only seeing their own them and being able to share those reports out maybe put those in dashboards for your contractors also time what time what history of time have they been entering um and against projects so those are kind of two of the the reports that we typically see that you'll want to share with contractors you want to make sure that your filter sets are set appropriately within the reports or within the user setup to make sure they have you know tests to make sure they have the right out a valid uh view of the data from from a from a hirer of contractors you know we're paying attention to them to these contractors schedules and forecasting our costs on these projects using contractors you want to make sure you have the right balance of employees participation and contractors and so being able to using the entity tags we can report on that and and make sure we're good we also want to validate timesheet compliance for contractors so again you know validating when timesheets are expected when they're not expected and making sure we're getting those in a timely basis the reconciliation using the time entry feature is not necessarily a report but it is a way you can generate reports there as i mentioned to be able to go in and and apply those reconciliations and then obviously running time entry and cost reports factoring in your project profitability you know your time entry by the type of user making sure your costing is appropriate so all those are key metrics and kpis that you know it's important to keep an eye on if you're using heavy subcontractors so these are just some of the dashboards that we will see inside of the system you know planned in actual hours obviously vendor skill sets revenue ratio how much are your revenues being generated from subcontractors versus employee so that would be a good kpi to keep an eye on forecasts versus employee versus subcontract as well um so that's another red one you know cost factor of a subcontractor versus employee so those are just all really good uh metrics that we report on we help our customers do so so in summary um you know subcontractors are a critical wheel for a critical component of professional service organizations so it's uh you want to make sure that you are set up to maximize the benefit minimize the problems that sometimes or the challenges so making sure you are managing the costs and getting accurate cost reporting make sure you have those metrics for reporting make sure you have you know if you're using skill sets or profiles being able to make sure your contractors are participating so that you have that good intel and you know as you're setting up your contractors as users if you're going to give them access you know make sure your open air admin or whoever is responsible for setting up users understand the onboarding process and making sure they're setting them up correctly so that you are able to benefit from all the reporting and the views and the entity tags and roles and filter sets okay so thanks to everyone for today's presentation i'm going to go ahead and stop the recording and if there are any questions i will be happy to answer any questions