An underrated feature of Exact PSA

An underrated feature of Exact PSA

Posted on 19. Apr, 2011 by in Exact Globe, Exact Synergy

A flexible structure of billing rates is one of the key requirements to any system that automates work of a professional services company, where time is the main billable resource. This structure is particularly important for project controllers, who need to express tricky contract conditions with different billing rates for different customers on different projects.

On the one hand, project controllers require plenty of options to capture any imaginable combination of hour prices for a specific assignment. On the other, they expect simplicity of use. However, achieving this simplicity becomes increasingly challenging as the amount of rates to choose from grows.

The upcoming solution update of Exact PSA addresses these needs by increasing the amount of configurable rates and providing simple means to work with them.

The more rates the merrier

Starting from solution update 246/401, a rate is a pairing of both the sales price and the cost assigned to a combination of criteria such as a person, a project, a customer or an activity. All rates have a date range attached.

All rates are listed in the following order, starting from the most important:

  • Project + person + activity;
  • Project + person;
  • Project + activity;
  • Project + person + activity of the parent project (if applicable);
  • Project + person of the parent project (if applicable);
  • Project + activity of the parent project (if applicable);
  • Customer + activity;
  • Person + activity;
  • Person;
  • Activity.

With this setup, rates in Exact PSA fall into one of three categories: personal rates, customer rates and project rates. When the system needs to look up a specific rate to populate the sales price of a billable hour, it starts from the top of the list and progresses down until the first non-zero match is found. In case no rates have been defined in the system, the sales price and the cost of an item that represents an activity is used.

This hierarchy of rates is configured in Synergy Enterprise and obsoletes previously available both the external rates that provided only the sales price, and the internal rate that represented the cost of labor. During the upgrade process all existing rates will be copied into the new rate structure so that nothing disappears.

Not getting lost in all the abundance

Access to rates is carefully guarded by Exact PSA: project controllers can view and edit all rates, consultants can see none of them. Project managers are allowed to view all rates that apply to the projects they are directly responsible for, but cannot peek into rates of other projects.

Project managers and project controllers can get hold of rates by following one of two paths: either by looking at an individual  personal, customer or project card or by listing all personal, customer or project rates from a dedicated overview screen.

 

The new rates structure will become available to existing and new Exact PSA customers in June 2011.

Vintage gas tank image by Woodhouse74.

 

 

 

 

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8 Responses to “An underrated feature of Exact PSA”

  1. Laurence Ledford

    29. Apr, 2011

    Can you “lock” down periods so hour entry staff can’t enter hours to those periods?

    Reply to this comment

  2. Vladimir Bataev

    29. Apr, 2011

    There is no dedicated functionality for that, but you can accomplish this via other means: deactivating a member temporarily, excluding someone from the project, or forcing a consultant to work only with an activity that he won’t be able to write on a project.

    Can you explain what is your scenario in question?

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  3. Laurence Ledford

    04. Aug, 2011

    Vlad – thanks for answering my post. The scenario I am describing is once a period has been billed, many companies do not want their consultants/staff entering time against those closed periods. Having a way to “choose” to prevent time entry into those periods would be great.

    Reply to this comment

  4. Ronald Voets

    05. Aug, 2011

    Hi Laurence, you can’t prevent people from entering time against such projects but since you can define an approval step for hour entries, the approver could reject any hours entered for closed periods. If you don’t even want such an entry to be created in the first place, the standard Synergy software can’t provide this. Alternatives you have in that case are a small customization via Exact, or the trigger&Validation manager by Eddon that also allows you to validate field values within a (new) request

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  5. Laurence Ledford

    11. Aug, 2011

    Ronald – Thanks for the reply! Thats a good approach, although I think the current approval screen would make that a little difficult as the approver can only view weekly or was this changed in 246?

    Reply to this comment

  6. Vladimir Bataev

    16. Aug, 2011

    Laurence,

    we will be rolling out a revamped hour approval/rejection screen in 246 and onwards. There a project manager (or a line manager) will have a choice of monthly and weekly views.

    Reply to this comment

  7. Laurence Ledford

    27. Aug, 2011

    Vlad,

    Is PSA GA for Europe yet or is it still in CR? If CR, is there an expected GA date? Also, is it GA for USA?

    Reply to this comment

  8. Ronald Voets

    27. Aug, 2011

    LAurnce, if you update Synergy Enterprise to product update 246 you can enjoy the enhancements that are described in this blog post. Exact doesn’t ship separate versions per region, it’s one for all.

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