Fee management – Fixed Price Tasks

Overview

This feature allows Time and material projects to include tasks in a WBS that are associated with a quantity rather than a number of hours. However, the task can still be referenced by time entries, followed up by a process to reconcile a task quantity with the time taken to complete it.

This means that the customer can be charged a fixed price fee for a task whilst timekeepers can accurately record the amount of time taken to execute the task.
From a pricing point of view, the task will be assigned a sales price and will be posted as a fee for later invoicing.

In 10.0.25 this feature is made available as a preview version and so should not be used in production yet. The complete version will be available in 10.0.27.

Feature management and parameters

Availability of the Fixed price task functionality is controlled by feature management (Workspaces>Feature management). The feature is called “(evergreen) Fixed price task (Preview)”:

It can be enabled by clicking either the using the “Enable now” or “Schedule” buttons. Enabling the feature will make it possible to add quantity-based tasks to a work breakdown structure which, in turn, allows the fixed price task functionality to be used.

Functionality

Set up

When you’ve created a project, there are two sections in the matter record that you will need to configure:

• Setup section
  Set the “Require activity on journals” flag to Yes

• “Billing Types” section
  Set the Fixed price task flag to Yes:

• Project categories
  A set of Fixed price fees will need to be set up that represent the fixed price tasks that you want to use. To do so, create new project categories and, most importantly, associate a category with a number of hours that equate to single fee amount. In the example, a project category of “half day meeting” assumes that such a meeting will last for four hours.
  
  
  

Work breakdown structure

When fixed price tasks are in use, the project’s plan (i.e. work breakdown structure) will have some additional columns to allow fixed price tasks can be added:

Once the plan is complete, it should be published. Note that doing so means that all time recorders must reference an activity when making a time entry, regardless of whether it is a fixed price task or not.

Reconciliation

Once work has been done in relation to a fixed price task, the hours recorded can be reconciled with the task using the “Fixed price task lines” screen:

The user (typically the project manager or PMO), will confirm the “consumed quantity” calculation made by the system (which divides the number of recorded hours by the assumed hours per unit). Clicking “Confirm” will generate an chargeable fee journal. At the same time, the previously chargeable hours will be converted to non-chargeable to maintain the accuracy of the WIP valuation.

The fee is exactly the same as any other chargeable fee and will be invoiced in the normal way.

Reason for preview

Whilst most of the functionality of this feature is included in this release, there are couple of items that will be in 10.0.27; handling a credit note containing a fixed price task, altering the WBS after work has begun and being able to override calculated quantities. Therefore, it is not recommended for production use until 10.0.27 but including the work so far in this release will give users the opportunity to learn more about the feature beforehand.