Rate Management

Understanding rate management in Projector is key to understanding how Projector deals with the financial aspects of scheduling and job accounting. This side of Projector deals with several fundamental issues:

• How much revenue is being generated
• How much it costs the organization to generate that revenue
• How profitable the organization's various projects are
• Where the barriers to increased profitability are

At its core, the financial side of Projector is simply a translation of hours into dollars (or euros, British pounds, or other currencies) through the application of hourly rates and costs. This section discusses how to properly and efficiently manage those hourly rates and costs in Projector, how Projector decides what hourly rates and costs to apply, and what the resulting revenue and rates mean for the business.

The examples in this section describe a moderately complex organization with multiple cost centers dealing with a moderately complex client structured in multiple client tiers. Many organizations will not need to model their organizations or their clients' structures in this much detail, and thus may not need to fully understand the structure and inheritance models described below. It is useful, however, to understand the potential complexity that Projector can manage as the organization grows and as its relationships with its clients and vendors becomes more complex.

The remainder of this section is divided into:

• Key Concepts – The Rate Management Key Concepts section introduces some conceptual models upon which the remaining two sections build.
• Managing Rates – The Managing Rates section discusses the different types of rates that Projector uses, how organizations can efficiently and completely model their rate and cost structures within Projector, and the process that Projector uses to determine the specific rates and costs to use.
• Analyzing Profitability – The Analyzing Profitability section covers a few of the ways that managers can use the financial data within Projector to determine how profitable its ongoing operations are and where they may need to look to improve profitability.

Understanding How Time Cards are Revalued

Projector will alert you when you attempt to make changes that will affect contract rates of existing time cards if the timecards had been submitted after the change. This may happen only to timecards that are approved, unbilled, and not on an existing invoice. Such edits can occur when:

• Changing a resource's title
• Changing rates on a rate card
• Changing project rates
• Changing role rates
• Changing task type rates

Projector will tell you the number of time cards affected and the monetary adjustment. You can choose to leave the time cards with the old rates, or be adjusted to the new rates. Note that time cards on invoices are not adjusted. Time cards on invoices can be adjusted only from within the invoice editor.