Any technician entering a time-point in their Shepherd mobile app-enabled tablet or phone is essentially feeding data into Netsuite’s timesheet. What that does and why it’s important is the topic of this blog piece.
From there that time-related data may impact payroll or operational expenses, for example. This translates as food for cost reporting whether on a given asset, contract, or customer. Not to mention the most obvious—invoicing.
And all of these variables are, themselves, influenced by rules and limitations on the sales order, in the case of a planned order, or the contract for a reactive order. A planned order can manifest as fixed fees, where the equipment used dictates the cost. Otherwise, it may be hourly billing with everything included or a contracted price, and so on. The point is the permutations are many—enough to leave you dizzy were you to sit down and try to catalog them.
That one-time entry in that one mobile phone at a work site beyond hill and dale truly is the beginning of an elaborate and elegant rabbit hole. A warren, to the untrained eye, of interconnected dependencies that can have a significant effect on all manner of a Shepherd user’s operations, and their customers’ too.
Time and Materials: The Heart of Cost and Revenue Management
A service provider has two resources that it tries to balance out in order to make a profit: time, which will pass regardless, and materials. Whether or not a company bills its customers for time spent, time is a constant cost. It’s going to trickle away, whatever you do, and so you seek to use it to maximum benefit, in terms of revenue. Materials are bought at a given price, based on an onward sale that will garner a profit.
This becomes especially relevant for those business models where time remains solely a costing issue, rather than a billing one. If you only have materials as a revenue stream, you will want to make very sure that the time your company spends with those materials is used as efficiently as possible.
A company’s time data is also a valid metric of performance—evaluating what is possible over a given period and whether that work is delivered by all team members or only one. This will be the topic of a different blog piece, so those interested should keep an eye out for that over the coming quarter.
The key point is as much about what users can do thanks to Time and Materials data, as it is about what they no longer need to do. The data the lone technician referenced at the beginning of this piece entered into his or her mobile device screen will enter a vast system where that data can be used, compiled, or omitted, all to generate reports, analyses, invoices, and paychecks to name but a few.
And with that glimpse of the mechanisms at play, you can imagine the time all this saves compared to how things had been done before.
Work avoided, mistakes averted
Let’s take payroll as an example: the technician will be getting paid for the time at the site. The site owner will be billed for a service and the parts used in it. Those two values combined will give us revenue and profit on that one job. The accumulation of such jobs will inform what the technician has earned, as well as what the company needs to. All this would previously have had to be done manually.
Time logged on a sheet of paper and then entered into the system. Then the client’s details would need to be looked up to check the terms of their contract to see what is billable and what is not. Add to that the materials logged out of the warehouse, and those logged back in, leaving those that were used. All this going toward an invoice.
Then the same time data now needs to be analyzed to see what was during normal working hours, and what was over time. If unknown, a contract needs to be found and consulted—this time to identify the terms for over time. Those values, added to all the others over a salary period made raising a paycheck possible.
Those are a lot of steps, each one with its own opportunities for mistakes, that can be swept aside, now automated and automatic, by leveraging Shepherd’s Time and Materials functionality. In a sense, it can be easy, in the face of a fluid, efficient system to ignore what the alternative would look like if that system didn’t exist.
It is important to note that, having acknowledged what the system allows, the scope for variants within that system is countless: different contracts for different clients; different contracts for the same client; different prices for different clients; different prices based on where the work occurs, whether it’s safe or hazardous, and so on.
In each case, how time is handled may be, and can be, done differently. In each such case, the system will apply the time rules that are relevant to a given job record, based on who is doing it, who it’s for, when, and where: it is all taken into account.
A wealth of opportunities revealed
For some Shepherd customers, this borders on revelatory. So accustomed are they to making do with the process-heavy options described above that a system like this, which does it all with the literal push of a button, is something they have not previously imagined.
Suddenly, there are options available that were hitherto out of reach. For example, simply getting a handle on exactly what staff are doing with their time. With the tick-tock of passing seconds often being a company’s biggest expense, confirming where that time goes seems like something worth knowing. Easier said than done, if you lack to tools to do it.
Opting for Shepherd as the native EAM choice for NetSuite users makes it very easy to understand where your company’s accumulated time goes, what it costs you, and what it earns. And with that knowledge comes the ability to make informed decisions, instead of trial and error.
For your own demo of what Shepherd can do, get in touch today.
