Setting Up Rates and Work Hours
Rates allow you to easily control all of your customer and engineer rates from a central point. They can be applied to a customer, contract, job sheet and project without the need to continually input the financial details.
Go to Settings > Settings > Rates & Work Hours.
Time Item Settings
There are a couple of different options at the top:
- ‘Charge Out Rate: Use Engineer Rate’ – You need to tick this if you want to use engineer specific rates rather than customer specific.
- ‘Cost Rate: Use Engineer Rate’ – Use this if you want the costs to come from the engineer’s cost rate in the staff database. Otherwise, you need to specify cost rates for all customers.
- ‘Default Start Time’ and ‘Default End Time’ – allows you to choose a default amount of hours automatically applied when you add a new time item to a quote or job.
If you have converted your data from Clik Service v3, you will find that all of the rates that were set against customers have been imported.
After these initial options, the rates screen has 3 main sections under the following headings – default rates, rates, and labels.
It’s important to understand the rates first. Each customer can have as many rates as required, but each rate must be given a name – a rates label.
Labels
Rate labels can be found at the bottom of the window.
To create a new rate label, ensure you are on the right type of rate (select work rates/travel) and then click on ‘New’ and add in the description.
Each rate label created will appear in the CRM rates tab. You can then apply a rate to it.
Rates
You can set up as many works, travel, mileage and call out rates/charges as you want. These can then be linked to a rates label. The ease of controlling the rates centrally in the settings is that when they change they only need changing once.
To create a new rate/charge, ensure you are on the correct tab and click ‘New Charge Out Rate’ or ‘New Cost Rate’, depending on what you want to set up.
Charge rates can be applied to engineers and customers, so you can see the margin when booking any time to jobs/quotes, etc.
The rates details window allows you to put in a description and cost per hour.
If you want to charge the first x amount of time at a different rate thereafter, you can configure this by changing the ‘First’ box to the desired amount of time and put the initial rate alongside it.
Default Rates
Once you have configured your rate labels and rates, you can set up a default set of rates that can be applied to all customers in one go. They will also be used as the default rates of every new customer created thereafter.
Select either ‘Apply to all Customers’ or ‘Apply to all Suppliers’ to apply the default rates in one go.