Tasks as cost centers
| The cost of the work can be measured using the time spent with elementary activities. Each position in company has its own goal, which can be defined as a group of activities. These groups are divided into Tasks. The Tasks are “cost centers” mapped to the business. Task structure offers transparent structure over the cost of the human resources (primarily the wage). The structure of cost centers may be aligned to the accounting lines, service levels, operational or revenue targets. |
JC360 supports default aggregation into Cost Centers which are called Tasks in the system. Each work in JC360 is mapped to a preliminary configured Task.
Default config
By default after JC360 company registration the following Tasks are created:
Document management - usual document management (eg. Office apps, PDF readers) activities are mapped here
Communication - common communication applications (eg. Skype, Teams, Google Meets) are mapped
E-mail handling - e-mail applications (eg. Outlook. GMail) mapped here
Meeting - Calendar events are automatically mapped here, and this Task is able to be selected as offline activity
Web Application/Internet browsing - all the browser activity are mapped under this item - it is suggested to split this to more specific tasks (eg. company intranet, ERP, etc)
Customers/Projects » JC360 Administration - a place to manage your CLients/Projects (see the Customisation in the next section)
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Customisation
Tasks can be named after the Applications (eg. SAP, Outlook), however this is not too useful, as the processes are stored by default, and you have them in reports.
It is suggested to use the Tasks for Business Process OR Client OR Projects (depends on the company profile). We can call this as Cost Centers, as primarily JobCTRL aggregates the working time to these Tasks, so the Company can split their Wage cost into these items. Company's accounting uses also such terms as cost center - so the company should understand this and the financial controlling department will be your partner to form this out any time.
You have to steps to customise Cost Centers in JC360:
1. Create the structure you want to use (Projects or Clients... or Cost Centers).
As each company differs it is not so easy to automate this - however there is a 2 step how to approach it:1. First define the structure/metric, what do you want to measure:
a) if the company department is client focused (the revenue comes from the clients) then you can use Clients as main cost centers (the time spent will be aggregated to clients) ⇒ the company will transparently see how much time/cost is spent per client. It is good to calculate the pricing towards the client or ROI for projects. Keywords to automate JC can be the client name, e-mail, phone number, so the JC will automate this structure easily.
b) the company works on projects (the time spent is splitted between projects). In this case projects should be recorded as they appear (maybe in the proposal state) and the work is automatically splitted between projects so the TCO comes automatically + you can use JC's project management feature if you wish. The keywords can be the project name, ID or the client name whom it served.
c) if the work is done on tasks/tickets (eg internal HelpDesk works on tickets, backoffice works on Invoices), then Business Process names can be created as Tasks, and the repetitive TransationID can be detailed in a lower level transactional report - if needed. In this case the Tasks are for Processes, and you will have analytics in the detailed reports (eg. working steps can be evaluated, execution norm times, FTE calculation).
2. Keep the items up-to-date
After you created your custom structure, you should manage them to be kept up-to-date. As you can see, the client names, projects names or even internal business process names are very-very business dependent, it cannot be founded out automatically by JC360 without telling anything.
So keeping up-to-dat can be managed in three way:
a) for clients/projects there is already a process in place in each company, and a responsible person is dedicated to create these accounts (eg. create them in CRM, Invoicing system, Proposal folder…etc). He/she can do this also in JC to create these new items.It can be the Sales/Secretary, CRM assistant, etc.
b) if the client has any external system, where the Clients/Projects/Tasks names are visible, then JobCTRL can capture them and create Task for that automatically (with Dynamic Project/Task creation in Central rules)
c) If there is no visible place on the screen to capture, but still an external system holds the clients/projects then we can provide a sync tool which will periodically sync them to JC (eg. from CRM system). This is manual, as the input structure is always unique. Usually we need a read only DB view to be able to read by our tool (tool can run at the company side), and we will poll that view and upload to JC based on the logic we define (we need a specification for that).
What to do with Tasks