Track cost rate or charge out rate

In Roll you are able to choose to track different cost rates on a project. You can choose to track the charge out rate for each hour of work completed against a project or you can track the true cost rate for each hour of work completed against a project.

Tracking Cost Rate

If you track the cost rate on your projects, all time that is added by a team member working on a project will have the cost of that team members time added to the Time logged value costs of the project. This is very helpful when dealing with fixed fee projects where you will invoice an agreed sum regardless of the time it takes to complete the work.

For example, if project has a fixed fee of $500 and a team member's cost per hour to the business (the cost to employee them including wages, their share of the business overheads etc) is calculated at $40 per hour and they work 6 hours on the project, there will be $240 worth of time logged cost associated with the project. This will equate to a profit of $260 for the project.

Using the cost rate for projects will give you a much more accurate reflection of profit or loss on each project.

Tracking Charge Out Rate

If you track the charge out rate on your projects, all time that is added by a team member working on a project will have the normal charge out rate for that type of work added to the time logged value of the project.

For example, if a team member adds 6 hours of work to a project and the normal charge out rate for that work is $200 per hour, then $1200 of time logged cost will be added to the project.

Using the charge out rate for projects will allow you to calculate if you were charging by the hour for that work (rather than a fixed fee), how much you would have invoiced for the work. This helps you understand if the project is a good project from a financial perspective.

Notes

By default, all new accounts in Roll will be set to track the cost rate rather than the charge out rate on projects. This is able to be changed in the settings area of Roll.

You can set the cost rate for each employee, from the users tab in the settings area of Roll.
The true cost rate of each employee will change over time as a business changes and should be updated periodically to ensure it is a true reflection of the cost of employment for that employee per hour.