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Xero Projects - Charge out Rates by staff member not by Task

It seems like a ridiculous hack to have to duplicate tasks for various staff members or charge out rates. eg TASK1(apprentice), TASK1(trade assistant), TASK1(Tradesman)...TASK2(apprentice) ...and so on.

The inability to organise 'tasks' into groups/ headings within a project is another obvious flaw and means that 'tasks' could functionally only really be used as 'major cost centres' rather than granular tasks, but even at a very top level breakdown, having those 'tasks' would get unwieldy very quickly.

I know that Xero Projects is a light weight add on, but that is also part of its appeal. So many other offerings eg. WorkFlowMAX try to take over the whole management of the business and have certain limitations or lack of flexibility that make them not be a good fit for our business.

For the per user cost of Xero Projects which has a mobile app with a decent enough implementation of timesheets, it seems strange and somewhat illogical to not have the ability to easily on-charge labour at a specified rate or markup.

If labour was treated just like 'expenses' that would make more sense in most cases.

Why should a 'task' have a charge out rate that is unrelated to the labour cost of the staff member performing the task?

If a project is on a fixed price quote then all you need to calculate is the real labour cost of the staff member and if is billed as 'tasks and expenses' as it is referred to in Xero Projects it really should be 'Labour and Expenses' (which is all it is anyway).
For invoicing this could either be added in as a single labour line item against a task as an aggregate amount of the various charge out rates, or it would be useful to have the option to invoice it broken down by staff member.

The only decent work around I can think of is to manually enter charge out rates at time of invoicing with the 'Display hourly rate time as: Time entries' option selected...

Each staff member just needs to have an attribute of a 'charge out rate' set up in the same dialog box as their calculated cost/hr. Then that can be used as a selectable option at time of invoicing.
There is no need to even re-think the logic of 'tasks' having a charge out rate, just add this in an an option

43 votes

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Simon Lewis shared this idea  ·   ·  Report…  ·  Admin →
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  • Susanne Fearnhead commented  ·   ·  Report

    This is a critial feature when evaluating if Xero fits our practice of 280 clients. If we cannot have a chargeout rate per employee, we will not choose Xero. When will this happen?

  • Micah Scheer commented  ·   ·  Report

    Having the ability to assign charge-out rates by staff member, not by task, is critical to us.

  • Luke Jones commented  ·   ·  Report

    Same for us, had to resort to creating tasks as staff names so we can individually set the rates per employee. Annoying!!
    Come on Xero, pull your finger out!

  • Julia Roberts commented  ·   ·  Report

    Even with a small team, this is unmanageable. All that is required is a charge rate to be added to the same area that the cost rate is entered. Creating tasks per employee creates increased maintenance and management as each entry must be checked on every single project to ensure the correct employee rate has been applied to the project.

  • Martin Hinshelwood commented  ·   ·  Report

    I have ended up creating duplicate Tasks with the staff members name on it to get different rates per staff memeber.

  • Ethan Bray commented  ·   ·  Report

    Having the same issues would elevate projects to the next level if this was added

  • Adam Smith commented  ·   ·  Report

    Yet another feature I'd assumed I'd just missed - it must be somewhere surely....?! Nope.

    Why do Xero half bake everything and then serve it? This is such a simple thing to get right - come on Xero; stop shooting yourself in the foot and listen to your customers.

  • Darren Kurt Bajenting commented  ·   ·  Report

    I hope this gets more traction as Xero Project was one of the products we were looking into to migrate our workflow to.

  • Jaime Bates commented  ·   ·  Report

    Agree - I would like to recommend Xero Projects to more of my clients but these types of illogical road blocks continue to stop us.

    I also hope to see this get more traction.

  • Evan Ferguson commented  ·   ·  Report

    100% agree and could not have said it better

    I contacted support on this very issue, I was directed here.

    At this point, we've been looking at other solutions, but exactly as you pointed out, the big appeal of Projects is it's simplicity. Aside from this issue, it works perfectly for our needs

    Really hope this gets some attention.