Hi Everyone,
We have released our starting proof of concept of Budgets into Production. We need to test workflow concepts and charting, as well as where to place this in terms of menu access and we’d love to get as much feedback as possible.
You will find 3 new features supporting budgets:
Admin > Manage Budgets
On the admin page Manage Budgets you will be able to review, edit and create new budgets for individuals.
To create a new budget click “create budget”. Here you will see the intent of the form, with place holder tabs for Team and Company, and the working Individual budget concept.
Within individual you can create a budget rule for as many individuals as you would like at one time.
Select the individuals from the drop down then select if you would like the budget to be based on their personal timesheets or if the budget is based on file/matter. The latter can be done by selecting a participant type.
By selecting a participant type you are indicating that you would like the system to pick up any billable fees/invoiced fees/collected fees against files for which that individual is… [participant type]. Example: A partner’s budget is that they need to collect $200k in fees for all the files for which they are the “Responsible Lawyer”.
You can then set a fixed amount per month that they must collect.
Once this is set you can see the budget for that person populated in two places:
Management > budgets
Under Management a Manager can select “budgets” and then select an individual from the drop down. This will show all budgets which have been published for that individual, stacked one above the other.
Standard > My Performance > Budgets (tab)
A standard user can find their personal budgets published under a budgets tab in their My Performance page. If no budgets have been published for that individual then they will see a blank page.
The budget charts
Under both of these menu/tabs you’ll be able to see the budget(s) for an individual. Every budget rule will have its own card and will show the following:
- Month – daily contribution to actuals
- Month – cumulative contribution to actuals against cumulative budget
- Year – cumulative contribution of actuals against budget over the year
We would love feedback on the look and feel of this page, so please let us know what you think.
Overlapping budget rules
We have instituted a system to help avoid overlapping/conflicting budget rules. When you enter a budget, you will see a timescale and gant chart below the form.
This indicates where there may already be an existing budget with the same rules for an individual in your selection. If there is a conflict (same budget rules, same dates, same person) the system will prompt you to rectify the issue. To rectify you can click on each of the budgets in the chart and it will automatically set the start and end dates for you for the new and old budgets accordingly. Else you can rectify the conflict manually through the form.
Fleshing out the form
We know that you would love to be able to set budgets over different time scales (Quarter, Year (both financial and calendar) and we are working on bringing these to the system.
Based on Salary
We know that basing a budget off salary is a must and we already have those tickets on our work board. We plan to put “salaries” under “Manage Users”. If there is another place you think it should go we would love your feedback.
We really would love feedback on what we’ve done so far, please try it out and let us know: if it’s easy to use; if the chart is easy to read; if we’ve used the right nomenclature; if we’ve missed something in “Individual”.
Managing Budgets
Once you have set budgets your budgets will show up on the Manage Budgets screen and you can view these in two different ways:
By individual
This will create a list of all staff with budgets and the budget rule(s) applied to that individual.
By Budget Rule
Here you can condense the list by budget rule. This will show you all the rules you have created and the team members against those rules. This is handy if, for instance, all your Jnrs have the same budget rule. Example: Jnr’s are Budgeted to Bill in Fees 3x their yearly salary. This could be a single rule against every Jnr staff member and all you would need to do then is manage their salaries (as stated above, salaries are coming soon).
Other things in this release
Breaking down the “Less than 5%” slice on the company dashboard pie charts
On the pie charts on the company dashboard, all contributions that contribute less than 5% are lumped together in a single slice. We did this because, without it the pie chart was intensly busy. However, our initial pass at the solution meant that the contribution of each data point that went into that slice was lost. We always intended to enrich this and we have now pushed that change to production. Now, if you hover over the slice you will see the contribution of those data points.
We have also made the pie charts more responsive to filtering. If you filter the data by removing or adding a data point the “less than 5%” will recalculate, which we think is more intuitive.
Save date selection on Company Dashboard
If you leave and return to the company dashboard the dates will be calculated based on the drop down selection at the top of the page, without you needing to change the selection.
Team name no longer disappearing when creating a team
In the old “create team” form, if you named your team and then made other changes, such as adding a team member, the team-name would disappear. This is obviously annoying and we have now fixed it.
That’s it for this release. More budgets stuff coming in the next release and we look forward to your feedback.
Thanks,
Tom