Allocation Budgets

If keeping track of your staff's available time is important, then you should take a look at the staff budgets in BigTime. You can use these budgets to keep track of how much time you expect each staff member to spend on the projects to which they are assigned.

Allocation Budgets and the Retainer Account

Firms that work with on-going or "retainer" accounts frequently budget differently than project-based organizations. PR firms, accounting firms, many law firms and some IT or consulting firms work within a regular "recurring" fee and provide their customers with an ongoing service that doesn't easily break down into a set of discreet "tasks" or "phases" that can be started, delivered and then marked "complete."

For those firms, a budget looks more like the one shown here.

In many consulting firms, a client agrees to pay a monthly (weekly, quarterly) retainer for services. Those agreements typically outline a set of goals or needs that the client would like the consultant to address during the course of their relationship (e.g. - "keep the network running," "establish a media presence," "deal with ad-hoc requests," etc.).

Retainer accounts typically have periods of high and low activity (e.g. - months that are busy and months that are slow), but the average level of activity should correspond (ideally) to the retainer amount. BigTime's allocation budgets help you keep that goal in front of your account teams: highlighting accounts that are being over serviced or under serviced, and giving you an indicator of accounts where either the scope-of-work or the retainer fees may need to be adjusted.

Consider the following hypothetical example. Jake Matyas has 16-20 hours (on average) allocated to the client account on which the example above is based (16 hours in January, 16 in February, 16 in March, 24 in April, etc.). When the customer comes to him with a task that will take 30-40 hours to complete, Jake can see that it's going to blow his budget for the month.

Seeing that makes it instantly easier for Jake to manage the account. Maybe he can see that he's been light for the prior few months, so additional work this month is OK. Maybe he can see that the client has a history of pushing the budget boundaries and the retainer's scope-of-work needs to change. Maybe, instead, he simply tells the client that the task will put him way over budget and he can ask for more time (at which point, the client can help craft a solution).

Whatever Jake's response, the conversation about budgets and expectations can take place before work begins on the task, not at the end of the month when it's typically too late.

Staff Planning and the Allocation Budget

Consider another example, this time from a "project-based" firm.

Joe Smith in an analyst at the firm (with 80 hours allocated in Jan/Feb to our sample "Client X"). In March, he tells his manager that he is way too busy to take on the additional 40 hours that he's expected to spend on Client X.

Joe's manager can see that he has more hours allocated to Client X in March, but that he is supposed to have less time dedicated to Client Y (and a lighter load on Internal Project A), so he shouldn't need to worry about March.

If it turns out that Joe's manager on those other projects isn't letting up in March per the plan, then this leads to an excellent opportunity for the managers to hash things out. And, they can adjust the plan before it becomes a problem for Joe or his clients.

Getting Started

Each of these examples uses an allocation budget to track how much staff time is dedicated to projects in the system. The topics that follow will help you setup a simple allocation budget and will review the options and reports managers have when reviewing and updating those budgets.