Background

When confronted about a billing discrepancy, a senior consultant asked the

accounting/support department how much time is spent with a certain client. It is
clear that a lot of time and resources are out towards this client but it is unclear
exactly how much. This is evidence of a weakness in the companys customer
monitoring.

Project Goals
The following are the intended goals of this change in structure:
Better tracking of company resource usage, namely labor in the
accounting/support department
Data for determining where additional training is necessary
Data for determining possible changes in the software

Plan of Action
To accomplish these goals I am recommending a modification to how labor hours
are tracked within the accounting/support department.

The ideal structure for monitoring the labor hours would be to track the specific
services that are provided and associate them with a specific client. This process is
too time-consuming for the benefit it would bring and the complexity would leave
room for too many errors. This would essentially be a more complex version of how
the direct labor hours are currently tracked which already result in occasional
errors during billing.

This leaves two possible solutions: tracking hours by client, or by activity. Tracking
hours by client would be useful for determining customer profitability, but would
provide no data for training or development purposes. This leaves the clear solution
of tracking labor hours by activity.

Tracking Time by Activity
The remaining question is, what level of detail the activities should be tracked at?
The following are a few examples of my proposed structure for new charge codes to
be used:
S0004.000.00.000 Rollup Task
S0004.001.00.100 Support Rollup Task
S0004.001.01.100 Fixing Timekeeping Charge Codes
S0004.001.02.100 Fixing Expense Charge Codes
S0004.001.03.100 New Computer Setup
S0004.001.04.100 Re-Indexing
S0004.002.00.100 Consulting Rollup Task
S0004.002.01.100 Invoice Trouble Shooting

This structure uses the task field to track the general type of activity. A 001 is used
for support activities, while a 002 represents activities that could be considered
consulting. After this, the sub-task field can be used to track more specific activities.
The project field is left the same to represent the department, but could also be used
as an additional level of detail instead.

The proposed task structure allows for time to originally be tracked with only the
rollup codes for the first 2-3 months. After monitoring the time put into these
accounts for a few months, a decision can be made to use additional levels of detail,
maintain the same structure, or revert to the original structure.

Intended Outcomes
If the time spent on these activities is determined material, additional levels of detail
will provide benefit in the areas of development, client training, and staffing.

As activities are identified and tracked, it may become evident that some can be
avoided through changes in the software. This would be useful in making decisions
for the new version of the accounting software.

Activities may also provide insight for possible webinar topics or areas that require
more emphasis during implementation. Having this system in place prior to having
billing webinars would have been a good measure of the success of the webinars.

Identifying these activities will also assist in training new employees. It seems that
working with clients falls into the rule of 80-20, meaning that 80% of their calls are
only on about 20% of the required knowledge. By identifying what that 20% is, new
employees can be trained on popular topics and will be able to work with clients
sooner.