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Budget - Retainer Fixed fee

  • 19 October 2022
  • 5 replies
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What is the best option to utilize the Time/billing and Budget function of Karbon if we have our clients on fixed monthly retainers?

Most of our services, even ad hoc, will be fixed fee to clients and our cost will be contractor, employee and other direct costs.

 

Thanks!

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Best answer by DianeK 19 October 2022, 15:50

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Hello @Herman 

We bill our clients using a fixed monthly fee and find value using the Time & Budget tab on each work order.

We utilize Budgets to plan capacity.  We do not track time but we do need to forecast capacity.  By allocating a budget to each person who will be working on each project we can ensure that we do not overload anyone.

We also compare the budget against the fixed fee to confirm margins and ensure we are not doing work for ‘free’. 

If you are not tracking time in Karbon (we are not), this is strictly a forecasting exercise.  If you are tracking time you can see how work is progressing against the budget.

Hope that helps,

V

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@Victoria Peters Thank you for your reply!

Just to confirm, you still assign a “Cost” value Budget to each person that will work on the item, it is just not based on actual time x hourly rate?

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@Herman Yes and Yes.  We assign a ‘Cost’ that we base that on the expected or budgeted time each team member working on the file would spend on the that work x the charge out rate we have set for each team member.

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@Herman Yes and Yes.  We assign a ‘Cost’ that we base that on the expected or budgeted time each team member working on the file would spend on the that work x the charge out rate we have set for each team member.

Great, Thanks - this will help a lot.

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We also use the Time & Budgets tab but in a slightly different fashion.  We add the fixed fee amount and then track our time to the work item.  We can then calculate if the work is costing us more than we are charging the client and adjust the fixed price in our next engagement proposal. 

We also take the fixed fee and divide it by an hourly rate to estimate a time budget.  We can then use the time tracked to the work to see if we are spending more or less time on the work.  This also helps us determine if the price needs to be adjusted in the next proposal.

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