The Service Fee Schedule is an important feature of Web Suite. It enables you to create unique fee structures for projects that override employee and activity bill and cost rates. It is commonly used for hourly-based, rather than lump sum billing. It enables you to assign multiple bill rates to one or many employees based on the activity performed. An unlimited number of Service Fee Schedules can be created. After being created, they are linked to projects in the Project screen. The Service Fee Schedule enables you to define hourly billing as either a straight hourly Bill Rates or by Direct Multipliers (DM) applied to employee's default Cost Rates or default Bill Rates. Use the <TAB> or <ENTER> key to navigate from field to field on the GRID.
Schedules can be unique to one project, or be applied to multiple projects. Time entries are recorded in any one of the three time entry screens against one of those projects. When time is recorded, Web Suite reads the project record looking for a service fee schedule. If a service fee schedule is assigned to the project, then it is searched for a scheduled rate for that combination of employee and activity. If a scheduled rate does exist, then it is applied to the time entry. If no matching combination is found and the project option to use rates from the Activity data table is on, then the Activity screen is searched for a rate assigned to the activity being entered. If that project option is off, then the default bill rate assigned to the employee in the Employee screen will be used.
Service Fee Schedules also provide you with a provision of assigning varied titles to the employees according to the fee schedule requirements. This can be done through the Classification field on the Service Fee Schedule tab. Classification field in the SFS actually stores the employee title that has been assigned to the employees in the Employee screen. After you create SFS, you can change the title assigned to an employee depending on the responsibilities according to the SFS requirements.
Web Suite first checks the Classification as per the Service Fee Schedule and if none is found, will look for classification according to Project Control settings and apply it. If no classification is found, the default employee title set in Employee screen will be used.
Possible combinations in the Service Fee Schedule and the hierarchy that Web Suite follows when fetching the rates:
Possible combinations in the Service Fee Schedule:
Employee and Activity
Employee Group and Activity
Employee and Activity Group
Employee Group and Activity Group
Important:
If more than one match is found in the Service Fee Schedule, the rates appearing in the first entry will be used.
If you update an existing Service Fee Schedule, the time entries that were previously recorded using the Service Fee Schedule will not be updated. This gives you the freedom to change your rates from a particular date and apply the change to only those time entries created after the change in Service Fee Schedule was made.
The Service Fee Schedule cost rate and bill rate multipliers read the employee's rate at the time you are creating the schedule in order to calculate the billing rate. If you change an employee's rate, the Service Fee Schedule's bill rate will not change. This gives you the freedom to modify employee rates without affecting the existing Service Fee Schedules.
If you link a Service Fee Schedule to a Project after time has already been logged to the Project, the old time entries will not be affected. The rates of the time entries entered before instituting the Service Fee Schedule will stay the same. The Service Fee Schedule will take effect for all future time entries.