We love Striven it has been easy and great for my team getting the data in, quoting and invoicing but, the reporting needs to improve. I should be able to run an invoice profitability report which factors in my labor cost, material from stock as well as from Purchase orders. It needs to be done at the invoice level because you cannot edit approved quotes. So if changes are made to the final invoice they are not factored in. This is same issue with new project profitability report. It does not factor in inventory used for a project from your own warehouse. I currently have no way of running a project or invoice profitability report that is accurate with the current reports. These reports are important to us so we can review invoices or projects to make sure we made a profit. This helps when bidding future similar projects to know if we to need increase our cost or we can be more competitive.
We have the exact same issue. We go live on February 1st and the “Sales” Order Profitability report is lacking because it will not allow you to see the cost for items being sold from inventory. Only purchased items. Our system we are leaving had this ability which made it very easy and you could price a time and material job easily knowing the “true” costs of all material and labor involved regardless if the material was from inventory or not.
Can I ask what software you switched from? We switch back in May from Aptora (TOM) love how easy it is for our employees to use the system, just trying to get the reports we need. Also need a way to run a time entry report that shows the labor cost on a job at a quick glance regardless if its been billed/posted yet or not.
Thank you chriscrest for bringing this to our attention. We really appreciate you bringing this to our attention. To get more details on the report you are looking for I will reach out directly.
We used a product by Infor called Visual Jobshop.
I’d be curious what other profitability metrics and reports you use/need to govern the success of your business @chriscrest? It speaks highly of you and being in tune with this level of detail in your business instantly sets you apart from most business owners I know.
I see the value of having a job profitability report to know where to price and be competitive, I just know too that job costing individual jobs can be deceptive. Real profitability comes from cash in your bank after all activities related to the generation of revenue.
No doubt getting a snapshot of one job is a good stop-gap measure to check prices, but the pitfall of job costing to determine profitability is all the administrative touches and soft costs the traditional job costing doesn’t factor in… you had to pay someone to take the initial sales call, you had to pay someone to write up an estimate and maybe even go on-site to evaluate their needs, and then there’s the back end of handling invoicing and receipt of payment and making the deposit. In other words, all the activities and “touches” to support that sale of the one job, how do you go about factoring in those costs? Job costing that way is way more accurate, but also the data and administration to track it to the depth oftentimes outweigh the benefits (at least what I’ve seen in other industries).
Hope you take my post in the spirit it is intended… not knocking job costing, I’m genuinely interested in the topic “Better Profitability Reporting” in general as I help business owners implement Striven and see what “default” reports can be the most meaningful for their success.
My belief is you need to know you made money on each project this is why you need job costing. I also track the time to check the project out as well and factor this in. I agree you have to factor these cost in your margins. By having true job/project cost per project I believe will insure you don’t make the same mistake twice on a job/project and allow you to be more competitive when you have to bid future similar projects without losing your shirt. Job cost monitoring long with monitoring your P&L will insure these soft-cost are being covered. I see a lot of companies that do not manage their job cost and for every project they make money on they lose their shirt on the next one and are paying the customer to do the work. I have always said I’m not going work for nothing.I rather do nothing than work for free. When you’re busy chasing the low margin work you miss out on the profitable work. This why I would like see Striven improve the profitability reports. I should be able to run this report on a quote before I submit it, using estimated labor cost and material cost. I should be able to run this on an invoice and Projects that factors in my true labor cost, item from inventory as well items purchased for a project. If did not make profit here, I have no chance of covering my soft cost.
Well said… better to be proactive in your decision with data integrity!
I know this isn’t an ideal solution, but being able to apply logic and/or arithmetic to fields in reports could help with these types of reports.
Circling back to this @chriscrest. Did you ever get a better solution to this for your company? The Sales Order Profitability report is still not reliable. It doesn’t reflect inventory items being consumed, only purchased items. I would be interested in the report that Troy said he would reach out to you directly on.
Same situation here. Sales Order Profitability has very limited use for us. Ideally, we’d pay our sales commission based on margin of the job or invoice and I can’t see an easy way to calculate it.
I built a few apis a few months back that drives all the data but you have to do it so filtered down so you don’t get unwanted data in there. It’s a very time consuming process. The reports in striven that have the data need to work with each other better.