Name of Feature/Request: Native utilization report.
What financial, time savings, or quality of life improvements will occur with this: Streamline capacity planing on projects. The report would look at actual hours worked and expected.
Attempted solutions so far: Custom Report
Digging deep - Any additional Why behind this request / How was this accomplished before Striven: Ability to see time budgeted (expected) vs actual time used.
I’m out of votes, or I’d stomp all over this, but it leads to a larger Striven issue with regard to how Striven deals with ‘efficiency’ metrics, time keeping, and payroll as a whole.
Currently, Striven looks at efficiency as how long it takes for someone to act on a new Task. While that is important, especially to CSR related tasks, for production, it’s far more important to track how long it takes to complete a task. In every industry, it isn’t about how long it takes to acknowledge a customer request, it’s about how long it takes to fix the customer’s problem. A mechanic that changes out an alternator in 1 hr is better than a mechanic that takes 2 hours. Another metric that is critical is the ‘call back’. If the mechanic that takes 1 hr has a call back rate of greater than 5%, that’s worse than the mechanic that takes 2 hrs, but has no call backs. Neither is easy to manage with Striven as the time keeping is a poorly integrated module (there is no way to see the time added to a task from the task, it doesn’t translate to costs for the sales order) and there is no way to indicate one or more call backs, tracking of the cause, or tracking of the resolution - per sales order.
The payroll and time tracking feature is such an afterthought, there is no way to assign cost to a sales order or invoice for labor costs. This makes tracking profitability impossible when a company sells labor. Even in MilesIT, there must be a way to know if a paid feature expansion was profitable or not, and which engineers are generating the most profit per project.
Long term, I would suggest teaming up or integrating with a large PEO to manage time keeping and payroll within Striven. We use an absolutely fantastic PEO that has the tech to make that an easy transition. They’ve saved us 3%-5% annually compared to using the included payroll processing through Quickbucks or Notsuite, and they not only process payroll, but are a complete HR solution. If anyone wants to know more, just reach out to me.
In the meantime, it would be great to simply connect the dots for the datapoints you already have. Striven has hours, employees have a cost rate and sell rate. If there are 20 tasks created that are linked to a sales order, it should not be difficult to have this data used to create meaningful costing reports, albeit simplified to some extent. Almost no business is hourly anymore, it’s all based on job costing or flat rate, but we still need to track hours for payroll, overtime, and work comp. Having a need for a separate system for this takes the All-In-One out of the ERP.