Have you ever wondered "How much did that interaction, with that client, just cost us?" With the new Time/Expense module in Engage you can calculate and display the effort involved with servicing your clients. To take it another step further, you can assign a dollar value to your users and see a calculation of your resource utilization. Based on Activities being entered in Engage, users can specify the duration of the activity and how many attendees were involved in the activity. Once the Activity is marked complete, Time/Expense records will be automatically created through Flow. Time/Expense records can be logged against Relationship, Opportunity, Financial Accounts, and Requests. This can provide a cost/benefit analysis on client relationships for firms.
Watch this short video on Time & Expense in Engage!
Tracking Duration and Attendees for an Activity
Activities available for Time and Expense calculations:
- Phone Calls
- Meeting Notes
- Client Review Meetings
- Tasks
- Emails
New fields that are available on Activities
- Duration
- Attendees
- Additional Attendees
Duration is based on a pick list (or option set), but can be modified as well. The duration must be entered in the following format: x minutes, x hours or x days. Hours and days can also be entered using decimals, for example, x.x hours or x.x days.
Attendees are based on your firm's users, and within Setup, your System Administrator can assign a "Rate Per Hour" for each User. When you then add a user as an attendee, your CRM will calculate an approximate cost per activity for each attendee and for the entire interaction.
Setup > Security > Users > Select a User > Update Rate Per Hour under User Information
Time/Expense Records
Time and Expense Activity records can be created and tracked on the Reference Panel for Relationships, Opportunities, Financial Accounts, or Request entities.
The Time/Expense section tile gives you an overview of the Time/Expense for the entity record. In this example, you can see year-to-date and last 12 months expenses, time, average cost per hour, and efficiency ratios.
Notes about Time and Expense
- Duration and Attendees not available for email activities. Email has a standard duration of 10 minutes and is based on the email composer as the attendee.
- Time/Expense records are linked to the appropriate records for each user that was part of the Activity.
- Total Expense for the record is calculated based off duration of the activity, and the rate per hour assigned to the user.
- Duration and expense are rolled up to the related entity.
- Roll up calculations happen every six (6) hours.
- An Efficiency Ratio is available that calculates Expenses/Management Fee. This will allow advisors to see how much clients are consuming their time.
- An activity duration must be greater than zero.
- If Time/Expense is related to a Request or Financial Account, the parent Relationship record is also linked on Time/Expense record.
- If a Time/Expense record already exists, an update is performed on the existing record.
Processes Time/Expense record for Activities:
- Creates Time/Expense activity record
- Retrieves user's hourly rate
- Calculation for Time/Expense fields
- Links to appropriate records (Relationship, Opportunity, Request, Financial Account)
For instructions on setting up Time & Expense, click here.
