One of the things we hoped to be able to do when we signed up to Monzo Business + Xero was to track profitability.
Xero Projects allows you to track profitability based on an hourly staff cost rate, but we don’t charge by the hour and our salaries are a fixed expenditure (we don’t pay overtime), so we can’t track profitability accurately in Xero Projects.
So we’d love Monzo to introduce a simple project management module to their Business tools, including the ability to track time spent on projects, expenses, and the ability to track profitability (including by using a monthly staff cost rate rather than just an hourly cost rate).
All Xero needs to do is add a monthly staff cost rate to Xero Projects, but they’re a big slow moving ship. I wouldn’t be surprised if Monzo or Starling could deliver this before Xero does.
Defo agree with working out the hourly rate. I wouldn’t be able to cost work accurately without it.
It’s not just the staffs pay, but also all the overheads that determine this rate too. It’s the baseline for all quotes because this can then be multiplied into days, weeks, months and years. Not to mention it’s the minimum chargeable amount.
Maybe in the old days. Modern banks like Starling and Monzo have already moved into this wheelhouse. I’m simply requesting further functionality.
Because our hourly rates are meaningless in terms of profitability tracking. We don’t pay by the hour. We pay by the month. We don’t work consistent hours and we don’t pay overtime. And we don’t charge by the hour. We charge fixed fees and get paid via interim monthly invoices.
So to track profitability of a project we need to use a monthly staff cost rate, not an hourly one. But we also want to track how many hours we’ve worked on a project. We can track hours on a project in Xero but we can’t track profitability accurately because an hourly rate does not reflect our actual expenditure when multiplied by the hours worked on a project.
The only way to track profitability accurately in Xero would be to do our timesheets based on the hours of our standard working week, rather than the actual hours we work. But then we wouldn’t be tracking our time on projects accurately.
Yes I suspect you’re right, although I think the reason Xero don’t offer it is because they’re just a really big slow moving ship with a lot of moving parts. If you check their forums out you’ll see long awaited features like the ability to invoice different contacts at the same company from as far back as 2012. As it currently stands you have to duplicate the company in your contacts book and call the company something slightly different (and the invoice is addressed to this slightly different name). Highly unintuitive and quite unprofessional when issuing an invoice. But I think they just have this creaking backend that they can’t change easily without breaking something.
Starling and Monzo don’t have that legacy problem.
Xero also have WorkflowMax, a more complex project management software, which probably gives them an incentive to dumb Xero Projects down a little (although I think WorkflowMax has the same limitation).
also, I’d imagine that directly sharing your profitability on a month-by-month bases with your bank might be something people would be uncomfortable with
