When you visit the doctor for a check-up, you can always expect your height, weight, and your vitals to be taken. Why? Because that’s the industry practice for determining if you’re healthy. Or, at least, at a very basic level.
When you run a business, you can’t simply take its vitals or measure its blood pressure to see how it’s doing. The closest thing to a check-up your business has can be found in the financial statements, but often they are not as revealing as you may hope.
Thankfully, BQE CORE reports are another great way to check on your firm’s health. Here’s what you need to know about using these reports to evaluate your firm.
1. Employee Utilization
Employee utilization is a metric detailing what percentage of an employee’s time is used to deliver revenue-generating services to clients. The higher the utilization rate, the more revenue and profit the employee generates for the company.
In these reports, you can see the name and title of your employee, how many billable hours he or she is responsible for, and many other measurables: non-billable hours, vacation days, overhead, sick days, and more.
The end result is a filterable list of utilization rates that can be grouped by person, title, department, and more. This will show you where exactly your employee’s time is being spent and how your firm can get the most out of that time.
2. WIP Reconciliation
Before billing, you’ll want to know what your WIP is. These reports can be sorted by dates or clients, and they show you if the work is being done on each contract.
You can also see the opening billable WIP for the period and how much billable WIP was complete. If there were invoices sent throughout the period, those amounts are subtracted and the net result is the closing billable WIP for the client.
From there, all the billable WIPs are added together from each client to give you a grand total WIP. Using this number, your partners can see the state of the WIP during the period, and your firm has a feel for how you’re progressing through each project.
3. Work in Hand
This report shows how much work you have in hand – or backlogged – so you can determine future finances for your company, including how long you could go without picking up new work.
On this report, you can view all your projects, the contract amount, how much has been billed, how much has been paid, the billable WIP, and a contract balance. Together, shows the value of each active contract and helps you decide how much new work to take on.
4. Profitability
Profitability shows how much profit you make off the work you’re doing. In other words, it looks at your billing amount and deducts the costs of getting to that number. In addition, you can quickly see which companies are paying, and if there are any payment issues, you can identify them and work to resolve them.
When comparing your costs to your invoice amount and your accounts received, you know where your profit is coming from and what jobs are the most profitable.
5. WIP + AR
The WIP + AR report is important when you want to know what your “inventory” is – or how much your clients owe you. This helps you value your business at any point in time. It works to project your revenue and cash-flow, too.
This useful report provides information about investments in projects and whether additional work can be taken without requiring more resources.
6. Budget Comparison
Budget comparison reports help identify which projects overrun – or, in other words, which projects take more time than you expected in your estimates. If you spend more time than anticipated, your client will probably not pay for it, so this tool helps your project managers keep the budget for the project in check.
This report can be set up to send out weekly to help benchmark active jobs and how teams are progressing through them. In each report, the job is broken down into line-item expenses.
7. Write Up/Down
A write up/down quickly shows which clients are more likely to challenge your invoices and which companies prove easiest to work with. You can group the reports by either clients or staff.
On the report itself, you can view the client hours and the agreed-upon billable rate. From there, your time spent is calculated based on that rate and then compared to the amount you billed your clients with. This gives the difference, or how much more/less you charged your client compared to the original estimates. This number can help you see which clients are best to work with and which might be a bigger headache for your company than they’re worth.
8. Top 10 in Revenue
As the title implies, this report answers who/what are your top ten factors in budget contribution. It shows the services billed, expense billed, gross billed, and the net billed amount. Additionally, this report can be sorted by project manager, contract type, and more.
9. Top N Clients
With the Top N Clients report, you can change the number (N) of clients, but no matter what you change it to, the report will rank your projects or clients by the paid amount. On top of that, the report calculates what percentage of your total paid amount for which each of the clients was responsible. For example, if one client is responsible for 35% of your business, that client should get more priority than a client responsible for 3.5% percent of your business.
10. Financial Budget Comparison
Finally, financial budget comparison helps you compare your expected budgets with actual expenses at the project-level. They can be view by month, quarter, year, or more.
This report provides detailed information about the financial budget based on the class. Organized by account, the reports display budgeted income and expenses, along with actual amounts and gross profit.
Together, these ten easy-to-use reports will help you perform frequent check-ups on the health of your firm. If you’re ready to take action, learn more about BQE CORE today.
