Have you ever wondered "How much did that interaction, with that client, just cost us?" With the new Time/Expense module in Elements 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 Elements, 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 Relationships, Financial Accounts, Requests, and New Business. This can provide a cost/benefit analysis on client relationships for firms.
Tracking Duration for an Activity
Time and Expense calculations can be added to all Activities, including:
- Log a Call
- Events
- Tasks
- Emails
You have the opportunity to add fields to your Activity page layouts, including
- Duration (minutes)
- Assign To*
Duration is based on whole numbers. The field will not allow you to enter letters and will round partial minutes.
Time and Expense is calculated by default based on the record owner, and your System Administrator can assign a "Rate Per Hour" for each User. If you want to be able to calculate Time and Expense based on someone other than the record owner, you will have to add the "Assign To" field to the page layout and this becomes a required field on the Activity.
One thing you will have to do before you can start using Time and Expense is to set up each user's rate per hour. Please reference this article to learn how to make that update.
Time/Expense Records
Time and Expense Activity records can be created and tracked for Relationships, Financial Accounts, New Business, or Request objects. Your object's Page Layouts must include these fields if you would like them to be displayed.
The Time/Expense section gives you an overview of the Time/Expense for the object record. You can add Expenses (YTD), Expenses (12M), Time - Hours (YTD), Time - Hours (12M), Average Cost Per Hour (YTD), and Average Cost Per Hour (12M).
Notes about Time and Expense
- Duration is not available for email activities. Email has a standard duration of 10 minutes and is based on the email composer as the record owner.
- When an Activity record has been marked complete, a new Time and Expense record will be created for the Activity.
- The Time and Expense will be calculated based on the Record Owner. It is not possible to add multiple users to an Activity. This is a Salesforce limitation.
- The Time/Expense record can be updated if necessary ex) change in Rate Per Hour, Time (Minutes), Other Expenses etc.
- Duration and expense are rolled up to the related entity.
- Time and Expense aggregation values are updated in real-time.
- Daily, overall roll up calculations happen at 5 AM Eastern.
- 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 and Expense record for Activities:
- Determines if Time and Expense record should be created
- Determines if a new Time and Expense record is needed or not
- A new Time and Expense record is created, or
- Updates an existing record if necessary
- Stamps Time (Minutes), Rate Per Hour (from User record), links to related records as necessary
- If Financial Account or Request, parent Relationship is retrieved and stamped on Time/Expense record
