allow an internal charge to associated with a trac login for gross margin estimation

[mark@…]

Great plugin by the way. We're about to start using this hack to support client billing. To support our sales process we assign an internal billing rate to everyone within the company. This rate sets the minimum that we can charge a person out at and still make a profit. The sales team then sets a charge out rate which is higher than this when quoting for work. We use the internal billing rate to determine the cost of sales for any sales.

It would be very useful if we could assign a cost of billing to a users login, such that when a ticket was assigned to that person, the report not only displayed the hours that were spent on achieving a milestone but also the internal cost to date.

This makes it very easy for the sales team to identify projects that are becoming unprofitable and to see what their gross margin is.

[Russ Tyndall]

Though its not something we had in mind, it does seem like it would be a cool feature.

Some thoughts,

• Rather than keying off the user who is assigned the ticket, key off the user who added the hours. In our company, we have a project leader that we tend to change less per hour for then for programmer's time. It would be nice for both of them to be able to add hours at their own rate on a single ticket.
• Keying off user and a (new) type of work field. This would allow (for example) our designers to charge one rate for html work and another for design work.

I am in the middle of something else at the moment, but will definatly keep this ticket around so that it gets implemented in the future. If this is something you need more immediatly than that, we can work up a spec together and you can pay for the implementation. Alternativly, I am willing to help you add this to the plugin yourself, by suggesting an implementation.

Before we begin anything, we obviously need to have a slightly more concrete spec (hopefully with a ui mockup). If you have something specific in mind, feel free to post it attached to this ticket. Otherwise, I will work it up before it get implemented.

Thanks for the good ticket,
Russ

[anonymous]

I like your thoughts, they would work better for us as well.

We're going to work with what you have now (we're just starting) and then I'll come back to you with a better idea of a spec and ui mockup once after that.

Re paying for it, could you give me a ball park figure? We may be able to pay or at least contribute but I need some idea of scale.

Cheers Mark.

[Russ Tyndall]

Sorry it has taken a few days to reply. Everytime I have sat down to write a reply, I have gotten side tracked on discussion about this, or a different project.

After thinking about it more fully, there are still a few sticky points left to work out. I also needed to talk to my boss about how he wants to charge for doing work on this.

The response I got was that, for the parts of this project that we would use, we will charge a three hundred dollar flat fee to change our priorities and move this forward into our work schedule. For work we wouldn't actually use we will charge a our standard hourly rate of 200$/hr to implement the rest. (Unless there is greater than 100 hrs worth of work involved, at which point our hourly rate drops)

This project is probably 75% stuff we would use with another 25% that we wouldnt use (rough estimate). Basically, we like the idea of different rates for different types of work and keeping track of that as we fill in tickets. We dont really do gross margin estimation, however, I dont forsee this being very much work above and beyond what would need to be added to do different work rates.

Russ

[Russ Tyndall]

4 years old and no work or patches... I am going to assume everybody has figured out ways around this without adding more complexity to the plugin (which 4 years on is quite complex enough by now).

Thanks for the idea, but for now closing as wont fix