4me Time Tracking Components
Cost management in an enterprise service management system revolves around Service-Based Costing. Understanding the complete cost of the services you provide forms the foundation for sound business and resource planning, budgeting, billing, charging, demand management, benchmarking, and investment decision-making.
Time tracking plays a pivotal role in Service-Based Costing, enabling you to measure the costs of activities performed. As 4me is built on a service-oriented architecture, you can easily correlate the time spent by individuals in your organization with the specific services they were engaged in.
The illustration below presents an overview of the various components of a Service-Based Costing model and the corresponding 4me records related to each component.
On the far right, you’ll find the cost objects, which in 4me are the Services for which you wish to gather costs, along with the assigned service providers. In 4me, the Service Provider is defined as a field on the Service record and is used to select the organization that provides the service.
The internal organizations providing services to both internal and external customers can be considered as *cost centers* to which the costs incurred in providing these services should be assigned. In a large company, the cost center concept is often used for budgeting, accounting, and financial reporting purposes.
Moving leftward, you’ll come across the activity drivers, with the Time Entry being the principal one. Once time tracking is configured in 4me, time entries will be generated. They serve as the core element within the Service-Based Costing model integrated into 4me, acting as the binding agent among all other 4me elements depicted in the diagram above.
In the 4me Help Pages you can find a detailed description of a Time Entry and of the Time Entry Fields.
Whenever you need more information about a record type in 4me, you can access the online help. To start, click on the Actions button of the toolbar and select the “Help and Support” option.
A time entry comprises the Time Spent, representing the duration of the activity performed, the Date when the time was utilized, and the Cost associated with the time spent for the organization employing the individual responsible for the activity. Additionally, a time entry can include a Description providing further details about the performed activity, which proves valuable when customers or managers require a more comprehensive understanding of the activities.
Every time entry is linked to the person who performed the activity. In the Service-Based Costing model, the individual is located at the far left under “Resources” in the diagram above. Within a person’s record, the Cost per hour attribute is specified. The cost of a time entry is calculated by multiplying the time spent by the person’s cost per hour and the Cost multiplier of the Effort Class. An effort class reflects the type of effort for which time spent is recorded. For instance, an effort class like ‘Overtime during weekends’ might have a defined cost multiplier of 2.
Time entries are created for various activities in 4me, such as Requests, Problems, Tasks, Project Tasks, or Time Allocations. Time allocations are commonly used to track overheads like travel, training, or meetings. By linking a time allocation to a service and a customer, it becomes possible to include these time entries in reports that break down time and costs by service or customer.
Additionally, a time entry can be associated with a Team and an Organization. The Team field is populated when the individual responsible for the activity holds a specialist role and belongs to one or more teams. In most cases, 4me automatically adds the most relevant of these teams to the time entry, typically the support team associated with the service, request, problem, or workflow. Meanwhile, the organization refers to the organization to which the person belongs.
Now that you have a better understanding of the different components of 4me’s Time Tracking functionality, let’s look at the steps you need to take to configure 4me for time tracking.