Most Jobs created in Aimsio are focused on your customer, but our platform is a great tool for managing costs of internal projects too.
Any overhead or ‘shop’ work that you don’t charge back to your customers can still be tracked in Aimsio. We even support alternative pay rates for your Employees doing this kind of work.
Setting up overhead, shop or internal jobs may require the assistance of our Professional Services team. If you have additional questions after reading this guide, please reach out to support.
How to Create an Internal, Overhead or Shop Job
First, you need to create a Job in Aimsio that can be easily identifiable as an internal Job. This might entail using an entirely different Job Number, an abbreviation and a checkbox on the form clearly stating what the Job is for.
Accounts tracking their own work (not the shop work for your customers) will need to add themselves as a Client to the Job.
Users will need to manually adjust the Job Number for each Job created.
Accounts tracking overhead costs may only require a single Job per year.
In some cases, shop or internal work may be related to a customer Job, therefore hours can be tracked and identified via the form, rather than the Job. Some of these hours may even be billable back to your customer, albeit at a different pay rate for your Employees.
The benefit of setting up a separate Job is the ability to segregate activity from any billable or non-billable activity that may find its way onto an invoice. Aimsio does not allow separate Jobs to appear on the same invoice, even for the same client.
Your business requirements will determine the best approach.
Employee Pay Rates
Employees working shop or overhead work may require an alternative pay rate, compared to their regular hourly rate for field work. We can provide fields under the Employee profile to indicate a different hourly rate.
Our Timecards module will favor the alternate rate when it identifies hours as relating to overhead or shop work. How Aimsio identifies these hours will be unique to each account configuration.
How to Record Internal Hours
Employees can use Timesheets or Tickets to track their internal work. In most cases, tracking the work under the Labor table as Non-Billable will suffice, but we commonly provide an additional checkbox column to ensure the hours can be identified properly.
We provide additional tables, like Miscellaneous, to record one-off expenses too. We may also advise the creation of NRBs to track third-party costs related to overhead or shop work so these costs can be recorded directly in your Job Performance report.
Reporting on Internal or Overhead Jobs
Accounts can leverage Aimsio’s WBS to track shop or overhead costs using our Job Performance report. Consider our Insights add-on to consolidate costs from all Jobs and subtract from revenue generated over the year.