Overview

Project Types

What's changing

Within Financial Settings (and when creating a Project), you will now have the ability to select a Type at the Project Level. 

This Project Type will then dictate which Financial Models that you can apply to each individual Offering within the Project.  The idea is to categorize your Project based on it's overall purpose, allowing you to apply Financial Models that apply.  

The Project Types you'll see are:

• Client: This Type is exactly what you'd think - it's intended for Projects being completed for a specific Client.  Within Client Projects, for each Offering you will still select a Financial Model, but they will now be grouped into two categories:

  • Billable Financial Models - These are not changing, and will continue to include the T&M, Fixed Bid, Retainer, and Mixed Models.  Plans and billable Actuals will continue to be when filtering Insights by both Billable and Total. 

  • (New) Non-Billable Financial Models - These represent things like prospecting or other tasks that are attributed to a Project on behalf of a Client, but for which the work completed is not billable.  Plans and Actuals for these Projects will be have a $0.00 Bill Rate applied, thus accruing no Revenue. They are excluding when filtering Insights by Utilization Billable, and included when filtering by Total.

• Internal - Formerly a Billing Model, the Internal Type is intended for any work that's not billable and not attributed to any specific Client.  This may include regular meetings, internal projects and strategic initiatives - really any Projects that are not attributed to a Client. 
  Currently, there are two Models - unlike billable Projects, selecting these will not affect how Clients are billed, but instead the purpose of the projects*:

  • Investment - These are Internal Project Offerings that are not actively tied to a single Client, but still represent productive work.  These are initiatives that improve efficiency, result in updates to process, and otherwise represent productive work.
  • Admin - These are Internal Project Offerings that are not tied to any specific outcome, and do not represent productive work.  These may be weekly company meetings

How does this affect my current Projects?

For billable Projects, this change represents only an increase in flexibility - so there will be no change to your existing Projects.

All current billable Financial Models still exist and are not changing, they are simply being nested under the Client Project Type.  As a result, you will not see any change to your T&M, Fixed Bid, Retainer or Mixed Financial Model Offerings, you'll just see the new Non-Billable Model available.

For non-billable Projects, with the Internal Financial model being split in two (Investment and Admin), the Admin Financial Model will be the most accurate representation of how the Internal Financial model was previously used.  As a result, all Projects with non-billable Financial Models (Internal) will be migrated to the Internal Project Type, and the Admin Financial Model.

What does this mean for Insights?

The first way this will affect Insights will be your options for filtering across Insights Reports.  The Financial Models filter will now include the new Non-Billable, Investment and Admin models, and you can also select All Models of each of the two Client Types (Client and Internal).

If you have any Saved Views that currently use the Internal Financial Model, you may want to update those Views to include both the Admin and Investment model type.

As you start to assign Client Projects to the new Non-Billable Model, you'll see that Revenue Reports will exclude 

Revenue > Overview:

Utilization > Overview (Billable):

Utilization Customization

Overview

• Utilization Configuration - This helps Parallax define how Capacity and Utilization are calculated by including/excluding categories of Hours.
  • Holidays (default unchecked) - This decides whether or not Holidays reduce Available Capacity. By checking this box a Holiday does not reduce available capacity, which means a full-time employee would still be expected to hit 40 hours during a week with a scheduled holiday. 
  • PTO (default unchecked) - This decides whether or not PTO reduces Available Capacity. By checking this box PTO does not reduce available capacity, which means a full-time employee would still be expected to hit 40 hours during a week despite having scheduled PTO.
  • Client Non-Bill (checked) - This determines whether you consider Hours completed on Client-type Projects, in Non-Bill Model Offerings to count towards completion of Billable Hours.

Additionally, if you have Time Off Excluded, we've added an Optional Column to the Utilization > Overview report, in order to more easily view Time Off that's being excluded.