How Can I Track My Labor Costs?

All costs in Electronic Service Control are accumulated on invoices; this includes Labor Costs.  In short, the Labor Cost of an invoice is the amount of time spent by the technician multiplied by the technician's hourly pay rate (plus Overhead).  

First thing's first, you need to make sure your technician's have pay rates entered into their profiles.  

1. Head to Dispatch → Enter Technicians.
2. Click the Add New button to create a new employee or double-click on an existing employee to edit their profile.  
3. At the bottom of the General tab, fill in the Pay Rate field and the Overhead Value field.  The Overhead Value is the total hourly amount that you would pay for this employee (including insurance, taxes, etc.).  The Overhead Value can be a Flat Amount or a Percentage of the Pay Rate.
4. Click OK.  
   
   

Make sure to fill in this information for all employees.  

Next, you'll want to tell ESC how much time to record for your Labor Costs.  To do this, head to Company → System Setup → Dispatch and select either Bill for Travel and Work Time or Bill for Work Time Only.  Then click OK.

How It Works

• As a technician is performing work on a dispatch, their status should be kept up to date.  Changing the Status on a dispatch from Pending to Traveling to Working and then to Complete (or any variation there of) helps to mark down important times that can then be carried to the invoice.
  
  
  
  
• When the dispatch is turned into an invoice, the times recorded on the dispatch are carried onto the Technician tab of the Sales Invoicing screen.  Here, the total time is multiplied by the technician's Pay Rate and Overhead Rate.  
  
  
  
  
• The Total Cost amount is then carried from the Technician tab to the Invoice tab where is it displayed in the Totals block at the bottom and used to calculate the Gross Profit of the invoice.
  
  

Reporting

Labor Costs will show on a variety of Sales Reports, which can be found by going to Sales → Reports → Sales Reports.  

Labor Sales and Labor Cost will be broken out on a per invoice basis on many of the reports, such as the Sales Report, the Sales by Technician Report and the Sales by Department Report.

Note: Labor Costs are never transferred to your accounting system in order to avoid double-costing.  Your actual labor costs will come from payroll.