When creating a job/opportunity in Metis, you may already know what you're charging a client. Or you may only know how long a project will take, or the charge-out rates of the people working on it. Metis can make pricing your opportunities and jobs easy by working from your available resources.
This article contains:
- Job/opportunity types in Metis
- Job/opportunity set up - revenue-driven or effort-driven
- Using the Resource Plan to price your job/opportunity
- Converting a priced opportunity into a job
Job/Opportunity types in Metis
All jobs and opportunities in Metis have one of two types:
- Fixed Price
- Time & Materials
If you create a Fixed Price job, you can't change it to a Time & Materials job later. But, you can create a Time & Materials opportunity and change it to Fixed Price when you convert it into a job.
You can change the type of a job (e.g. from Time & Materials to Fixed Price) only once, just BEFORE you convert it from an opportunity. To read more about this, click here.
Job/opportunity set up - revenue-driven or effort-driven
Within a job or opportunity, you can decide how you want to set it up. This can be:
- revenue-driven
- effort-driven
Typically, the revenue-driven style is used when you've agreed on the fees with the client, or you know their budget. The benefit of the effort-driven style is that it allows you to drive the costs (and fees if you want) from the resource plan. You estimate the time, or costs, or charge-out rates and build the revenues and costs from there.
Not sure what type you need? Read our article on the differences here.
Using the Resource Plan to price your job/opportunity
To build a job or opportunity with the resource plan, we recommend you set it up as Time & Materials.
Navigate to the Budget tab of the job/opportunity and enter Edit Mode.
Scroll down to the Resource Plan and check whether your budgets are currently being driven from the resource plan. If they aren't, select Change in the top-right corner.
The revenue/cost spreading wizard will appear, and at the very top you'll see an ON/OFF switch which controls where your budgets are driven from. Press the switch to turn on resource plan driven budgeting. Metis will warn you that this will overwrite your existing values. If you are happy, press Apply to save.
You can then enter some effort (how much time the person should spend working on this job) by entering values in the Effort spread boxes. Metis automatically adds up the total effort spread.
Then you can go ahead and assign a person by clicking Add Person and then the + icon on the new row. This will bring the person's cost through if they are a member of staff, or you can enter it here if they are a freelancer.
You won't be able to save without a Job Role, so make sure you input this!
Lastly, add the charge-out rate for this person, and you'll see the total revenue and cost for this job/opportunity update - great!
You can add as many members of your team to the resource plan as you like, and play around with time worked, and the charge-out rates to price your job/opportunity. Once you're happy with your revenue and costs, you can keep it in the effort-driven style or, turn off effort-driven to lock in your total revenue. If you turn off effort-driven, you can still make edits manually. For example, you can add to the revenue without changing the time you expect the job to take.
Converting a priced opportunity into a job
If you have created an opportunity in order to price your job, and you're ready to convert it to a live job, you can change the Type (Fixed Price/T&M) at the time of conversion. Read our article here on how to convert an opportunity to a job.
Didn't find what you need in this article? You can submit a support ticket or send an email to support@getmetis.com.