Service Titan does not match P/L. Idle time is not included in any reports with total payroll?

[jamied]

It appears that all the reports we've been able to find .including payroll reports and business unit reports only include time paid on jobs.  We can get the labor rate and burden (ST PLEASE give us a total of burden and wages) but paid idle time is not included.

Gross profit on jobs with $$ is job costing and is different than gross profit of a business unit.  We are in CA and employees are paid for all time worked.    

ST captures materials and labor which is fine for job costing purposes, however for actual gross profit, we need all paid time including idle time,  All the reports that include gross profit, don't include paid time that isn't attached to jobs.

It's hard for me to imagine that this is actually no possible in Service Titan.  

[michael21]

If I understand you correctly, it seems that the main complain you have is that ST doesn't give a report of jobs that includes labor burden costs, and I mostly agree with that complaint.  Most of the ST reports either show the sum of services as labor, (I sure don't how you classify sales as labor).  I did have our CSM develop a report for me that does show sales, equipment cost, material cost, purchase order cost, labor burden, and gross profit.  Selection options include range of dates and business unit, so it helps.  One question I have, though, are you calculating burden as total employment costs divided by total hours or total employment costs divided by work hours.  If the former, yes idle hours are not being included in your gross profit calculation.  If the latter, the cost of idle hours is included in the burden and you shouldn't be getting such large variances between QB and ST.

[jamied]

Not quite.  I can see all that information as well.  I wish that they'd give a selection that included both labor and burden, however, that is only an inconvenience.

My issue is that the data that Service Titan shows as gross profit is grossly inaccurate accurate because it only includes labor and burden attached to jobs, but not any of the idle or non job time that we pay to the technicians.   

We can capture the non job time on the master pay file but not on any report that includes gross profit.

Gross profit should include all COSs labor and material, not only on-job time.  The job times are just fine for job costing but not for calculating gross profit.  

If all of the field labor both job and idle could be included then the gross profit would be pretty close to what QuickBooks shows once the labor is entered in payroll.  We aren't trying to use Service Titan as our financial software at all, however, since the data that is sent over to QuickBooks comes straight out of Service Titan the information should correlate.   

[tomhowar]

We are in California as well.  We use ServiceTitan to track our hours.  We use the Technician activity detail report under legacy reports but we are switching to the master pay file.  It does cover idle time.  Its pretty straight forward because we export that to our payroll provider and they cut the checks/direct deposit.  That payroll provider gives us all the data we need for burden rates.  If you sign up for payroll pro, they will do what our payroll provider does.  Payroll pro will take your completed time sheets and determine the pay and send out the direct deposits.  Once you know your fully burdened rate, you can enter that rate into ServiceTitan.  I wouldn't be using ServiceTitan to determine fully burdened rates unless I was using payroll pro. I currently don't use payroll pro yet.  

Another thing, ServiceTitan is designed to show you gross margin per job, not gross margin for your company yet.  Since idle time isn't attached to a job, they don't show that in their reports.  Your accounting software should be your go-to spot for true gross profit.  The accounting software doesn't typically do it well per job but it does well on the overall.  For right now, ServiceTitan integrates with those accounting software solutions for that reason.

[jamied]

We do know our burden and do have it in ST. Since all of the time is tracked in ST it would make sense to be able to see both in the same report not have to look in 3 different places.

We pay managers based on gross profit so it sure would make sense to be able to see that real time in the software.

Quickbooks labor is only entered after payroll is run (bi monthly) but since the info comes straight out of ST we should be able to see that data.  Its all right there.

We use ST for job costing and do well on work completed but when all the paid time is accounted for the numbers tell a different story.

We tell our team that the target is 60% margin and the reports in ST look great, but the real margin is very different.  

It takes a lot of explaining to get non financial people to easily see why the actual gross profit is so different than what ST shows them.

[michael21]

I too am very concerned with ST's inability to assist with an accurate burden rate determination, and in developing cost of sales and gross profit in the financials, but approach it somewhat differently than your point suggests.  We use an outside payroll service for our payroll, so most of the elements of burden determination are in our financials, not ST.  To develop the burden rate, we take all employment costs, (wages, company payroll taxes, workmen's' comp insurance, etc).  We then obtain actual work hours from the employee timesheet summary.  For each technician, we divide cost by work hours to get burden.  By default, this includes PTO, idle time, drive time, etc. in the burden rate.  Where our problem starts is in getting our financials to accurately reflect this.  Since ST doesn't export labor burden as part of job cost, and since ST provides no report that gives us this information by business unit for exported jobs, we have no accurate way to reflect job cost in the financials.  I have posted an idea, (COMMUNITY-I-928) in the ideas section to address this.  If, after reading this, it sounds like this might also address your problem, I would certainly appreciate an upvote for the idea.  (get all you friends to vote too :).

[jamied]

We are with ADP total source PEO and the hours in our master payroll match up.  We do have accurate burden rates and use our quickbooks for our financials and do our job costing in Service Titan. 

Gross profit of the company and business units is based on the total burdened field payroll amount, not just on job time.

So looking at the reports in service shows a number for "gross profit " that is nowhere close to accurate.  

We aren't after using ST as our financial software, but I don't understand why we dont have the ability to include non job time.

All of this data is tracked right in ST we just can't include it in the same report.