Hi, this video will show you the basics of what Costlocker can do.
We won't be going into detail and show all the options of settings and reporting,
but you'll still get a pretty good idea about how Costlocker works and how it can help your company.
In order to calculate the profitability of your project work,
we'll need to enter your operating company costs.
This is a schema of how we'll calculate the cost of one hour's worth of work per employee.
We'll simply add up all the company operating costs to the hourly rate of an employee, i.e. rent,
internet, telephone or assistant salary.
Then, we'll be able to calculate the profitability of your billable projects, as well as the cost of
non-billable internal projects, and even lost tenders.
Let's get back to the app.
We'll start with creating a project.
You can start by creating a Standard project with a defined start and end,
or a Recurring project ideal for internal and long-running fee-based projects.
The following steps are identical for both types of projects,
so we'll just continue with the Standard project.
Here, you can tag your project.
Tagging projects is critical, because it enables you to define various project reports later.
I'll show you how it works. For example, let's look at the listing of all running projects.
Let's say yo want to know what our turnover on currently running web projects is.
I'll select this tag and here I can see the overall turnover and other financial metrics.
Oh, and by the way, tags can be defined right here in bulk.
Let's get back to project creation now.
We were just adding tags.
The next step is about adding people who will be able to track time within your project.
The first thing to do is to define the activities they will perform while tracking.
Let's select project management, for example.
Then, we'll add the person and enter an estimated number of hours that this particular person was allocated for this activity in the project budget.
We'll enter an hourly rate that we invoice to the client here.
We can even define tasks we want the person to track time for.
It's also possible to add more people to the same activity.
This way, we'll define all the activities and people relevant to this project.
If the only thing we know is the overall price of the project, we're able to start fixed-price projects, too.
No estimated hours, no client rates.
We'll be glad to show you how to do that on a live demo presentation.
Just drop us a line at support@costlocker.com and we'll share our screen and guide you through the process.
The next step enables you to enter external project costs,
such as stock photos you needed to buy and will be invoicing the client for;
or an external workforce that provided some of the work on the project and will need to be paid for.
That's it!
The project has now been created and we're looking at its details, where we can see the basic financial metrics.
Perhaps the most interesting is the estimated profit figure.
If everyone tracks hours equal to their estimate
and no external costs arise,
this will be your real profit.
Above it, you can see the current financial status
for now, current costs consist of external costs only, as the costs for employees' working hours are zero,
because nobody has tracked any time yet.
Let's look at how things change when people start tracking time on the project.
Time tracking works in two different modes.
You can either track time in the Start/Stop mode
or retrospectively add the hours worked later, e.g. at the end of the workday.
In the Start/Stop mode, you'll first pick a project and then click the Start Tracking button.
That starts the timer,
which can be stopped by clicking the Stop button when you're finished working.
A time record will be created in this lower part.
If you want to add working hours retrospectively, you'll have to pick a project and then enter how long you've been working
or simply select the from and to time data.
In either case, you'll save the record by clicking the Save button.
Oh, and you can track not only from your browser,
but also using our desktop app for Mac or Windows.
Back to the project tab, to see how the tracked time changed our costs and current profit.
You can easily see that current costs are now higher and current profit lower
that's because we're going to have to pay for the working hours people tracked on this project.
Let's now look at how we deal with invoicing in Costlocker.
We can't generate invoices yet, but we can track what's happening in this project with regard to invoices.
There are two options to deal with invoices on this tab.
Let's say that we've just sent the client an invoice.
I'll enter today's date, the invoiced sum and, if I want to, the invoice number.
I'll check this to acknowledge that this sum of money was actually invoiced.
Or, we can enter the date of planned invoices here.
Let's say I know that I expect the next invoice at this date, because I know the next project stage will be completed.
I won't check anything, because it hasn't been invoiced yet, but I can enter any information that will help the person who's going to generate the invoices.
Future invoices play an important role in a different part of the application as well. We call this the Billing Outlook,
which is essentially a listing of projects we'll be invoicing in these dates with these amounts.
This is handy when we want to see how much we expect to invoice this month or the next.
This information is critical when planning your cash-flow, for example.
This brings me to this graph, where we can see how well your company is doing in each individual month.
Let's take a look at this month, for example.
The blue column shows how much we invoiced.
The grey one above shows, how much we're still planning to invoice.
The yellow column shows the total costs for this month and the red one is simply a difference between the invoiced total and costs total.
This means that you're in the reds now, but if you manage to invoice everything you're planning to,
you could get in the blacks, as the green column shows.
Moreover, if you click this month, you'll get into the month detail,
where you can see how much you invoiced or are still going to invoice for which projects.
Any external costs that you need to pay this month are also shown here.
I hope this basic introduction helped you better understand of how Costlocker works.
If you're interested, we'll be happy to present you a live demo in much deeper detail.
Just drop us a line at support@costlocker.com. Take care!
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