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Staff Base Rates are not entered in Xero Practice Manager

Understand how missing base rates affect costing, profitability, and reporting.

Background of this issue

Base rates represent the cost per hour for our staff. Having this captured allows us to not only view the profitability of jobs, but also the performance of our staff. When base rates are not loaded, it means there will be no cost against our jobs and all jobs will therefore be showing 100% profit margin.

How to resolve this issue

Base rates can be entered by clicking into each staff member and centering their base rate. This is covered in Chapter 4: Practice Settings under the staff settings section. Unfortunately, base rates entered in XPM cannot be updated retrospectively, so the base rates entered will only be effective as at today. This means any historical time sheets will be captured with a nil rate, making job profitability incorrect until the next financial year when all our jobs roll over.

Fortunately, Link Reporting provides the ability to update base rates retrospectively, which override the XPM rates used. This means you are able to get valuable reporting at a job, staff, client and practice level from the day you started entering time sheets. You can do this in Link Reporting by navigating to the base rates section, and updating the rates for each staff member.

Timeframe to implement solution

Updating base rates takes about 30 seconds per staff member.