Roles and role-based prices

1. What are roles?

As an admin user, you can set up roles for your site to define hourly charge-out rates for your team members based on their skill set, level of seniority, experience, responsibilities, or any other criteria. The main function of roles is to support a role-based approach to pricing, where the exact price of the service depends on who actually carries out the work. 

For example, since a Senior Designer’s salary is higher than that of a Junior Designer, you may want to charge more for a Senior Designer’s work. By setting up respective roles and role prices, these different roles can collaborate on the same task, and every minute they log will be recorded with their corresponding hourly charge-out rate, i.e. the role's selling price. 

Roles cover the whole project lifecycle in Scoro – you can sell, track and bill your services with role prices. After setting up roles and role prices, you can easily:

• create a budget for your project using role prices and labor cost
  • apply role selling rates on quotes to price services accordingly
  • estimate service delivery costs based on role-based labor rates
• track revenue based on role prices 
  • instantly see the revenue you’ve earned based on any work already completed by people in different roles
  • in case of fixed fee or retainer projects, keep an eye on how much budget you still have left as you see burndown in real time based on role prices
• bill for time based on role prices
  • each time entry automatically takes the correct selling price of the doer upon invoicing

2. How to enable and set up roles?

To use role-based prices, you need to switch on roles for your site. This can only be done by users who have the permission to manage roles. To give this permission, go to Settings > Administration > Permission sets, open the Modules and actions of the relevant permission set, scroll down to Settings and tick the Manage roles box.Now head to Settings > Sales and finance > Roles and enable roles for your site. You can then see and manage the list of roles in that same view.

NB! Once roles are enabled, each site user must be assigned to a role. Therefore, the first time you switch on roles for your site, all existing users will be assigned to a default placeholder role. You can simply delete the placeholder role once you’ve assigned all your team members to correct roles.Click on the New button to add a new role. This takes you to the role modify view, where you can name the role, define default selling prices for it, and add users to that role. You can later return to this modify view at any point by simply clicking on the role name in the role list.The selling price is the hourly rate you charge your client when someone in this role is working on their project. The prices defined here will be used by default for revenue calculation and time-billing in every project where you choose to apply role-based prices, but you can always change these values on project level whenever you need. 

If the price of the service varies depending on the nature of the project or if you do business in several currencies, you can also set up multiple price lists for your site. Once price lists are set up, you can return to Roles to define each role’s default selling price for each price list. These will be your defaults, but you can later easily modify these standard role prices on the quote or project level case by case.

You can assign as many team members to one role as you wish, but every team member can only be in one role.

Once you’ve assigned all team members to relevant roles and set up selling prices, head to Settings > Work and projects > Labor costs to set up labor costs for roles as well. This way you can conveniently use role labor rates on quotes to estimate service delivery costs and set target margins, even if you don’t know yet which team member will be delivering the service.

Role labor costs are used solely for estimation purposes. The actual cost of any service is always determined by the individual labor cost of the person who logs their time and does the work. Note! If no individual labor cost has been set for the user, Scoro will apply the Default labor cost, not the role-level labor cost.

Now that roles are set up, you can start using them on quotes for budgeting and in projects for revenue tracking and time-billing. To learn more about how to use roles and role prices on quotes, check out our article on quotes in Scoro. To find out how role prices affect real-time revenue tracking and billing, check out our articles on Quoted vs Actual table and time-billing respectively.

3. How to use roles in projects?

Once roles are enabled and properly set up, you will have the option to use role-based selling prices and labor rates on quotes when budgeting your proposal. With the role-based pricing method:

• project revenue will be calculated based on role prices
• time will be billed based on role prices

Let’s take one straightforward example project to see how this all works in practice.

First step - we’ve enabled roles and assigned each team member to a role. We’ve also set up different price lists for different currencies and defined role prices for each currency.

Now let’s suppose we have a client who wants to order a web design project. We estimate it would take around 80 hours of work. We’ll involve a junior and a senior designer to split the workload. We want to price the services accordingly, i.e. based on roles, so we’ll opt for the role-based pricing method on the quote:

We’ll create our project and tasks directly from that quote to track our costs and income accurately with the help of the Quoted vs Actual table.

By default, Scoro will use the role prices you’ve set up for the selected price list. But let’s suppose we want to increase the selling price of the Senior Designer only for this particular project. We can easily do that in this same view by clicking on Modify role prices, adjusting the value and saving the change. This will update the selling price of the Senior Designer for this particular project only.

Note! If you want to modify role prices for the project it’s important to do it before you start adding services and roles to the quote. This way Scoro will automatically use the updated role price(s) when you start adding services. If you modify role prices after you’ve added services to the quote, the unit price on the quote line will not be updated retrospectively. The updated role prices would then affect only revenue calculation later on in the project.

Therefore, first we modify the role prices for the project:

Then we add the services. Note that the unit price will remain 0 at first. To populate the correct role-based selling price, we need to assign a role or a specific doer in the Cost column as well. Scoro will then use this provider info to fill out the unit price accordingly – based on the role selling price. Since we don’t yet know which exact team members will do the task, we will use roles as doers. Scoro will automatically apply the respective role labor cost to calculate the margin for the service.

So now we know what we’re selling to the client and what’s the expected margin if we involve junior and senior designers.

Next we send out the quote to the client for confirmation. Once the quote is confirmed, we’ll create our project and tasks directly from that quote to track our costs and income accurately with the help of the Quoted vs Actual table.

Now let’s see how these same role prices affect revenue calculation once people start working on the project. Let’s say our Junior Designer, whose selling price is 80 EUR per hour, has worked on the project for 50 hours and logged time under the task accordingly. Therefore, the Income to date column in the Quoted vs Actual table shows that we’ve earned 50 x 80 = 4000 EUR so far.Once our Senior Designer, whose selling price is 100 EUR per hour, logs their 30 hours of work under the same task, the Income to date column is automatically updated to reflect that data. 30 x 100 = 3000 EUR has been added to the total.This is how role prices help you track revenue accurately in real-time as the project progresses. Note that you can also see how the final numbers look compared to the initially quoted sums. If you’re working with fixed fee projects, you can easily track budget burndown this way – by comparing income to date with the quoted sums.

Let’s suppose we also need to add an ad hoc 3 hour consultation task to the project. This will be shown in the Not quoted section because it was not included on the initial quote. However, once a team member logs their time under it, we can see how much we could potentially charge the client for this task as well.We now want to bill our client for the design work we’ve completed. We’ve enabled time-billing, so we can simply select the time entries to invoice. The unit price of each time entry on the invoice corresponds to the selling price we’ve set for respective roles. This means we don’t need to update anything manually, we can simply save the invoice and send it out.

4. What to keep in mind about roles? 

• If you assign a user to a new role, their old role will be overwritten since one user can only be assigned to one role.
• Deleting a role is only possible when there are no active users assigned to that role.