Roles

1. What are roles?

As an admin user, you can set up roles for your site to group team members based on their skill set, level of seniority, experience, responsibilities, or any other criteria. You can then define hourly charge-out rates for roles to track revenue or use roles in your resource planning workflow.

One of the main functions 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, as a Senior Designer’s salary is higher than a Junior Designer's, 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 entire 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
• Plan resources based on roles
  • Use roles as placeholder members when booking resources for projects to understand availability and utilization on a role level

2. How to set up roles?

Roles can be managed only by users who have the respective permission.

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. Head to Settings > Sales and finance > Roles to set up roles for your site. You can see and manage the list of roles in that same view.

NB! Each site user must be assigned to a role. Therefore, if you have not set up custom roles yet, all site users will be assigned to a Generic role by default. You can simply delete the generic placeholder role once you assign all your team members to the 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, and add users to it. You can later return to this modified view by 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 the 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.

Note! If you haven’t set an individual labor cost for a team member, Scoro will also use the role-level labor cost as the default one for all cost calculations. Read more.

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 for pricing and revenue tracking?

Once roles are properly set up, you can 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, firstly, 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 also need to assign a role or a specific doer in the Cost column.

Based on the role selling price, Scoro will then use this provider info to fill out the unit price accordingly. 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.

 

We now 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.

Let’s see how these same role prices affect revenue calculation once people start working on the project.

In this example, 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 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 in the initial quote. However, once a team member logs their time under it, we can see how much we could charge the client for this task.

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. How to use roles for resource planning?

You can also use roles as placeholder members when booking resources for your project. Read more about roles and bookings from here.

5. 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.
• Changing the role pricing will not affect the historical time entry data, as the new pricing will be applied only to time entries created after the changes are in effect. However, if you change the role pricing and then add a time entry for a date and time before the pricing was changed, Scoro will consider the new pricing for this time entry.