Overview - What are Activities?

Activities are major parts of a job. For example, a construction job might include framing, drywall, finish trim work, and painting. Each of these major parts of the job are what we call activities. Similarly, the typical water loss job includes emergency service (initial visit to mitigate the damage and begin the drying), monitoring (daily checkup of the drying process), equipment pickup, and carpet cleaning/re-installation. Again, each of these main parts of the job are activities. Each job should also include non-production activities: activities like sending a final estimate, contacting the agent to let him know you are servicing his customer, and so on.

Identifying the activities that make up your jobs is important for several reasons. Seeing the activities that are part of your jobs helps you plan your resources since different people often do different activities. It helps make sure no part of the job accidentally gets left undone. It helps you monitor labor costs since labor is entered by activity; you can see parts of the job you’re doing most effectively and which parts could be done more efficiently. Chronicle comes with many activities already set up for restoration, construction, and cleaning, but you will need to customize the list of activities to match your business.

In getting your activities set up in Chronicle, there are several main steps:

1. As needed go to the activities setup and add additional activities and delete activities that you don't need.
2. Use activity templates to define groups of activities that are commonly used together for particular types of jobs. This lets you add groups of activities to jobs all at once, making sure you don’t accidentally leave any standard activity out.
3. If you are using Chronicle for job costing, customize the budgeting percentages for activities.
4. Whenever you add or delete activities, you should check the automatic rules tab to see if you need to add or delete any rules that you have set up.