Production Department Labor Settings

Labor can be Added for Activities that are Not on the Job: Set this to No if you only want labor entered for activities that are assigned to the job; set this to Yes if you want people to be able to enter labor for any departmental activity regardless of whether it has been associated with the job or not. We recommend setting this to No for departments where activity management is critical (like Water, Fire, Mold, and Construction) and setting this to Yes for departments where activities aren’t always added (like Residential and Commercial Cleaning).

Labor Burden: Labor burden refers to the behind-the scenes-costs of having employees. What does it cost you to have an employee? For example, in addition to your direct pay to employees, you must also pay social security, workman’s comp, insurance, medical benefits, vacation/sick time, and so on. So Chronicle can reflect these costs into the cost of doing each job, enter the percentage of your income that goes to these behind-the-scenes costs associated with having employees. For example, if you entered 30% here, and you entered $200 labor for a job, when Chronicle calculated job costs, it would add in a labor burden cost of $60, so you would see that your total labor cost was $260 rather than $200.

Talk to your accountant if you are not sure what your labor burden is; this amount is typically calculated based on figures from QuickBooks.

Dept Overhead (burden): This setting answers the question of what does it cost me to have this department? For example, you might have warehouse costs to house vehicles for packout or special equipment costs for mold jobs or you have two estimators who work on only construction jobs or you need more staff oversight time on water jobs. If you have percentages here you can see them on the Job cost screen.

Labor & Budget Can Be Changed for How Many Days After Activity is Complete: Enter the number of days that employees have to enter labor after each activity is completed. Once this number of days has passed, the activity no longer shows for the job on the labor entry screen.

Activities with Labor Need Budget: When an activity with labor is completed in the job file, this setting will warn you if nothing has been budgeted for that activity. This gives you an opportunity to put in the budgeted amounts since they have not already been entered. You might leave the Cleaning department set to no warning as you do not normally create budgets for that and Construction set to warn which almost always have budgets.

We recommend that you use the new labor manager, so leave Use new labor entry checked unless you are working with a support tech who suggests otherwise.