Hi Team, and welcome back.
In this session we're going to be going through the next step in setting up your Xero Projects
and that is choosing your project tasks.
In this I'm going to take you through creating those tasks, but more importantly
how to choose the right tasks for your business. So let's take a look.
So to get started with setting up our project tasks we need to understand what a task is.
Your tasks are what your staff are going to put their time to inside your projects
we can have multiple tasks per project.
A project might be the building of a fence and step one may be demolishing an existing fence,
step two might be construction of fence, step three might be--
construction of fence and that might be the end of it.
So our two tasks there are demolition and construction.
So that's what we're going to be setting up now, now this doesn't actually occur inside the projects tab
this occurs inside the inventory tab of Xero.
So those of you who are familiar with Xero inventory, you'll probably find this pretty straightforward
So under Accounts there's an area there called Inventory
and even though we don't inventory our tasks
we still got to add them to this section,
but we're gonna make sure they're a non-inventory item, okay?
I've got a couple set up already.
Here we go, here's a landscaping plan but I'll go with Clothing Repairs
so here's an hourly rate charge up type task repairs.
So if I open up this task...
Clothing Repairs, you'll be able to see what it looks like if I click edit
you'll notice I've given it an item code, that's just and unit code and not to important really
for most people's tasks. What it's important is our item name, needs to be fairly descriptive
and you'll notice here I've included an hour in brackets
so that as my staff are entering in
a number they know we're talking hours, not minutes or days.
So that's just a top tip there. Now, it's important that
you don't tick 'I track this item' because this is not a physical item
we don't have stock of clothing repair.
So leave that alone, but you do wanna tick 'I sell this item' because
we want it available on our invoices so we can charge hourly for our clothing repairs.
Inside here I've put in the hourly rate which is why I haven't put the hour there
inside the Unit Price this is the rate which we charge our customers
and the sales account I want that revenue to go to
the appropiate tax rate which will default from that account
and any description if different to my item name.
So that's what a task would look like
and to set one up all you need to do inside inventory list where I was
is to fill out those fields by clicking new item, like so.
Item code, item name, we don't purchase it, we complete the rest of these fields.
Now, we can do this in bulk but for your tasks
what I recommend is that you have no more than ten activities.
The real common fault I see is people create tasks for everything, every activity in their business
they will create tasks for phone calls, emails, client meetings, internal meetings,
quoting, estimating, and those keep going on, and on, and on, and it complicates their Xero Projects.
and their task based reporting.
By simplifying our tasks what we wanna get to
when we get to the reporting phase of our Xero Projects at the end of this course
we wanna be able to ask your projects what are we good at?
What do I do? How much money did I make on demolition of fences in October?
How much money did I make on construction? Are we any good at those things?
Because what Xero Projects would lead us to is say
here how long you expected that demolition to take, eight hours,
here's how long it actually took, twelve.
And you'll be able to roll that up together across all the fences you've built
and you can say 'Great, we're not any good at destroying fences'
So, that's the beauty, that's kind of what we're aiming for.
Now, how does that help you?
A good life hack I got for you is to go to your own website;
if you go to your own website what you will find, what you should find on that website
is somewhere that describes the services that you delivered to your customers,
if it's just one thing that you do
Car interior cleaning, then it's fine just to have the one task
interior cleaning.
Now if you also offer exterior cleaning, then have a second task for exterior cleaning.
If you do a special service for rims, then have a rim or tire service, for example.
You get where I'm going, we want it very broad and we probably don't--
we shouldn't really be offering more than 10 services,
because there's a good chance that if you're doing more than 10 different things
some of those things you're not doing very well.
Pick between one and ten different tasks and set them up in here in your inventory
as an item.
What that looks like on a project just so you can kind of picture how it appears.
When we go do a timesheet or when your staff go to do a timesheet
Here we got a
custom embroidered jacket.
We are able to see the embroidery task under here,
so we might have multiple tasks under here if you got a large project
You might have concept design, detailed design, developed design,
or developed design, detailed design, construction observation,
this can be quite large and broad or simple like this one, embroidery, three hours.
That's kind of what we're aiming for and what your staff will see.
Great, I did three hours of embroidery.
What we covered in that session was how to set up tasks for your Xero Projects.
We don't do that inside Xero Projects itself, we actually go to our inventory area of Xero
and add it as a non-tracked item.
We also went through some top tips around, some good examples of what a task should be
and kinda discussed where we might look for those
and kind of the upper end of how many tasks we could expect to have.
Hopefully you found that worthwhile and I'll see you in the next session.