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	Subject - Busines Management John A. Peters If you are an employee please do not post questions here. John A. Peters Motivation and scoring. How do your motivate your electricians, other than hourly pay? Do you use any of these? Rewards. Commissions. Bonus. Raises. Some kind of scoring system. Commendations Recognition Promotions Time off A prepaid education plan. Currently we here at Brookline-Aries Electric are using a scoring system that accurately reports how well a man is performing. I will tell you how we score the men's performance. By the way we use the newer "lead electrician" method, rather than the older foreman system. For more information go here - http://www.hometechonline.com/lead/lead.htm and then meet back here. My estimating program provides a labor budget. Most estimating programs do or they show haw many man hours it will take which multiplied by the average hourly pay scale will provide the same labor budget. This projected gross amount that we expect to pay the electricians for doing the work is the GL-labor budget. To keep it simple we use the basic gross labor figures - hours worked times the basic hourly rate of pay, ignoring any other figures like overhead, benefits, and/or profits. Those other numbers are not part of this calculation. I added a feature to my job costing program to determine how much of a raise would be appropriate if the electrician were able to continuously perform at the same level every day, as he did on the current job. Here is the formula. You can use a spread sheet. Take the GL-budget and subtract the GL-paid. The result is the remainder of the budget. Divide this remainder by the GL-budget. Multiply the answer by 100 to convert it to a percent. For example: $2,000 is the estimated budget. $1,900 dollars is the gross labor at the end of the job. $100.00 dollars is the remaining labor budget - which is 5% I like to see a number in the range of 4 to 12 percent. Higher than that and either the man is under paid and needs a raise or else I need to adjust the final price down. If I were to leave the final bill to the customer high enough to have a 15 or 20 percent under budget, then I think I would be breaking my trust with the client, who I have promised that "I will audit the figures at the end of the job and adjust the final bill. You will not pay for anything you don't get, and conversely nothing is free. They like this form of a "flexible bid" We use Quick Books to keep track of the gross labor paid to the men on a per job basis. We keep each job's expenses separate. By running a report in Q.B. (Alt FRJ) we can see how much gross labor has been spent on a particular job. I added a place in my estimating program to enter the GL amount paid for that job. By executing a command named CALC the program provides 3 or 4 answers. The amount of a raise that could be given to the electrician and still be in budget. The remaining amount in the labor budget. The number of hours left in the job. The number of hours that would be left in the job in excess of 10% under budget. That last number is usually negative. It is there in case the client is nit-picking the report. Al the above numbers are printed as a part of the final "as-built" or "The list of work we did" report. This is in line with a form of business that I like, called open book accounting. It is best to run these calculations at least a day or two before the end of a multi-day job. If you wait until the end of the job it's too late to make changes, corrections or get a change order signed. We usually try to run the job cost calculations at various junctures of a job, like when we get a rough-in inspection, or near the end of the job. To do this in the middle of a job when we do not have all the labor figures in yet, we do this some what by hand. By calling the men in the field and getting the number of hours worked that day we can calculate an amount to add to the numbers from quick books. So we are adding in an estimated amount for the number of hours that have been worked but are not yet entered in quick books. There is a location in my program for these numbers as well as a set-a-side for the time it will take to trim out the job and the hour it takes to meet with the inspector for the final. We let the electrician know how many hours are left in the job after setting aside to proper amounts for the final elements of work The goal is to be 10% under budget, since we know that reality will not be that good. I can show you how my program works if you want, but since I will let you use it for free you will have to spend some time on the telephone with me and have a phone line in addition to your modem or broadband connection. Thank you, John A. Peters, Owner, Brookline Electric Co. 415 239-5393 Office 415 509-3599 Cell japeters@pacbell.net