Using a Vendor on a Custom Development Project
We love interns! Interns help us with some of the grunt work, but also give us a fresh look at our software and our company. Sometimes we hire our interns or use them for freelancer work when they are dealing with exams, or in-between parties. In this document, we are going to go through how we leveraged our interns, sales, vendor management, projects, and AP invoicing & payments to turn a small custom dev job into a profitable well-managed project.
It all starts with the order. We met with our customer to outline the scope of work they wanted. We created a new order in our system with a custom dev service for the hours estimated and marked for time & material billing.
With the work order approved. We need to create our project and find available resources. We determined that our former intern would be the right person for the job, so we created a PO with the estimated hours and the rate.
Once he accepted, we tied him and the PO to the project. We assigned his rate and assigned him the 3 tasks he needed to complete for the project.
We uploaded the SOW to the project so he could review it in personal his portal, and used the discussion module to go over any details of the work that was unclear.
Figure 1. Upload an SOW to the Project Portal for Review by the Vendor
Figure 2. Project Discussions with the Vendor
While we use JIRA for all our dev tickets (with our Zapier integration), we use our system for hour tracking. As he completed work on the ticket, he added his hours for his effort and notes in the timesheets in the portal.
After the work week was over, he submitted his timesheet for review. We approved his hours.
We reviewed the metrics tab of the project to see if we were on pace to complete the project on time, and how his hours affected our bill rate, while also seeing his total cost to see if we have a profitable project.
Not only is our effective bill rate higher than we expected, but the work was also done correctly and ahead of schedule Go intern!.
Now, we can create an invoice in our system against the PO for the hours worked. With the invoice in the system, we can do a direct deposit through our system for the approved hours so he can have money for the weekend.
We love interns!!! And our system.