Ever wonder why your job costs never quite match your estimates? The secret lies in understanding your true labor costs. While Chronotek Pro tracks your employee time, adding pay rates transforms it from a timekeeping system into a powerful profit-tracking tool. It's not complicated, but it is powerful: accurate rates provide accurate profit tracking.

We'll show you how to set up pay rates and explain how each one factors into accurate job costing.

The base rate is what you'd expect - the hourly rate your employee is paid. This rate doesn't include payroll taxes, worker's comp, etc.

Before diving into the types of pay rates, here's how to get started:

Important: Update pay rates before closing a pay period - rates are locked once the period is closed. While pay rates are visible in the admin site, they're hidden from the Supervisor App for privacy.

Your true labor cost includes:

A loaded pay rate represents your total labor cost for an employee and provides an accurate view of what jobs really cost. We apply the percent labor overhead to the base rate to get loaded pay rates.

The system calculates loaded rates from your labor overhead settings: Settings>Payroll>Pay Profiles. Click on the profile and edit the percentage. Don't include revenue costs in this rate, such as franchise fees, leases, utilities, and supplies (revenue % goes into another field when entering a job budget).

To modify company-wide settings, go to Settings>Payroll>Labor Overhead. Contractor-only businesses can disable Labor Overhead entirely.

The image below shows that Kit's labor cost for one day was $147.75, which was his loaded pay rate, including payroll taxes. This is great visibility to have, right?

Pro automatically adjusts job costs when employees receive raises. Example: When an employee's pay increases from $12 to $13 per hour, all reporting reflects the correct rate for past, present, and future jobs. You can track the history of raises, including when they were given and by whom.

Create special pay codes for weekends or other events that require premium pay. Add either a flat dollar amount or a percentage to the base pay. Apply these codes when creating shifts, and Pro automatically calculates the adjusted labor costs.

Pro uses weighted averages to calculate accurate job costs based on hours worked. For example, you have a job where two employees work. Employee A makes $12 an hour, and Employee B makes $16. It's easy to assume that the average pay rate is $14 and use that for job costing. But let's break it down a bit further:

Example:

By comparing this weighted number to the budgeted pay rate for the job, you can determine whether you're staying on track or not.

Pro brings these calculations together to give you real-time insight into your labor costs and profitability. Enter pay rates for employees and keep them updated to get the most accurate job cost reporting.

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