Stop leaking money: How to track utilization and profitability in ClickUp
Andrew and Kuba demo Zenpilot, a custom reporting tool built on ClickUp that tracks team utilization and client profitability for agencies. They show how to spot money leaks through dashboards that measure billable hours, project margins, and team capacity without juggling separate tools.
Experience, it is the visibility into how your organization operates. So if you're someone that's craving that visibility, you want to know how you're performing, whether that's performing against a specific client budget, performing profitability wise, whatever it might be. What we're going to walk through today are the key questions you've got to be asking and then where do you find the answers? Hopefully I can show you where to find some of those answers today.
Yeah, yeah. A big part of the demo today is going to be about like showing you what's possible when you push ClickUp to the limit and build solutions on top of that, what data is actually possible to get once you have all of that in place. People are coming in with a lot of comments. Livia is tuning in from north. I'm sorry, what does GA stand for?
Georgia.
Okay. Georgia. Sorry. Bessiana is here from the Zen pilot team. Hello. Josh is here. Matthew McIver already with some comments. Estimates versus actuals has been great. Looking forward to seeing these new reporting tools. Awesome. Marina is here from Serbia. Amazing. Livia is saying we've got the basics and really loving the updated dashboard functionality, but always looking for more ways to report and optimize. Great. This is all a great fit for today. This is actually the question that I wanted to ask to you, my dear audience, our dear watchers and listeners. Like let us know in the comments about your current situation with utilization and profitability reporting with your level of visibility. What are kind of the day to day or maybe ongoing problems and situations that bring you here today to this stream? What would you like to learn? What would you like to solve? We're here for you and we want to address your specific problems. The more you can tell us about them, the more we can try and help with them. Quite a few people signed up for the live stream today, so I don't know if we'll get to all of your questions but we do want to hear them and maybe address some of them off the call. Derek is with us saying hello and welcome from Colorado. If you want to see Derek, talk about how does a little bit of polish for you. Okay. Andrew, love to see the comments rolling. Love to see the comments rolling in. Andrew, I wanted to ask you first and foremost like who do you hope is joining in today? I can see a lot of people are but like what kind of person and what kind of situation, what kind of company might benefit the most from what we've got to present today?
Yeah, I think it'd be great if there's Someone on here who's been on ClickUp for a while and has a desire for more visibility into how the team is performing. Hopefully there's someone here who feels good about like, hey, we got the basics down. Now we're ready for 2.0 or 3.0 in terms of how we operate on the system and how we engage in it. So if you're here, I think you're going to eat this up. If you're not quite at that level yet, I think you're still in the right spot. Because what I'm going to show you guys here today is what I think of as like the top of the mountain experience. It is the visibility into how your organization operates. So if you're someone that's craving that visibility, you want to know how you're performing, whether that's performing against a specific client budget, performing profitability wise, whatever it might be. What we're going to walk through today are the key questions you've got to be asking and then where do you find the answers? Hopefully I can show you where to find some of those answers today.
Yeah, yeah. A big part of the demo today is going to be about like showing you what's possible when you push ClickUp to the limit and build solutions on top of that, what data is actually possible to get once you have all of that in place. People are coming in with a lot of comments. Livia is tuning in from north. I'm sorry, what does GA stand for?
Georgia.
Okay, Georgia. Sorry. Beziana is here from the Zen Pilot team. Hello. Josh is here. Matthew McIver already with some commas, estimates versus actuals has been great. Looking forward to seeing these new reporting tools. Awesome. Marina is here from Serbia. Amazing. Olivia is saying we've got the basics and really loving the updated dashboard functionality, but always looking for more ways to report and optimize. Great, great, great. This is all a great fit for today. And this is actually the question that I wanted to ask to you, my dear audience, our dear watchers and listeners. Let us know in the comments about your current situation with utilization and profitability, reporting with your level of visibility or what are kind of the day to day or maybe ongoing problems and situations that bring you here today to this stream. What would you like to learn? What would you like to solve? We're here for you and we want to address your specific problems. The more you can tell us about them, the more we can try and help with them. Quite a few people signed up for the live stream today, so I don't know if we'll get to all of your questions, but we do want to hear them and maybe address some of them. Off the call. Derek is with us saying hello and welcome from Colorado. If you want to see Derek, talk about how project management migrations fail and what you can do about that. We streamed about that with Derek just yesterday. It's on the ZenPilot channel on YouTube and LinkedIn. Check that out while I wait for your comments about your issues that we'll be addressing here today. Andrew, we're five minutes in. It's time to start bringing some value to the audience. I'll ask you the traditional Zen pilot live show question. Are you ready?
Let's go. Fire.
Okay, Andrew, what is your number one tip for agency operators?
My number one tip is to take a break, step back, map out how you want your client journey to flow. A lot of agencies get caught in the weeds of doing what their clients want. They turn into digital yes men. I'd advise you take a step back and you, you craft a journey for your clients. You become the undisputed expert in your area and you lead them along a path. Spend so much time with your target audience that you know the challenges that they're going to face after they solve the problem that they have in their head that they're facing that you can help them solve. You want to be able to see the future for your prospects, and that way you can map a journey of expertise out for them, of, hey, I know where you are, here's where you are now, here's what you might be feeling right now, here's what we can do to get you to the next level. And I'll tell you what, once you get to that next level, here's the next set of problems and challenges you're going to be feeling. And you can trust that we're setting you up for solving those things before you even realize them here today. If you could hover over one specific area, solve problems, understand problems at a deep, deep level there and become that, go to map that to your client journey. You're going to be in a really, really good spot as an agency owner because you're maximizing expertise and you're not competing on commoditized services at that point.
Okay, I love that. I like how the number one tip usually is not like one to one related to the topic, but it's something extra that you're giving here. I wanted to spend one extra minute on this. So for this client journey, obviously this is something that we've been working on here at Zenpilot as well. What do you think is kind of the most key change that for example, we've introduced in the client journey or that agencies should look at in the client journey that makes the most difference when you actually go and make that change and build that journey for them?
Yeah, I mean, if you're just getting started on it, I think that the gateway, the first step in the process for us, it's a blueprint. When we were running an inbound agency, it was a game plan. But having a discovery strategy level product that gives you the bandwidth to talk at a higher level with your clients and to not get drilled into like a requesting a quote on specific deliverables. You want to elevate the conversation and get into more of the strategic area. So if you don't have a strategy level offer, I'd encourage you to try that out and try leading first with the strategy offer. You can take that, that should be a paid endeavor. The client can credit that towards the next step in the. In the client journey. If you want to, you can have it standalone as well. But what that allows you to do is learn more about the pain that the client is experiencing, not just in flashing your portfolio of what you can solve for them. The deeper you know the pain, the deeper solution you can provide. And the more times you provide that solution, the more proficient you get at delivering it. The more proficient you get at delivering it, the more streamlined your processes can be inside your PM tool. The more streamlined your processes are inside your PM tool, the greater the visibility you'll have into how your team's performing and you'll know then how to optimize that playbook. If you're a digital yes man doing something different for everybody all the time, then you can't really optimize and improve that machine. There has to be some element of standardization. And if you're going to measure and if you're going to measure, then to optimize.
Okay, I love that. You know, the analogy I usually use here is medical, like jumping straight to the deliverables to me feels like going to the doctor and saying, you know what? I just, I need this specific surgery. Could you quote me like how much for that specific surgery? And when could you open me up? And you know, any professional is going to say, that's not how we do this. Let's diagnose you first. And that's going to cost you as well. But it'll actually allow you to uncover what's happening in there and what surgery. If at all is needed. So when you look at it through that lens, it becomes quite obvious. Okay, so the comments are popping right now. I'm trying to keep up with all of this. You're talking about the specific cases that you've got, the specific sources of data. Matthew is saying about having his data here in Data box from QuickBooks Harvest Data, but would like to get the data right from the where the work. From where the work is being done. That will be part of our live demo. So you're on the right track here. Liv is saying her company is using the time tracking software Everhour, which integrates with ClickUp, but curious if might go back to directly to ClickUp and ClickUp's native time tracking option. That will be part of the demo. So I'm trying to not address these one by one because I feel like, you know, we should get as quickly as possible to what we've got to show today because that will answer a lot of the questions here today. And special shout out to Alex Rizzia from from zenpilot for already addressing some of these questions in the comments. Love it. Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay, so like we're about to start the live demo of the solution we've built for utilization and profitability reporting. One last step before that is I wanted you, Andrew, to talk a little bit about kind of the origin story behind why we built this, why it's built the way that it's built, and how did it happen that we have this to talk about today, this ZP reports solution.
Yeah. Well, I think both Matt and Olivia's questions both kind of hit on the pain that we're trying to solve for here. Is that natively inside of ClickUp and ClickUp's dashboarding tool set and those widgets, there's no visibility now into how utilizes your team, what are your rates as team members, any of those things. What does a budget container look like for a contract that you're servicing? ClickUp is a blank slate. It's like buying a whiteboard and a pack of markers. You could put anything onto that. And for some people that's super inspiring. And for some people that's paralyzing. And so for the last, for the last handful of years here at Zen Pilot, we've been focused on helping construct a Zen Pilot methodology that you can empower inside of that ClickUp framework in order to help you have more visibility into what, what and how your organization is running. Because the key to clear reporting is a standardized data structure. Like it doesn't matter what you're reporting on, if you're trying to pull HubSpot CRM numbers, you've got to have a tight definition of what are your pipeline stages. You got to have tight habits on your salespeople of putting numbers on deals at certain points. And so the, the report that you're looking at at the end is so much influenced by the structure and the habits that your team execute at the beginning. So if you don't have those first two things down, you can have the fanciest dashboards in the world, but they won't show you anything real. And so the challenge with ClickUp right now is that the widgets don't even exist to get agency owners the visibility that they need. And as we've met with the ClickUp exec team, they, they're all about it, they're excited about the ideas, but the focus and the direction of ClickUp is one app to rule them all. They're not building this for the client services use case. They're not going for that professional service automation tool type reporting stack. It just doesn't meet enough of their target user base. So it's out there, it's an idea, but it's nowhere in the near term future to get that natively inside the tool. So we need to look and say, how do we manage user rates, how do we manage labor rates, how do we manage contract budgets, how do we factor in, you know, your internal labor costs, your external deliverable expenses, those sorts of things to roll up a clean report of how we're doing, where we're doing. Because right now you're, you're kind of stuck in the, the, the areas where people have been already today. You gotta have some stuff coming in from Harvard, you gotta have some stuff coming in from QuickBooks, you gotta have some stuff coming in from ClickUp. And, and what happens when you, when you're patching the tools together like that is it's kind of diluting the power of the one tool having everything in one spot or you gotta kinda make some pros and cons handoffs there. So what we're gonna walk through here today is a, is a reporting suite that you can embed inside of your ClickUp dashboard. It is not a native ClickUp widget. It is its own, it's our own software product that lives on top of ClickUp. We extract information out of your ClickUp account, put the reports together, you can embed those reports inside your ClickUp workspace to see this stuff. And we also build inside of Your ClickUp workspace, all the lists and data you need to manage your users, your labor rates, the different role based rates that you need for different projects, however you structure your billing, that's another side of this thing that makes it more complex is every agency structures their, their billing, their budgeting in a little bit of a different way. So whether you're trying to map it into a specific tool like Xero or QuickBooks, or you're just trying to get simple reporting like we'll walk through here today, it's a complex area. And so that's another thing that kind of puts a, a big question mark on ClickUp ever handling this in house is how niche the, the use case is here when, when you're talking to, you know, we got this crew here together, we all know it, we all feel the pain, we all want this solution. When you pull that up to the next level, we might be a smaller voice in that conversation, but that's why we were here. We wanted to tackle the problem. So we've been working for years, one on one with customers to help solve this problem. We've done a lot of workarounds, we've done some manual stuff, we've done different things with automations all natively inside of ClickUp to provide this kind of clarity. And stuff has worked, it's been beneficial, it's helped fill in the blanks, but it's not been as streamlined as we have wanted it. So we've been working on this kind of external tooling to sit on top of ClickUp for a few months now. And we've got our first agencies inside of it. Loving it so far it's continuing to iterate quickly and evolve and just super excited to bring folks in. But the origin is out of the pain. We're in the trenches with agencies every single day who desire clarity and have lacked the means to gain that clarity. So our team helps train on those first two pieces. Get your technology structure right, get your habits right. And now we've got the reporting piece on the back end of that to provide the visibility that you need into how that organization is running.
Yeah, yeah, okay. And kind of putting myself in the audience's shoes here, Aga, Olivia, I am seeing your questions coming in. Give us a moment to get through some of the main content that we've got here here today. And if we have time left over, we'll get into kind of your specific questions. But again, putting myself in the audience's shoes here, I think some people might be thinking, just show us the thing. So we're about to do that. Andrew, is it okay if I pull up the screen share now?
Yeah, yeah, go for it, man.
Okay, here we go. Let's show you CP reports. Let us know that you can see this. Okay. Or try to make it as big and visible as we could. You might have to go full screen to be able to read all of the text. But as you can see, this is something that has its own ui. It's built like we mentioned on top of ClickUp. And I'm noticing that probably Andrew, you should be talking about this.
Take it away. Kuba, you got this man.
What they're seeing here. So you take it away please, please, please.
Love it. Absolutely. So again, this is an external dashboard that we've just embedded inside of ClickUp. What's great about the way that this is built is it's ClickUp user verified. So we're going to get into some data and some information in this that you probably want to constrain to just certain elements of your organization. You might not want all this data out to everybody and so you can select who you want to have access to this demo. So even if you accidentally turn to the, the ClickUp dashboard to public or whatever, you're not going to have, you're not going to have someone seeing this who shouldn't. It's all ClickUp user verified information in here. And so we're going to start here at this overview area. And at the overview area we're really looking at the intersection of, of like our, our resources. Who do we have available, what time has been planned for them to do work. So that's availability and then future state and then what has been tracked already past. So we're looking at those three areas right here. And so as I look at the overview I can see first of all, what's my total availability here? What if that is out of office because we want to factor that into things. It's not, that's not effort that we can account for when it comes to delivering our client services, but it is, it is stuff that we need to be, be looking at there. What percentage of our overall time is committed? That means we've, we've scheduled workout, we have time estimated associated with different resources. Then what's the amount of time that we have available? So at the overview level here we're really trying to build a dashboard that provides the agency operator with a high level view. How are we doing right now at what we're at, how we're, we're running things here. So we've got, we've got different setups here to track these things and to pull us down the line here. What I'm showing you here is a demo dashboard. This is not real data in here. So there's certain things that, excuse me, you'll be able to see kind of a see and feel a taste of what it's going to look like. But it's going to look a little bit different obviously depending on your situation and how many team members you have, how many of those are full time versus part time, how many, how you've configured your work in terms of what is, what has time estimates associated with it. That's again part of the work that we do here at Zenpilot is help you get good processes in place because a big part of clear reporting is knowing what's to come. And so the estimated factor in here is super valuable to see what time is estimated against which users because that feeds our workload, visibility and everything that we do going down the line from there. So we're looking at a high level overview of these things. We can see month by month, what's capacity estimated and tracked. This is a great spot to catch our trends and just see like are we consistently seeing that we are over tracking what we've estimated. If I see here that my greens are exceeding my yellows month over month over month, that means I've got a process problem. That means either work is sneaking in that wasn't planned or the templates that I'm deploying don't actually match reality. So when I see that trend, I can go and investigate from here. And this is just meant to be a launching point from this point right here. Yeah, if I see that capacity is always, you know, a skyscraper above what's estimated, that means I've got some freed capacity here where we could be leveraging that somewhere else. So you can see here in August I'm a little bit more, my estimate is a little bit more tied to my capacity, but my actual time logged is ahead of that. So I'm burning my team here in August. I need to be aware of that and make decisions off of that.
So that's, and that's one of the, if I may, like in my view, that's one of the key things that you can uncover and just the immediate financial benefit of this is that if you're finding, using this data that you've got free capacity that you didn't even know about, then you're able to bring on new clients and just Bring in more revenue faster than you perhaps thought. A couple questions came in in the meantime, just quick ones that I wanted to address along the way. To satisfy our viewers curiosity, Olivia is asking, is this built on Google Analytics?
No, the visualization engine is Power Bi for this.
Power bi. There you go. And I think that I know the answer to this one, but Kristen, Hello Kristen, thank you for joining us. Once again, where is the out of Office data pulling from?
You want to pull this will be pulled out of a ClickUp out of Office management area. How that area is constructed, is that listening to a third party tool like Gusto or something like that, or our team members submitting requests through ClickUp that would be hashed out. But there's, there's going to be an area inside of ClickUp where that data is pulled from to be represented here, associated with a user. All those sorts of things.
Yeah, it's perhaps not the most immediately intuitive thing to have out of Office handled in ClickUp, but once you have that properly implemented, it's so centralized and it's so useful. Like I noticed I submitted an out of Office form here at zenpilot and the tasks that I had kind of scheduled for those days when they marked them as out of office, they. They automatically got attack out of Office. And that needs to be addressed. Right? Because like I'm physically incapable of addressing them on that day because I'm playing a gig, for example. Was that was the case there actually. And I've got. Let me just read this one question, this one comment. Do you think we could address this one from Livia? Just a quick comment here. Livia's responding to Kristen, but that's an interesting point. She's saying this is something I haven't been able to solve in the workload view unless we add tasks for time off for each user, which would be duplicative of them entering their time off in Everhour. Definitely a struggle. So is the answer here just centralizing this in ClickUp or is it deeper than that? Is there more?
Yeah, that's one of the challenges with Everhour is they've got an integration with ClickUp, but it's just an overlay integration. So you just kind of see layers on top of ClickUp what's happening in every hour. But every hour doesn't tell ClickUp what's happening. So it's only a one way flow there. So by centralizing everything inside of ClickUp, your time estimates, your time tracked, and then this reporting in there as well, you can really eliminate the need to keep those disparate systems updated. That way it's all centralized. So typically, what we're seeing when someone's operating on this structure, they're saying goodbye to Harvest or they're saying goodbye to every hour to go all in on ClickUp time tracking and then have these reports layered on top of that. Historically, a lot of the reasons to go to an every hour or a harvest have been because of the reporting capabilities, the invoicing capabilities on top of this. So this is. It's bridging that gap and bringing. Bringing you closer into ClickUp. Because when we're using ClickUp for a workload visibility solution, we want to make sure that time is living on a task. And so then we got a log time in the PM tool. So then you're looking at an overlay with Harvest or every hour. If we can remove that, you're just tracking it natively and ClickUp this creates a little bit more of a streamlined experience and just one less thing that can go wrong in terms of the syncings happening and everything on top of this. So this is. It's bridging that gap and bringing you closer into ClickUp. Because when we're using ClickUp for a workload visibility solution, we want to make sure that time is living on a task. And so then we got a log time in the PM tool. So then you're looking at an overlay with Harvest or everyhour. If we can remove that, you're just tracking it natively and ClickUp, this creates a little bit more of a streamlined experience and just one less thing that can go wrong in terms of those syncings happening and everything and brings us.
All closer to one app to rule them all. Actually, we're getting there. There you go. Okay, I think for the time being I'm going to put you back. Olivia, in response to saying we might have to go back to the dark side, which is click up native time tracking. It's only the dark side because we use dark mode all the time on ClickUp.
Okay.
I would argue it's actually the light side anyway.
That's great.
Andrew. I'm going to put you back kind of on the main rails here. Do keep taking us through what we're seeing here and I'll wait for a few more questions to come in before we address them along the way.
Love it. Two of the things we want to capture in this overview. I'm going to try to pick up the pace here for everybody. Capacity analysis on the left hand side. Just a snapshot across the whole team, what is available, where is it going right now, what's out of office, what's our, what's our utilization? And we think about utilization. We're looking at what is time spent working on billable work in a delivery area and what is all the other time, the time you spend growing your agency or the time you spend running your agency, the operational components. And as we think about this at zenpilot, we put agency effort into three buckets. It's either growth effort, delivery effort, or operations effort. And so we reflect that in our spaces inside of ClickUp. The spaces are the containers for effort. That's where the tasks live and the tasks get time estimated. And the main ingredient that we have as an agency is, is a person's time. It's, it's usually the most prevalent thing on, on the books for an agency is the HR element. What are you paying for your human resources? So all of our, the lens through which we, we analyze the performance of a team is going to be through that time lens. So where is time going inside of the organization? So at a high level we want to know that utilization and then seeing that visualized here, what percentage is in that delivery area versus that growth or that operations area right there? So that's the overview, just gives you kind of a jumping point at the beginning. We can then jump into tasks and get more information on the tasks that live inside of each of those containers there. The things I want to shout out here are on the left hand side. We've got that expected versus working. So this is kind of like an estimated versus actual rolled up and laid side by side month over month here. And you have the option here to filter this down. Say I want to analyze a specific client month over month. I can quickly do that by just selecting the folder that I want to analyze here and see that month over month in that way to see how one specific client is performing across all of these different widgets we've got here on the report. But you can quickly see that going back to the kind of the agency as a whole right there. So we want to look at time, but then we also want to look at time through the lens of work category. This is a Zen pilot term. We use a ClickUp dropdown field to designate the tasks that are in a certain work category. As we build out our task templates, we put work categories against all those tasks so that we know what work category or line of service is a specific amount of effort being pointed towards. So we can see software development Internal systems, General admin. These categories are designated by custom fields inside of ClickUp when you deploy those tasks. So you can see right there by category, how are we doing estimated versus actual. This is super helpful if you have say you're kind of a full service shop and you've got a wide variety of service lines that you're offering. You always wanted to know like what how is it actually, how are we actually doing and performing each of these things? If you can see that your tract is way over your estimated on a specific service line, that again is a trigger to jump off and start doing more research on that point. If I see that say my organic content or my long form content service line work category there is sucking a lot more time than we had estimated. I can go and do some investigation on that, drill into it, see, is it one client, is it just one account manager? What is what's going on in that area? So it helps you gain a lens of visibility into the organization by seeing data just sliced in a different way here. So this whole report here is dedicated to tasks and breaking tasks down, understanding what is under what is over and getting more visibility into how your tasks are performing across your whole workspace.
Okay, so if I could stay here for just an extra minute, I do think that's the, that's the place to ask about this. So you know, promoting this event, I wrote about that. You know what this can allow you to do is to actually identify which service lines you're actually making more money on than you perhaps realize or perhaps where you've got a negative ROI and don't even realize this. So this is the data that allows you to uncover it, right?
Yeah, it definitely starts that discovery period because this is agency wide at this point. So maybe I see that and it looks good, but I drill into one client and that's the one client that's draining me. And I'll be able to see that if I drilled here. But I also could see that on the other side when I look at the client specific reporting. So we want to analyze how we're performing through these different vectors into the data. So we're going in through tasks here to analyze how we're doing. We'll go in through budgets and through account managers on these other tabs, but just each of these tabs is just a different tunnel into your data and it tells a different story that can help you smoke out issues. That's what we're trying to do here. How are we doing? Where are we underperforming? Show Me where to investigate and I can go and either have a conversation with somebody, go to that location inside of ClickUp and look inside that folder, go through some comments, get some more context there. But this is meant to tell us where are the issues that we need to solve.
Okay, so that was the tasks tab. If any questions about that roll in, I'll address them. None for now. Let's keep going. I bet people want to see more.
Next one is users. So here we're looking through the lens of your individual team members. So we can see utilization by team member right here. And again this is just looking at what time goes into our delivery area versus other areas. We can see this over time. We can see what, what has been, what's their availability, what have they estimated and planned there, what's been tracked, what's moved into consumed. So it's already been. But that that availability has been eaten up right there. What about that is out of office as well. So we're just, we're looking at that capacity point here and we have the option to see that as a team or drill into that as an individual what is tracked, what is remaining. So we've done a lot of work here to get down into the specifics and get down into more of the nitty gritty. Whereas clickups time reports right now or, or like time entry specific. We're trying to get a little bit more context into these reports so you can drill into different areas by the lens through which you're drilling is the individual here. So I can see utilization, I can see how that time went into a specific month. I can also see across the whole org how am I doing at available time versus track time versus out of office time to just again see I've paid for this effort. I've got a team member here. Where is that time going? Is it invisible time? Kind of this time here between I've got 674 hours of tracked but I've got, you know, 1230 hours of availability. That means I need to figure out what's going on in that time. How do we, how do we put more on that person's plate or make sure that there's no shadow work happening that's not in the system. Going to give you a point to kind of launch and ask more questions to see what's going on.
So yeah, can, can you tell me more about kind of the kinds of issues and you know, problems to solve that this might help smoke out as you might say?
Yeah, I mean quiet quitting is a Big issue right now on, on agency teams. Someone who just has decided they're kind of done and so they start mailing it in. And if you, if you've got, if you're looking regularly at this information, you can see that story pop up because people aren't going to be getting their time in consistently across the, across the workspace. And one of the things that we recommend is that you train your team not to do end of month or end of the two week time period time logs, but you get team members to log time on tasks as they do them. When you have task based time entry, you don't just get this utilization by a team member, you also get that work category estimated versus actual that we looked at on the last tab. If I don't have my team members tracking time against the task, then I lose any analysis that I would have over the estimated time, the actual time it takes to create a deliverable or a phase of a project, or a project as a whole. So I really want to advocate for that task based time entry and robust templates that get updated often based on your data so that you can have the most visibility into honing and optimizing your deliverables and the phases of your projects. But also it gives your team leads a better view into who's engaged in the process. If I've quite quit and I'm kind of, you know, getting through the day, not doing my stuff, it's harder to do that if I'm having my team members log time on tasks and update task statuses and leave comments on tasks and do different things like that. So that it's a habit piece that can impact the outcome that you get from the reporting side of things. That would be one example. Another one would just be thinking about your team and the target utilization that you have for your team. You can, you can look at this, you can go back in time and see what is a certain team looked at in terms of utilization. Because your utilization, you may have a blanket target you have for your team. Say it's, it's 75, 80%, something like that. But there's specific teams where that's, or specific individuals where that's going to vary. That's, that's largely unique, team to team. Someone you might want it like a 95% utilization. Someone else might be like a 30% utilization. Depends on what their role is and what they're called to do. So this allows you to see some side by side and overtime views of what that looks like.
Yeah. And you're calling out an interesting feature of this solution as well is that there is a date section there and you can look at past data if you want or analyze trends, et cetera. I wanted to underline before I get to some of the questions that rolled in. In the meantime, I wanted to underline one thing that you mentioned. Like we said at the beginning, we're showing you kind of the top of the mountain. The final point of the data that you're able to surface, but that requires work within your operations to actually get everybody on board tracking that data, as Andrew said, not on a monthly basis, not bi weekly, but as you do the task. So that's not even at the end of the day, but like throughout the day. And that's the kind of work that's required here. That's why we harp on processes and habits so much here at zenpilot. And for as long as we're here, we're going to keep harping on it. You need to do that work internally and of course we can teach you how to build these habits to be able to surface this data. But once you have it, it's game changing for the business. Now I wanted to get into. Okay, there's this one quick question from Aaron asking what is the dashboard widget? It's an embed of a Power BI view. That's the answer here.
Yeah. So if you missed it earlier, you're not going to be able to find this natively inside of ClickUp. This is like Zen pilot reporting visualized through ClickUp here. So it's not native inside of ClickUp.
Yeah, yeah. So just to clear that up, and Josh has an interesting question. How customizable are these dashboards in regards to visual layout and themes? Can we rearrange content depending on relevancy? So really getting into the nitty gritty here. But what's the answer?
Not right now, Josh. Maybe someday we get to that point where we're more like user level customization. But right now we're working with our, with the clients that are using this right now to nail the actual reporting widgets and flow, making sure we've got all the key information in there. And then we're going to move more into the user experience side of things, the design side of things as we, as we learn and pull aside, pull alongside customers in that. But for right now, it is what you see right now.
Yeah. The way to customize this would be to become our clients, get CP reports and then give us feedback on the layout.
Shameless plug.
Shameless Plug Exactly. You can go to the zenpilot site right now under Solutions. There's a whole landing page for this solution right here. Okay. This one is fairly specific. I don't know if you want to answer this on the call, but I'm going to read it anyway. Olivia's asking is the cost for the Power BI dashboard variable based on the blueprint exercise. So that's our paid discovery that Zenpilot goes through with their prospects clients.
Yeah, the, the variable rate of getting this set up is tied to the current condition of your workspace. So you need to be data compliant in order for the reporting to, to flow and make sense. So the variable that would apply would just be an analysis of where your workspace is right now, which is what the blueprint exercise is all about, is looking at your data structure and understanding what are the current pains and challenges that you're facing as an organization and what would the action steps be that we would take to overcome those challenges and what are the data structure points that we need to have alive inside of your ClickUp workspace in order to enable the action plan that helps you overcome your challenges. And so that blueprint is going to lay out kind of a two dimensional breakdown of what your structure should look like, what some of your custom fields and locations, spaces, folders, lists, that kind of stuff that are, that's going to set up reporting solutions like this to make sense. So that's where the variable just be. What's, what's the delta between where you are today and where you need to be from a structure perspective to have all this make sense.
The delta, I love that. So what I'm hearing is if you're already as unpilot client data compliant, you've got the habits, you're tracking time the way that it needs to be tracked for this to work. It's a much easier conversation to get this report for your agency.
Yep, absolutely.
All right. Okay. We're getting all sorts of thank yous here from the nice people on the stream where we answered the questions. Thank you for submitting the questions. Keep them coming. For now. Andrew, I'm gonna put you once again back on the main rails. Let's show us the rest of the views. I know there's still quite a bit.
To cover, so we hit users, we hit tasks, we hit overview. I want to jump into the AM side and this is where we start to pivot from just like individual performance to collective performance and where we begin to get into the budget tracking side of this stuff. So we've got how do we handle kind of where time is going for individual users. That's kind of one lens through which to look at things that can be. I can really look at things through the eyes of like a team leader, but we've also got the client side of things and how do we group our work together by account manager. So one thing that we do when we work with agencies to structure their ClickUp workspace is we delineate the contracts that are managed by a specific person. This is a client lead or an account manager is a common name. You could have a different name inside of your organization that makes sense for this. But what we're really trying to get at is who is the main guardian of the client relationship, who's in charge of collecting demand for our resources from the client, either in the form of client requests or in the form of building the strategy for the client and prescribing it to the client. Either way, we're, we're agreeing to do things for our client and somebody needs to be responsible for overseeing the doing of those things. And so here you'll see we've got Daniel and Sarah. Each of them oversee clients in this demo environment here. And I can see my, all of my effort grouped by these account managers. So I can see the estimated. I can see the time track, I can see how much is remaining here. And the remaining is just kind of looking at what is, what is the. Where are we at right now in terms of overall consumption along the path there. So that, that gives us some indicators there of how we're performing on that side of things. We can also see that the amount of contracts that each account manager is managing. So the piece of the structure that informs how this all rolls up is we want to associate kind of an account manager with an active contract rather than an active client because a client could technically have multiple different contracts going with your agency at any point. So we want to look at budgets through the lenses of contracts rather than through the lenses of, of a specific client. So we can manage those things because there's a lot of clients we work with that could work with multiple clients at the same time, have different account managers internally for each of those clients depending on the type of project that they're working on, working and burning through different budgets and stuff like that. So the AM page here lets us drill into each of our account managers and see how are they performing across individual clients in terms of managing the effort that's planned. This Sarah is not responsible for all these tasks, but she is responsible for making sure that those promises that were made to the client are delivered. And if we're over tracking our time over our estimates for, for a group of clients that all associate with one account manager, that tells me we got something wrong with the planning and the, the guidance of that work. So that, that helps me again find an issue that we can smoke out and, and go and solve there. And you can see here, when you look at some of our, our red and green indicators here, we're, we're looking to be close to 100, but if we're super low or we're super high, we're, we're still going to flat get a flash of red there to help us identify issues that we need to go and pay attention to on the time side of things.
So basically from the executive perspective, it allows me to assess how my account managers are doing and whether they're keeping all these contracts kind of within the set parameters per client as well.
Bingo. Bingo. And you can also see like, how are we doing at getting our time into each of these areas? Because if there's, if there's no value there, that means that there's, there's missing time in those situations. So it's another compliance check for us to make sure that the data is getting into the system there.
Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. That's, that's a great added benefit. Okay, let's keep going.
So that's our account manager side of things. We can also look at the cost side of things. And here we're looking at the cost of our labor to see what, what is the effort that's being put out into each of these, into each of these clients. So where you can do this in a variety of different ways, we kind of talk through that one to one on how we're associating this. If this is dollars to individuals or this is dollars to roles. On the, on the labor side of things, it's going to be dollar to individual because you've agreed to pay this person this much money in exchange for their time. And that's going to be populated inside of your ClickUp, inside of your ClickUp account on a list. You'll be able to have a, a list of individuals there where you groom those rates and keep, keep up to date with that kind of stuff that lives in your workspace. And then this system pulls that information out and presents it to you to look at what is your, what are the time estimates for those individuals? The time estimate multiplied by their hourly rate. The labor rate for an individual is Going to give you the cost. And so when we look at those numbers we can really see what does cost look like for us across our clients and to some agencies do this really, really well. Some, some other ones struggle with this. Just the, the idea of looking at, looking at the time that individuals spend talking about things and working on things and collaborating as investments. You're paying for that time. So if I have an all hands meeting, I'm paying for that meeting. If I'm having a, an all hands brainstorm for a client for the third time this month or this campaign cycle, I'm paying for that. And so this report helps you get an idea of where is that money going. It helps you visualize that and associating it with time here. And so that's how we drill into this side of things. As you go into here, cost by client, you can see those costs broken down by service line right here. So this is again just what is the expected and worked here. And then drilling into that where, where is that money being broken down to what you were asking about earlier Cuba, those individual service lines, where is that effort going? You can see some of that stuff come up here in dollars. And the last time, the last tab I'll jump into here is the budget side of things. And so this is where we want to be able to see what it. When we looked at the revenue that comes in from a specific client, kind of the dollar number next to a contract and then we add in and factor in all of the costs associated with that contract. How are we performing? Let me just see that in kind of in plain numbers right out here. And so this allows us.
You know what, sorry to stop you. Could I take you one step back to the previous view? There's something that I'm actually quite curious about. You mentioned the rates of team members kind of figure into this cost analysis. So are these rates sourced from ClickUp as well?
Yeah, we would just. You would centralize that. And you want to calculate what is the full cost of employing somebody. You want to factor in the benefits, the insurance, taxes, all that stuff to come up with a, an effective hourly rate for each. Not effective like the labor rate. What does it cost per hour for you to employ that person? And that becomes your cost item here. And that's, that's what would feed into this. And that's going to be a little bit different if you've got a full time versus part time versus contractor, all that kind of stuff. But you would own that list inside of ClickUp. And we'd obviously permission gate that, because that's pretty proprietary information. So you'd want to control who has access to that as you go through.
But you can do that. You can do that in ClickUp. Okay, and one last thing I'm curious about. In this view, you expanded the boxes on the right, but you didn't expand the boxes on the left. And I'm curious about what happens if you go kind of under month department on the left there.
I want to clarify one thing that you said. You said you can do that in ClickUp, and that's just we configure a list where that information lives. You don't go searching down the user fields to find the labor rate. That doesn't exist inside of ClickUp. We're going to populate that information into a task list. One task per user, per team member, and put that data on a task list so that through the API we can grab those numbers and show them here on the report. But it doesn't natively live. You don't tie it to a user when you're configuring a user. Setting user permissions inside of ClickUp.
Yeah, yeah, gotcha. Okay, so now what happens on the cost per user? Yeah, you're mousing over it. Show me. Okay, so here we go.
Here we go. Cost per user and team. So I got my teams in here, my design, development and strategy teams. And if I go into a specific team, I have individuals on that team. So that's the hierarchy and flow on this side. On this side, it's the work categories or the service lines associated with those tasks. So you get to see both sides.
Okay, gotcha. Right. Sorry to kind of stop you. We were already in the budget tab and Livia, I see her comment. Yeah, I guess we were curious about the same thing. Right?
That's great.
Okay, let's keep going then.
Love it. So on the budget side of things, again, inside of ClickUp, you'll have a space where your budgets are maintained by contract. How much effort can you put into each of these, each of these contracts? And so this is our area here where we can drill in and see how are we performing against those budgets. So if I come in into August, I can see kind of top line numbers here, but if I drill down deeper, I can see individual client performance. I can see where we're in the red, where we're in the green. What are we overall? You know, what's our. What's the amount of time that we've tracked versus budgeted, all that stuff kind of line item to your by client, by month. What I love about this that's, I mean you can't do it inside of ClickUp right now, but what this allows you to do is, is do one of two things. You can go up here at the top and you can filter down the specific client that you want to see. So if I just want to see Apple, I can update all my widgets with that and see month over month right here exactly what Apple is doing across the board. Then I can expand these. I mean, there's just gonna be one client in there, but it just, it allows me to filter what's, what's hidden in those areas. If I wanted to say, look at one specific account manager's budget performance here, I could select different clients and load those things in and see how that, see how they're doing kind of across a suite of clients there. So it gives you some filtering ability to drill in and see how are we doing kind of across across the board there. So then we can also dig into the. Since we've got revenue and we've got cost, we can project profitability as well. So we, we can drill in there and see profitability across the board for each of those clients as well. And if we drill into this, we can see kind of the flipped perspective, what's the one client over the year and then as you drill down into months there.
Yeah, yeah. And actually you got me curious because you just showed us one of the filters there to be able to filter, you know, by clients. For example, what do the other filters do at the top, top there?
Yeah. So the, the, we can look at the status of the contracts right now. So if we need to look at like this is active or former clients. So we can drill into to that, we can look at the, the lists within a specific folder here. So this is going to play into account if you have one client with multiple, multiple contracts going on. A contract's going to equate to a list. You can then drill in and see, okay, I've got one client and I can see one specific list associated with that client there. And then on the manager side, it's again that account manager custom field, that same lens through which we use that AM tab. We're just going to analyze the budget view here from that AM perspective. And then you can obviously play with your dates to see, you know, what, what time range are you looking at here for this stuff?
Awesome. Awesome. Alex left a comment. I'm not sure if this relates to what we were just talking about or a minute ago, I still wanted to highlight it. This is the section that makes you rethink how good or effective you are at what you do. Yeah, I mean, when you have the data visible clear as day, it gives you all sorts of answers. All righty. We got 10 more minutes on the clock here. This would be an excellent time for more questions to roll in. If you've got them, happy to take them. Meanwhile, Andrew, is there more to see here? If not, I've got some other questions to hit you with.
No, you guys have seen again, this is, this is very early on for us right now. We've got live clients using this right now. We've been developing it over the last few months, but we are over the target in terms of providing more visibility into the client management use case on top of ClickUp. So we want to, we want to hear from you guys. What do you want from this? What do you wish? ClickUp. Provided that it doesn't right now. Because these things are going to continue to evolve and continue to be optimized as we learn more and as we get into things. So it's a very exciting time because again, these are things that we had to patch multiple tools together before and never really got a full visibility into what was going on. So we're really excited to kind of bring this to market and share it with folks.
Okay, can you tell the audience, I mean, I'm sure there's some people watching this that are thinking, I want this. How do I get my hands on it? Like, what's the path towards that?
Yeah, I would go to, I go to zenpilot.com and, and book a call with us there and just talk about your current situation. If you're already operating on top of ClickUp, we're probably going to do an audit of your workspace to just see what's the current data structure and what are the gaps between where you are today and where you need to go. If you've been following the Zen pilot methodology, either, you know, you follow the content that we put out and you, you've organized your workspace accordingly, or you've been a past client of ours, there may be some, some tweaks and changes that we need to play in. If you've never worked with us before and never followed our what we've done, still go to zenpod.com call but there's probably going to be a couple steps you need to get to before this reporting is possible because it's, it's kind of the foundation points of clear reporting. You think of it like a mountaintop. You start at the base of the mountain and you're building your strategy to get to the top. That's our blueprint. Then you're going to move into implementation where you're, you're building the structure inside of ClickUp and then you're moving into more of the process building pieces, which is where all those effort projections come from, where the repeatable, predictable processes come into play, where the team habits get applied. The reporting piece sits on the top of all of that stuff. So it all plays together and it all lines up there. And it's just going to depend on where are you in that journey and progression that's going to dictate to us. How can we best help you in getting these things fired up and live as soon as possible?
Yes, that's excellent. So the easiest, fastest way to get your hands on this is to book a call with us. Zenpilot.com call. If you want to read more about this on our website zenpilot.com under Solutions, you can. Thanks, Olivia, for that comment. You can find in the dropdown there's a whole page that Jeff, our productivity professor, put together with lots more information about this solution about ZP reports. So as we close out here today, I'm still looking if there's additional questions to come that might come in that we might address in the meantime. So could I ask you, I've got like two more to close out. One would be Andrew, what is your favorite part of this? What do you think will make the most difference, the most impact for agencies out of everything that this reporting solution offers?
I think seeing by clients a green number or a red number on like profitability. How are we doing here? Because when you're in, when you're in client management, there's so many factors that come into play. There's personalities, there's relationships, there's experience. And that could be with your team that's servicing them, or it could be with the client themselves. And when you have to look at a report that has some red numbers next to a specific client that was kind of a pet client for some reason, and you're analyzing your whole business, that's a very clear tab to tell you how are we doing? How are we actually doing it? Delivering what we need to deliver on and in that is our is wrapped up in everything. It's our packaging and our pricing and it's our team that's working on it and it's our process efficiency. All that boils down that one simple number. Do we make money or do we lose money on this? So that there's a lot that goes into being able to see that. And that's what's, that's what's hard sometimes. Cuba with agencies is it. On the surface, it looks like a simple business model of, hey, let me, let me do something for you. I'll go hire some people to help me do it. But if, if you think about this related to like a manufacturing company, a manufacturing company can go down onto the shop floor. They can see how raw materials come in on one side of the building, how those raw materials are processed by different machines and different stations and different human touch points, different automation touch points, and they move through the process. If something breaks down, it blinks red and you know where to solve it. But agencies often lack that visibility because they don't put these structures in place to see where is something at in the process and down to a detailed level of visibility. So having those pieces in play mean that you can step up and look down on your quote unquote shop floor as an agency and see the work moving through and see these red spots, see these red lights of, hey, we're losing money on this contract this month. It doesn't mean that that client is sinking. It just means there's an issue that needs to be addressed. And if you can catch that issue in month one instead of month six, you've changed the trajectory of not just that client relationship, not just the health of that person managing that account, but your entire agency. So it gets you seeing a pulse of what's going on much sooner.
Awesome. I love that analogy. I remember you mentioned it on the call while we were preparing for this live stream and I love it that you gave it to the audience here also as we were live. Thank you for remembering about it. So in a moment, watchers and listeners, I'm going to point you to some other free resources and we've got an event next week that I want to tell you about. But before that, Andrew, one last question to you. It's my insurance question. Is there anything else that you wanted to mention that I failed to ask about? Because we've got a couple more minutes here as we close out. If there's anything more, give it to us.
I don't think so, man. We covered some great depth. I love the specificity and the questions that came in. There's a lot going on in ClickUp with time, time tracking tools, reporting tools and budgeting tools and connecting those things together. Everything we showed you here today is assuming time tracked natively inside of ClickUp.
Okay, yeah, yeah, exactly. I feel like we got some converts here today using external tools, looking at what's on going possible here and thinking okay, I'll come back. I mean literally, we had a commenter saying they're coming back to the native time tracking side. Awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome. Thank you Andrew for everything you shared here today. So here go my CTAs for you. Let's start with the event next week. Next week Jeff Seifer, our productivity professor, will be my guest here. My first repeat guest on the Zen Pilot Live show on Thursday, October 26th. We'll be talking about how to run EOS on ClickUp. So a lot of agencies like EOS run on EOS use external tools for EOS. Thank you for that comment, Divya. Again, she's saying she's ready to make the switch into native time tracking. I was saying so if you're curious whether it's possible to run EOS within ClickUp without using an external tool, keeping it closer to your day to day work so that your rocks tie more closely to your tasks, you've got your VTO already in there in a ClickUp doc. Yes, it is all possible. And Jeff will be doing again a live demo, just like today, of how it can be done the easy way. So we'll show you all about that. In the meantime, I only know about the events that we're about to run, but if you're watching this two months from now, the replay the best way to stay in touch with what we're about to do here at Zenpilot is to subscribe to First Class Operations, the newsletter brought to you by yours truly. I write it, I send it, and I include the best content from Zenpilot. And outside of zenpilot. Go to zenpilot.com under resources. You'll find first class operations there. You'll find the ClickUp for Agencies Guide There Too, a 40 plus page ebook that will allow you to kind of build the habits and build the data structure that you'll need for ZP reports, for example, down the line. So that'll all get you started. We've got a ton of stuff there. We've got a ton of stuff on our LinkedIn. Ton of stuff on YouTube too. Don't miss that. Jeff posts a lot of great videos there that will teach you all about how to run on ClickUp and improve your agency operations and tying it all to the overarching goal make more money as a business. All right, that would be it for today. Make sure to give us a follow and a like and a subscribe if you're watching on YouTube and follow zenpilot on LinkedIn. And that's all of the CTAs I've got for you today. We'll be saying, ah yes, thank you LinkedIn user. I bet that's Jeff for mentioning the link to the First Class Operations newsletter. So that'll be in the comments on the LinkedIn event. Thank you so, so, so, so much, dear watchers and listeners, for joining us here today. Great engagement here today. Great work everyone. Great work. Andrew, you did great as a speake. You pass. I'm going to have you again definitely down the line as a guest.
Love it, man. It was great. Thanks for your questions and everyone, thanks for your comments. It was really fun to go handle some of those live. So thanks for that.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Thank you everyone. Everybody have a nice rest of your day and we'll see you in the next one. Don't forget next Thursday we're running another one. So I'll see you in the next one. Bye everyone.
Cheers guys.
Done. I'm clicking the button. End stream. Bye bye. Take care everyone. Bye bye.
