Services

A service is how you sell pre- and post-production work. It has a name, a description, and a price, it groups the tasks that make it up, and it appears in its own section on your quotes and invoices. Because the hours your team registers on those tasks roll up into the service, you can also see afterwards whether the price you charged covered the work you did. 

In this article, you will learn what a service is, how to create and reuse one, how to link tasks to it, how to read the breakdown, and how to get services onto your documents.

What is a service?

A service is a sellable item made up of tasks. It sits on the Services tab of a project, alongside your equipment and crew.

A service has:

• A name and a description — what the client sees on the quote.
• A price — what you charge for it.
• An hourly cost rate — what an hour of this work costs you, used to work out what the service actually cost.
• One or more tasks — the work itself, each with its own planned time, deadline, and assignee.

What a service is not: it is not a crew function group, and it is not an equipment item. If you have been presenting design work as a function group to get it onto a quote, a service is the replacement. See How to plan work in Rentman.

Create a default service

If you sell the same kind of work regularly, set it up once as a default service. You can then add it to any project without building it again.

1. Open a project and navigate to the Services tab.
2. From the left menu, click on +.

3. Configure the options.

   Options

   Name: What the client sees on the quote.
   Estimated time: The amount of hours it takes to do this service.
   Price: What you charge the client.
   Cost per hour: What one hour of this work costs you.
   VAT class: The VAT class for this service.
   Ledgers: The debit and credit ledgers this service is booked to.
   Details: More detail about what the service includes.

4. (Optional) Add one or more tasks to the service. When you add this default service to a project, the tasks will automatically be created.
5. Save.

Create service groups

You can create service groups to organize related services. Grouping services makes it easier to manage them and helps you present them clearly when adding services to quotes and invoices.

1. Open a project and navigate to the Services tab.
2. Click on the small arrow next to + Service and select Service group.
3. Choose a name for the service group.
4. Save.

Add a service to a project

1. Open a project and navigate to the Services tab.
2. Click on + Service.
3. Select the group this service belongs to.

4. Configure the options.

   Options

   Name: What the client sees on the quote.
   Estimated time: The amount of hours it takes to do this service.
   Price: What you charge the client.
   Cost per hour: What one hour of this work costs you.
   VAT class: The VAT class for this service.
   Ledgers: The debit and credit ledgers this service is booked to.
   Discount: The percentage of the discount applied to this service.
   Details: More detail about what the service includes.

5. Save.

Add a default service to a project

1. Open a project and navigate to the Services tab.
2. From the left menu, select the default service you want to add to the project.
3. Click on ADD.
4. Select the service group you want to add this service to.
5. Save.

Once the service is on the project, you can adjust its price and description for that project without changing the default.

Link tasks to a service

The tasks linked to a service are what give it its hours. You can link a task that already exists, or create a new one from the service.

To link a task to a service:

1. Open or create a task.
2. Under Service, select the service.
3. Save.

To add a task directly from a service:

1. Open or create a service.
2. Under Tasks, add a new task.

Once linked, the task's planned time and its registered hours feed into the service breakdown. Nothing else about the task changes: it still appears on the project task board, still has its own assignee and deadline, and is still worked on the same way.

Services details sidebar

The service details sidebar lets you view and manage important service information without leaving the Services tab.

To open the details sidebar:

1. Hover over a service and click on Details.

The sidebar provides an overview of the service, including its linked tasks and purchase orders.

Under Tasks, you can create a new task by clicking +. When you create a task from the details sidebar, it is automatically linked to the service.

Read the service breakdown

The breakdown is where a service earns its place. It works like the breakdown for crew and transport, and shows:

• Estimated costs — the service's Estimated time multiplied by the cost per hour of the service.
• Planned costs — the total of the planned time of all linked tasks multiplied by the cost per hour of the service.
• Actual costs — the total of the hours the team actually tracked on the linked tasks multiplied by the cost per hour.
• Revenue — the total price of the services.
• Discount — the discount applied to the service.
• Profit — revenue minus costs.

Put services on your quotes and invoices

Services appear on your documents in their own Services section, separate from equipment and crew, so a client can see what the production work consists of.

FAQs