Setting up snow services
You establish all services on the Service screen, in the Service Catalog under the Estimating section of the Administration menu. There are some special considerations for snow services.
- Verify that the Division Name is “Snow” – For the service to appear in Aspire Mobile when Snow Mode is turned on, the division associated with the service must be named Snow (case-insensitive), and the division on the service’s Opportunity must also be Snow. The division name can’t include additional words or characters. Note that the Service Type field displays the division followed by the service type. If the division name includes additional text, the service won’t appear in Aspire Mobile when Snow Mode is turned on.
Important: For a service to appear in Snow Mode, both the service's division and the division on its Opportunity must be Snow. If Snow services sit on a blended (white and green) Opportunity whose division is set to something else, such as Maintenance, those services won't appear in Aspire Mobile while Snow Mode is on, even though the service division is Snow.
- Mark the service as a Contract Service – To add the service to a snow contract, mark it as a Contract Service.
- Mark snow services as Requires Approval – Snow services require review and actions that can’t be performed in time entry before they should become available for invoicing. For example, someone in the organization may need to verify the actual snow depth after a snow event and adjust the service associated with the work ticket for proper billing. When you mark snow services as Requires Approval, a work ticket moves to a Pending Approval status when it’s marked complete in Time Entry. We recommend marking all snow services as Requires Approval.
- Multi-Visit– This option flags a service as multi-visit, which provides the following benefits for work tickets that are used repeatedly for multiple visits:
- Lets crew leaders complete a day’s work on these work tickets from Aspire Mobile without putting the work ticket into complete status, and lets a ticket form be triggered in Aspire Mobile.
- Lets auto expenses for subcontractors be billed periodically rather than requiring the work ticket to be complete.
- When visits for events are scheduled in bulk from the Route Scheduling screen, visits created from multi-visit work tickets are established with a visit time of zero, because the work-ticket time (the default) is known to be an incorrect visit duration for multi-visit work tickets.
- Specify appropriate pay codes – Because pay rates for snow work commonly vary from the normal landscape season, it’s often helpful to specify snow-specific pay codes. If this is the case, establish the necessary pay codes and assign them to the appropriate services. Note that when you apply the service to an estimate, you can, if there are special circumstances, go to the Service Details screen and change the default pay code for that Opportunity.
Setting up snow season pay codes
Employee hourly pay rates for the snow season are commonly higher than normal pay rates. You manage varying pay for different types of work in Aspire through pay codes in Administration > Application > Lists. The following image shows examples of possible snow-related pay codes, followed by annotations:
Note the following about these pay codes:
- Snow Labor – Adds $5 to the standard pay for an employee when they perform work assigned to this pay code. Any time associated with this pay code is included in the summation of time that determines whether the employee has earned overtime pay.
- Snow Shoveler – Increases the employee’s hourly pay rate by 35% over their standard pay rate when they perform work assigned to this pay code. In this case, time performed at this rate isn’t included in the summation of time that determines whether the employee has earned overtime. The rate already accounts for the longer hours expected during a significant snowfall.
- Snow Plower – Adds $3 to the standard pay for an employee when they perform work assigned to this pay code. Any time associated with this pay code is included in the summation of time that determines whether the employee has earned overtime pay.
In some situations, you can’t determine the pay differential for a pay code (such as Snow Premium) with a standard formula because it’s negotiated individually with each employee. For each employee, you can add override pay codes that determine their pay rate when a given pay code applies. Specify these override pay codes on the Override Paycodes screen, available through the HR Admin tab of the Contact screen for each employee.
Companies define pay rates that reflect their policies and employee agreements.