Snow Season Setup

Setting up Snow Services

All services are established using the Service screen within the Service Catalog under the Estimating section of the Administration menu. There are some special considerations when establishing snow services.

1. Verify that the Division Name contains “Snow” – For the service to be displayed in the Crew Mobile App when snow mode is enabled, the name of the division with which the service is associated must contain the word “snow” (case insensitive). Note that the Service Type field displays the division followed by the service type.
2. Mark the Service as a Contract Service – In order to add the service to a snow contract, the service must be marked as a Contract Service.
3. Mark Snow Services as Requires  Approval  – Snow services require review and actions that cannot 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 that occurred after the completion of the snow event and adjust the service associated with the work ticket accordingly for proper billing. By marking snow services as Requires Approval, the company assures that when the work ticket is marked as complete in Time Entry, it moves to a Pending Approval status. It is recommended that all snow services be marked Requires Approval.
4. Multi-Visit – This option allows services to be flagged as multi-visit which provides the following benefits for work tickets that are used repeatedly for multiple visits:
   • Allow crew leaders to complete a day’s work on these work tickets from the Crew Mobile App without putting the work ticket into complete status. Allow a ticket form to be triggered on the mobile time app.
   • Allow auto expenses for subcontractors to be billed periodically rather than requiring that the work ticket be complete.
   • When visits for events are mass-scheduled from the Route Scheduling screen, visits created from multi-visit work tickets are established with a visit time of zero since the work-ticket time (the default) is known to be an incorrect visit duration for multi-visit work tickets.
5. Specify Appropriate Pay Codes – Since pay rates for snow work commonly vary from the normal landscape season, it is often beneficial to specify snow-specific pay codes. If this is the case, the company should establish the necessary pay codes and assign them to the appropriate services. Note that when you apply the service to an estimate, youcan, if there are special circumstances, go into the Service Details screen and change the default pay code for that opportunity.

Setting up Snow Season Pay Codes

It is common for employee hourly pay rates for the snow season to be higher than normal pay rates. Management of varying pay for different types of work is handled in Aspire through the proper use of pay codes. The following image provides some examples of some possible snow-related pay codes, followed by annotations:

The following comments highlight considerations related to the examples above.

1. Snow Labor – Specifies that $5 will be added to the standard pay for an employee when they perform work assigned to this pay code. Any time associated with this pay code will be included in the summation of time that determines if the employee has earned overtime pay.
2. Snow Shoveler – Specifies that the employee’s hourly pay rate will be increased by 35% over their standard pay rate when they perform work assigned to this pay code. In this case, time performed at this rate will not be included in the summation of time that determines if the employee has earned over time. The rate already accounts for longer hours that are expected during a significant snowfall.
3. Snow Plower – Specifies that $3 will be added to the standard pay for an employee when they perform work assigned to this pay code. Any time associated with this pay code will be included in the summation of time that determines if the employee has earned overtime pay.
   In some situations, the pay differential for a pay code (i.e. Snow Premium), cannot be determined by a standard formula but is negotiated individually with each employee. If this is the case, Aspire will allow you, for each employee, to add override pay codes per employee that will determine their pay rate when a given pay code applies. These override pay codes can be specified on the Override Paycodes screen available through the HR Admin tab of the Contact screen for each employee.

Companies will define pay rates that reflect their policies and employee agreements.