Employee Bonus Management
Incentivize your team effectively
Bonus plans are difficult
- Is the bonus fair to your company (was the job actually profitable)?
- Is the bonus fair to the employee?
- Is the customer happy?
- Did you catch everything; are there late expenses still to be applied?
Chronicle makes them easy
Chronicle takes all of this and more into consideration. A good incentive program does many things:
Employees get a chance to make more money. If there’s a possible bonus for work done quickly and well, employees have something substantial to work toward.
It gives real incentive to work more efficiently. Without a bonus program, most employees will do what’s expected of them, not go above and beyond. If something takes 6 hours but could be done in 3, there’s little reason to do it in 3 because they get paid either way. A good incentive program pays employees extra for profitable, well-managed jobs, while poorly managed or unprofitable jobs get little or no bonus.
Motivated employees mean the business makes more money too. Your company benefits by having more profitable jobs, consistently. When your employees work more efficiently, the same number of employees can do more work. This lets you produce more profit without increasing your overhead.
Happy employees = faithful employees. A bonus program helps create employee satisfaction, and satisfied employees means lower turnover. Hiring and training new employees is expensive, so keeping your employees happier saves you money in the short and long run.
Chronicle’s Bonus Manager lets you reward your employees for good work, and do so fairly.
Controlled incentives
What you decide to call bonuses, whether bonuses are department based or for the job as a whole, you have complete control and visibility of the performance of your employees.
How Chronicle’s Bonus Manager Does Its Job
We look at job profitability, job completion, payment status, customer satisfaction, and job file management. These conditions (and many more) are evaluated, and the settings for evaluation are highly customizable. Here’s some of what we’re looking at:
| Condition | Explanation | How Chronicle’s Bonus Manager Handles This |
| Work completed | Until a job is completed (and has been complete for a number of days), you don’t know how much additional labor will occur, whether the customer will call with complaints or need additional repairs, and so on. | Completion status (whether the money is paid, and whether the job meets your rules for profitability/labor rates) are all handled automatically by Chronicle’s collections manager based on the rules that you set up. |
| Money collected | While some companies pay bonuses when a job is invoiced, we don’t think this is good practice. Even if your employees did the job well, the customer could refuse to pay and you lost money; there’s no profit to share. | |
| Profitable | The job must meet or exceed gross profit or labor percentage requirements to be eligible for bonuses. Jobs with very low profit or very high labor rates may call for negative bonuses. | |
| Well-managed | To qualify for a bonus, a job should be well-managed. Activities should have been completed on time, documents should have been added on time, etc. | We shows on-time status for the department, documents, activities, and events scheduled, giving you a good idea of how the job was managed. |
| Good customer service | Doing a job cost effectively isn’t the only goal; your customer must be happy. If they are dissatisfied with your service and give negative recommendations to others, it harms your business. | We show both job feedback and survey results that contain customer satisfaction data. |
| Different bonuses for different employees | Businesses sometimes give different employees different bonus rates based on agreement at point of hire, based on different base salaries, and so on. | The Employee Eligibility setup tab lets you indicate whether an employee uses custom bonus rules. |
| Departmental bonuses | Some companies give a bonus on the job as a whole. We recommend separate bonus rates for each department or business line since they usually have different profit and labor rates (the gross profit you expect on a construction job is quite different from what you expect on a water damage job). | You can set up bonus rules for the job as a whole or for individual departments depending on what you choose on the General Settings tab in the Setup. |
Test and Evaluating Your Incentive Program before you Implement It
Setting up a successful bonus program requires a clear understanding of a variety of business conditions. Chronicle automatically applies business rules and makes your incentive program easy to manage once you set it up, but there are no shortcuts to setting up the right rules for your business. Different areas of the country have different labor rates, different volumes of work, different fixed operating costs, different competition, and so on. And different businesses have varying roles: in one business, the project manager is involved with sales; in another these roles are covered by different people.
We give you a chance to set up your bonus rules and calculate bonuses with Chronicle before you announce the program to employees. Bonuses that are too high will keep your company from being profitable. If they’re too low, they won’t be a real incentive to employees. We’ve provided you with a starting point so you can begin to calculate bonuses, based on successful programs in different business. But they may not be exactly right for your business, which is why almost everything is customizable. We’ll also work with you to get this tuned perfectly for your business.