Last year, the team at 91¶¶Ňő was excited to introduce a new module to help plan people for preconstruction tasks and deliverables. Since its release, we’ve been thrilled with the response it’s received from precon and ops managers alike. The module helps to provide better capacity planning and simple, flexible task management for preconstruction planning.

As thrilled as we are with the response, that doesn’t mean our work is done. Our philosophy has always been to get the tool into the hands of the people who need it, listen to feedback, and implement meaningful changes.

With that, let’s get into your preconstruction enhancements.

2024 Preconstruction enhancements

Duplicate preconstruction roles

Sometimes, meaningful changes can be as simple as speeding up your workflows, for example, when planning your precon tasks and teams. Now, when creating roles on preconstruction tasks, you’ll have the option to include a quantity. Need three estimators for your Schematic Design task? No problem; add a quantity of three when setting up the role, and you’re good to go.

What if the role already exists? Like on the operations tab, you can duplicate any existing precon role on your project. Go to your role options, select “Duplicate role,” choose how many times you want it duplicated, and hit enter.

Precon data in your Spend Reports

A few of our customers asked to have precon planning data included in the project-level Spend Report and the Workforce Spend Summary in the Forecasting Dashboard. Ask, and you shall receive. By default, both Spend Reports will now use all project roles (including precon) to calculate your planned spend.

The Project Spend Report

On the project-level report, you’ll notice a Role Type dropdown in the report filters (top left), so you can quickly focus the report on your different project operations. You can even drill the report down further to specific roles by filtering on the role name (top right).

A couple of things to keep in mind with precon being added to the Project Spend Report:

• The report will organize the roles accordingly if multiple role types are selected. For example, if Precon and Salaried roles are selected, you’ll see the report broken into sections for each type.
• Any role added to a preconstruction task will appear in the Precon section of the report, which means you might have some roles that appear in both the Salaried and Precon sections.
• The Precon data in the Project Spend Report will not be reflected in your Budget vs. Planned Cost.

The Workforce Spend Summary

In the Forecasting Dashboard, your Workforce Spend Summary will now include all roles, including preconstruction. The report functions the same way it always has, but when using the quick filters at the top of the page, you’ll see that when displaying salaried roles and team members, you can narrow in on your preconstruction workforce using a second quick filter.

This helps to focus your spend reporting to get specific insights into your project, field, or preconstruction operations.

Precon Roles Column

Previously, preconstruction and project operations roles were consolidated into the same Roles Column in your project list, making it harder to discern, at a glance, which team had unfilled roles. You always needed to dig a little deeper to find out.

Well, you can dig a little less. We’ve split your precon roles into their own column now for better planning clarity

Precon data included in Project and People List exports

We understand how important collaborative planning is for our customers, so we’ve added your precon data to multiple reports available in 91¶¶Ňő Bench.

Project List

Whether you’re exporting a .csv or PDF report from your Project List, you’ll notice your precon assignments have been added along with your operations and their assignments. Select “include allocations” when exporting your report to get the full breakdown.

People List

When exporting a PDF report from your People List, we’ve added any precon assignments and task information under the Role column. This means you can provide accurate overviews of each team member’s workload to anyone who needs it.

New Dashboard filtering

We’ve made a couple of small tweaks to the Dashboard in Bench. Previously, when applying a project filter for specific roles, Bench would display all projects containing the filtered role in the Project Breakdown and Unfilled Roles insights.

When applying a role filter now, Bench will instead filter the insights mentioned above to display the selected role name, helping Precon and Ops teams get accurate role counts for their respective teams.

For more information about Resource Planning for Preconstruction or step-by-step walkthroughs of all the latest functionality, visit the .

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• System Permissions are the standard permission sets that come built into Bench.
• Custom Permissions provide the freedom to create entirely new permission sets.
• Group-based Permissions provide additional access to specific Groups in Bench, often broken down by different regions/offices.

With great data comes great responsibility

As a service-based industry, the success of every contractor is always dependent on the people responsible for delivering their projects. Still, access to workforce planning data is often limited because, well, too many cooks in the kitchen means too many unwanted changes to the sauce (your data).

If the “sauce” can be protected, however, a wealth of decision-making workforce data can positively impact nearly every team’s work. We’re always happy when customers ask how to get more people into 91¶¶Ňő Bench. Still, we also understand the integrity of the workforce strategy should not be tampered with if more people will be using it to inform their work.

Let’s look at three types of permission sets in 91¶¶Ňő Bench that help ensure each of your teams has the access they need and none of the access they don’t.

1. System Permission Sets

System permissions in Bench are the standard permission sets built into every account. While they can’t be edited or changed, they’re a great starting point for providing controlled transparency across your company. Here’s how System Permissions are broken down.

ADMINISTRATORS

Admins can access 91¶¶Ňő Bench, including the account settings and customizations. Admins are responsible for managing all custom and group-based permissions and assigning those permissions to each user. *We recommend limiting the number of account administrators in your organization. If everyone is an admin, what’s the point of permissions, right?

FULL CONTRIBUTORS

Full Contributors have almost as much access to 91¶¶Ňő Bench as an administrator. They can manage all project and people details, as well as project roles and allocations, but they won’t have access to manage any settings, view financial fields, or send any communications. *Full Contributors will be able to view all private fields. If you don’t want users seeing this information you may want to create a custom permission set for them (below).

VIEW ONLY

This permission set is the most self-explanatory. Look but don’t touch. View Only users will have access to create custom views and apply filters, but can’t change or edit any information.

2. Custom Permission Sets

To complement the System Permissions, your Bench admins can create custom permission sets that provide team members access to contribute to your workforce planning in unique ways, but without giving them full access to the platform.

Admins can create new permission sets and assign users however they choose. For example, you can create a “Human Resources” permission set that allows your HR team to add new team members, edit their details, and view private fields, but limits their ability to change project details, roles, or allocations.

Custom permission sets also give the ability to grant or limit access to different profile types in Bench (hourly vs. salaried). Let’s look at an example. You want your site supers to be able to view and manage all your craft labor (hourly) and send Assignment Alerts, but not be able to even see the project management team in Bench (salaried), you can create a custom permission set for this exact use case.

Same on the flip side. If you want to limit access to view or manage your craft labor, you can set those parameters using custom permission sets.

 3. Group-based Permission Sets

What if you want to limit access to specific offices/regions within your Bench account? No problem. With Group-based Permissions Sets, you can create custom permissions to dictate the level of access team members will have not only at the account level but also their access to make changes within their assigned office or region (Group).

Here’s how it works.

Group-based Permissions are created by stacking two permission sets on top of each other.

• Base permission = account level access – This can include permissions to view people/projects, private and/or financial fields, and sending communications like Broadcasts or Assignment Alerts.
• Group permission = additional access restricted to one or more Groups – This can include permissions to manage people, projects, and project roles and allocations.

Let’s take a look at one Group-Based Permission stack. Let’s say you want your Foremen to be able to add roles to projects in their respective offices and be able to send communications to their project teams.

Base permission – View Projects/People + Communications (means they can see and communicate across all of Bench)
+
Group permission – Manage Roles (means they can add/edit/delete project roles, but not allocate anyone)
=

This team member can see and communicate across all of Bench but can only manage project roles in their assigned group.

Here’s how it looks when adding new users.

*Group-based Permissions are a premium feature in 91¶¶Ňő Bench. To get access to Group-based Permissions, for more information.

At 91¶¶Ňő, we understand the importance of transparency in workforce planning. Everybody benefits from better visibility into where your people are and what they’re working on. But we also understand the importance of controlling that transparency and ensuring your people only have the necessary access. For a step-by-step walkthrough of getting permissions set up, visit the or head back up and check out the Bench Guide at the top of the page.

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Consistency is key, but it sure can be tricky

When it comes to workforce planning tools, flexibility can help ensure that, on an individual level, everyone can view information in the way that makes the most sense to them. You want everyone to digest the data that will drive strategy and planning conversations easily, but it can often lead to multiple people in meetings looking at their different views and, in some cases, different data.

Not to mention how difficult and time-consuming it can be to build and implement common, meaningful views that everyone on your team can use.

Enter Saved and Shared Filters in 91¶¶Ňő Bench.

Workforce planning should be efficient and consistent

While we understand the importance of flexibility in planning at 91¶¶Ňő, we also understand how critical it is to have a common language and lens for effective planning. We also know that creating standardized views for every user in your company should be straightforward.

Let’s look at how to create that common lens in 91¶¶Ňő Bench.

Saved Filters

Saved Filters in 91¶¶Ňő Bench were built to help you get the information you need by applying multiple pre-selected filters all at once. Adding and manipulating different filter sets may not take a ton of time, but if there are filters that you’re consistently applying, Saved Filters can certainly help make that process more convenient.

Let’s say you log into your Bench account, and each week, you want to look at the Supply and Demand of your construction team but not your precon team. Typically, that means every week, you’re adding filters for all of your construction team roles and a filter for all your construction team titles. With Saved Filters, you only ever have to do it once.

What if you want to send a monthly report to your HR team with all your expired or soon-to-be-expired certifications for your craft labor? Like the above example, creating a Saved Filter means that the report is only a couple of clicks away. Nice and easy.

How it works

Creating a Saved Filter may be the easiest thing in 91¶¶Ňő Bench. Once all the filters you want are applied, simply click on the star at the top of your display, right at the start of your applied filter chips.

You’ll then have the opportunity to review the filters you have applied, give the filter set a name, and save it for future use. You’ll find all your Saved Filters between your search bar and standard filters.

Unless being shared, Saved Filters will be unique to you and unavailable to other users, but you’ll likely still want to create a consistent naming convention that makes it easy to find the Saved Filters you’re after.

Sharing Saved Filters

Saved Filters are a great way to create consistent views within one user’s account, but what if there were a way to share those Saved Filters with every user? That sure would help create a common lens for workforce planning across the company, wouldn’t it? It would probably make it easy to create consistent reports for your executive team too, right?

If this were a courtroom drama, this is probably where there’d be an objection for leading the witness.

Of course, it would help create a common lens, which is exactly why Saved Filters can be shared with every user in Bench. We want to help standardize your planning, reporting, and staffing meetings. Making sure everyone is looking at the same information is the first step to gaining that consistency.

When saving a filter set (like the examples above), Bench admins will also have the option to share the Saved Filter. Once shared, the Saved Filter will appear in all of your user’s respective accounts. They’ll be able to change the name to be consistent with their naming convention and even remove the filter set if it doesn’t apply to them, but any changes they make won’t impact the Saved Filter on other users’ accounts.

A couple of things with Shared Saved Filters are worth noting.

1. Shared filter sets will respect any permissions you have set up. If there is limited access to financial or private fields that are included in a Shared Saved Filter, for example, users without permissions will see a notification telling them they don’t have access to view this information.
2. Sharing a Saved Filter will expose each filter applied when you create it. That means if you’re sharing a filter set that includes an OSHA certification, for example, the OSHA filter will be displayed for everyone to see.

Now, exposing an OSHA filter might not be a big deal, but there may be more sensitive field names you don’t necessarily want exposed, so just something to be mindful of before sharing.

Sharing Saved Filters is exclusive to 91¶¶Ňő Bench administrators. If you have an idea for a filter set that you think everyone would benefit from, reach out to your admin to get that set up and shared across the company.

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No two projects are exactly the same

But sometimes, they’re pretty darn close. At least, regarding the roles that make up the project team, you might find a little repetition. While there might be subtle differences from project to project, the ability to templatize the makeup of a project team could help speed up the planning process and copying the role setup from a previous project might even help to repeat past successes.

In 91¶¶Ňő Bench, you have the best of both worlds – you can create custom role templates to use when planning out your projects or, if you know of a similar project, you can quickly just copy the role setup from another project.

Task Templates for Preconstruction

Let’s start with preconstruction because, well, so do your projects. Because preconstruction happens on projects whether they’re awarded or not, there tends to be a high volume of shorter tasks.

With a higher volume and shorter durations, we wanted to ensure planning your precon people didn’t take as long as the tasks themselves. With Precon Task Templates, you have the ability to create reusable task templates with or without roles attached to each task.

Task templates without roles – Standardize your tasks across all precon projects and simplify your planning by creating task-only templates. Pull from an existing list of tasks like Schematic Design, Design Development, and Construction Documents, and then decide how many people will be required for each task based on the specific project.

Task templates with roles – Create a task template that includes tasks and roles. If you know, for example, that every schematic design will require two estimators, you can build the template to include those roles automatically. When including roles in templates, you can pick the allocation percentage for each role and decide how many copies of the role should be on the task. In our example, we’d add one estimator and choose their allocation percentage before copying the role for our second estimator.

Bench Pro Tip – With precon task templates that include roles, you can set a role description directly in the template for things like “lead” or “support” and “interiors” or “structure”, for example. A role description adds another layer of specificity to help keep precon planning consistent from project to project.

Role Templates for Construction

Planning your project team in Bench is lightning fast compared to other tools, sure. At 91¶¶Ňő, though, we care more about comparing our tool to where it was a year, two years, three years ago, etc. than we care about comparing it to a spreadsheet system. Of course, we can do better than a spreadsheet, but can we make it faster and easier for our existing users?

With Role Templates for your construction team, you can lay the groundwork for your ideal project team and save that template for reuse across any projects you choose. Like with precon, you’ll be able to pick the allocation percentage and role name and create multiple roles of the same type.

Have a project team you know would work on future commercial projects with a certain budget or square footage? Save it as a template. Easy.

Have a foundational set of roles that get added to every project? Create a template to hit the ground running when building your team. Before you save the roles, you can make edits and change the roles to accommodate the project specifics.

*Note: Role templates for precon and construction will need to be built by an admin in your Bench settings. Reach out to your account administrator if you have a template idea that would make your life easier if it existed in the platform already.

Copy from an existing project

What if you just got done with an amazingly executed commercial project? It finished on time and under budget and the way the team ramped up and down on the project was borderline perfection.

Why not repeat that success when you can?

In Bench, if we’re starting up a similar commercial project to the one mentioned above, wouldn’t it be great to copy over the same role setup? Of course, it would be. Instead of selecting an existing template for your construction team, you can also choose to “copy from another project” and be given a list of projects to choose from. Just like with Role Templates, once you select the project to copy, you can make any tweaks or changes before saving the roles and allocating your people.

Copying from an existing project is only available for construction roles, not preconstruction.

At 91¶¶Ňő, we’re always looking for ways to streamline the workflows our customers use every day. What may save a few minutes here and there saves hours when all is said and done. Time that could be better spent putting out other fires or more strategically. However you use that time, we’ll keep trying to give more of it back to you.

The post Role and Task Templates for ops and preconstruction appeared first on 91¶¶Ňő.

Juggling labor requests eating up your time?

Depending on the process you have in place, consolidating and filling labor requests from your different projects can be one of the most scattered, time-consuming daily tasks your ops and field managers deal with.

Everyone has their idea of the best way to communicate labor needs; the only constant is the person trying to make sense of them all. 91¶¶Ňő Bench is here to help.

Subscribe to projects with Role Notifications

In every project in 91¶¶Ňő Bench, users can “subscribe” to projects and be notified whenever a new role is added.

For general contractors, you’ll be able to stay up-to-date as more roles or workforce needs are being added to the different projects in your pipeline.

For specialty contractors, you’re better equipped to stay on top of and prioritize all the labor requests from your field teams. Role Notifications are available on the Bench mobile app so your foremen and superintendents can be notified and open Bench on the specific project directly from their phone or tablet.

How do Role Notifications work?

When it comes to receiving Role Notifications in 91¶¶Ňő Bench, setting them up is as easy as you might think. Every user in Bench essentially has two different ways to set them up.

1. Receive Role Notifications on a project-by-project basis by subscribing to individual projects.
2. Set account-level Role Notifications to receive updates when roles are added to every project in Bench.

All Bench users will have access to turn on/off notifications in their account settings and for each respective project, however, users with limited access to view only hourly or salaried roles will be only be notified when roles they have access to view are added to projects.

Here’s a quick overview of setting up Role Notifications on 91¶¶Ňő Bench for web and mobile applications.

Speaking of labor requests

Role Notifications can help standardize your labor request workflow from the field to the office. Instead of one person trying to make sense of emails, phone calls, text messages, and messages in bottles, your field teams can use the 91¶¶Ňő Bench Mobile application to submit labor requests right from the site quickly.

What if the request is urgent? Using Role Notifications, the team members responsible for assigning your skilled labor can stay current on every request and prioritize accordingly. With Smart Suggestions, drag-and-drop allocations, and the Roles page, 91¶¶Ňő Bench can help create a standardized labor request workflow that works for you and your team.

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You know the old saying “Summers were made for big software ľ±łľ±č°ů´Ç±ą±đłľ±đ˛ÔłŮ˛ő”? Of course, you don’t. It’s likely never been said before, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. This summer, we pulled out all the stops at 91¶¶Ňő to add new functionality and new reports to 91¶¶Ňő Bench.

The 91¶¶Ňő Widgets

Drag and drop allocations with the new Available People Widget

Located in each project, the Available People widget provides a list of team members with the required availability for the project and a one-step allocation process where you simply drag people from the list directly onto an unfilled project role. What’s even better? You don’t even need an unfilled role. Just drag your team members, and we’ll build a role for them. Pretty easy, right?

Learn more about the Available People Widget, which is now available in all your projects in 91¶¶Ňő Bench.

Protect margins with the Labor Budget vs. Planned Cost Widget

The Budget vs. Planned Cost Widget, located in each project in 91¶¶Ňő Bench, helps you better understand how your staffing plan compares to your budgeted labor costs. The widget displays accurate cost information that updates in real time as changes are made to your staffing plan.

Note: At the least, the widget requires you to have default cost rates for your project roles set up in your Bench account settings and the Budget field in your project details. Adding individual cost rates to your team members’ profiles will make this widget more accurate. Don’t worry; only users with permission to view financials will see this information.

Visit this blog for a full breakdown of your Project Budget vs. Planned Costs and how they work.

New (and improved) Reports in 91¶¶Ňő Bench

The Project Spend Report

The Spend Report, now found in your Project Reports, is where you’ll find project-specific insights and a summary of the labor required to satisfy the project’s staffing plan. The report will consider every role on the project to paint an accurate picture of your resource usage throughout your project.

The Project Spend Report provides better visibility into the total resource demands of each project, keeping you closely connected and helping to track and understand, in detail, the impact of project changes and project-specific variables and outcomes.

The Workforce Spend Summary

Where the Project Spend Report was built for project-level insights, the Workforce Spend Summary was built to provide a 10,000 ft. view of the roles, costs, and hours required to staff your entire project pipeline.

The Spend Summary provides top-level totals for your pipeline AND visibility on every project, which helps to better understand your cost of staffing without needing to comb through and consolidate all your project spend data. The Summary is now available in your Forecasting Dashboard and is great for diving deeper into trends in the Supply and Demand Report.

Click here for a breakdown of the Project Spend Report and Workforce Spend Summary.

Supply and Demand Forecasting updates

Aside from the updated name, the Supply and Demand Forecast (formerly the Strategic Workforce Plan Report) will now include your hourly workforce and project roles, giving you the ability to understand the upcoming demands of your field and craft teams.

Now, with just a few clicks, you can quickly focus the Supply and Demand Forecast on your specific trades and self-perform teams to help inform recruitment and bidding strategies. We even built-in weekly time intervals so you can dive right in. Make sure you’re right-sized at the right time with the newly revamped, all-in-one Supply and Demand Forecast.

Read more about the Supply and Demand Forecast in 91¶¶Ňő Bench.

The New Roles Page

Roles on Web

The Roles page in 91¶¶Ňő Bench, located right beside Projects in your navigation bar, provides a consolidated list of every unfilled role across your account. You read that right – One page for all your unfilled roles. Well, one page with two tabs, especially now that we’ve added all unfilled salaried AND hourly roles.

Roles on Bench Mobile

Like on your web-based version of Bench, the mobile Roles will display any unfilled roles coming down the pipeline, but with two exceptions that make it perfect for requesting labor from the field.

1. New roles can be added to the list on the fly. Just tap the plus sign in the top right, select your project, fill in the role details, and add it to the list.
2. You’ll also have a tab for Filled Roles. That way, the team member who requested the labor can see their request has been filled and who they can expect to see on site.

You can even duplicate roles on mobile, so you don’t have to create the same role multiple times when you need more than one person.

Below, there’s a quick video explaining how your field and ops teams can use it for labor requests. For more information about using the Roles page in 91¶¶Ňő Bench, check this blog.

Role Notifications

Worried that labor requests might slip through the cracks? We’ve introduced new ways to keep track of all labor requests coming in. Now, on every project, you can click the notification bell in the top right to receive email notifications any time a role is added to the specific project.

For convenience, you can also open your own personal account settings and choose to be notified when roles are added to every project across your Bench account.

In case you missed it

Categories to help organize project roles

Planning and tracking large project teams can make it difficult to stay organized. By using Project Categories, now available in 91¶¶Ňő Bench, you can keep your project teams organized however you like. Want to categorize team members based on their scope of work? No problem. Want to be able to collapse every other category and only focus on your team working on the 5th floor? Easy.

Next time you’re in your project details, head to your Roles/Operations and click Add Category. Once you’ve created a Category, you can add roles from both your project admin and craft/field teams. Categories can be collapsed in both your Project Details and Gantt to help keep you focused on one thing at a time.

SMS Communications in 91¶¶Ňő Bench

This year, we’ve added new ways to communicate directly with your workforce and project teams from 91¶¶Ňő Bench. This summer, we’ve extended all communication services in Bench to include the option to send both email and SMS text messages.

If your team prefers text messages or can’t easily access their email on the go, you can send them a quick text message instead. We’ve put proper controls in place to ensure only the right people have access to send Alerts and Broadcasts and so that your admins can see the team members who have opted in or out of receiving SMS text messages from 91¶¶Ňő Bench. To inquire about getting SMS communications added to your Bench account, .

The post ’23 Summer Release Roundup appeared first on 91¶¶Ňő.

Sometimes you just want to get people on projects

At 91¶¶Ňő, we understand your workforce planning doesn’t always adhere to a linear path. Sometimes you want to build out the roles on a project long before you fill them so you can have visibility on upcoming roles that need to be filled and can use them to accurately forecast labor demands.

But sometimes you just want to put a person on a project. Quick and easy.

You probably know where I’m going with this…

Drag and drop allocations

Located in your projects, the Available People widget was built to help assign team members in a more visual, intuitive manner. When you open the widget, Bench displays a list of team members with availability within your project dates.

Green indicator = full availability. Good to go.

Orange indicator = some availability. Click the indicator to see the potential issue.

Based on the title of the article, you know what comes next. You can quickly select any person from the list and drag them onto any unfilled role to allocate them. Quick.

But we took it one step further. You can also simply drag someone onto the project and Bench will create the role for them, but still allow you to make any tweaks before finalizing it. Easy.

How it works

Your Available People list will populate the same way your Smart Suggestions do. When filling a role, Smart Suggestions is looking for matching titles and availability, team members from the same group as the project, and the people with the most relevant experience based on the specific role and project details.

With the Available People list, the only difference is that Bench is looking at the entire project from beginning to end, instead of focusing on any one role. The list is still using our same Smart Suggestions logic though – looking at title, group, and relevant experience to make sure that even if you’re just looking to get someone on a project quickly, you’re still able to pick the best-fit people.

Note – For drag and drop in the Precon Module, the Available People widget will use the start date of the first precon task and the end date of the last task to determine availability. Not the full project dates.

Need to narrow the list down? Have someone specific in mind for the project?

Good news – you can use the search bar at the top of the list. You can search for different titles or even specific people to narrow your search.

Great news – Smart Suggestions still apply. Type “Project Manager” to see available, best-fit team members without needing to build the role first. By searching for specific titles, you can get a quick glance at your potential PMs, ranked by previous experience with similar projects.

Creating new roles using drag-and-drop

Dragging a team member onto an unfilled role does exactly what you’d expect. It fills the role. No changes, tweaks, or saving is needed.

But what about when there isn’t an unfilled role? Bench won’t get in your way if you just want to throw people onto a project quickly. In fact, we’ll help make it easier. If there’s not an existing role for you to fill, just drag the team member you’re allocating over the project roles and drop them. Bench will create a new role automatically so you can make any needed changes before saving. Check the video guide above for a walkthrough.

From the Bench Pro Shop – When Bench creates a new role using drag and drop, it will also allow you to display the allocation issue that will be created. You can use this information to adjust the role on the spot to not have the issue flagged down the road.

The post Drag and drop allocations with the Available People Widget appeared first on 91¶¶Ňő.

Understanding the cost of staffing is tough

From an individual project to the entire project pipeline, looking at the cost of your staffing plans and workforce is hard to consolidate quickly and keep accurate.

However, understanding the cost of staffing is invaluable to keeping labor costs on track and making changes to projects on the fly or changes to the pipeline if costs aren’t tracking in the right direction.

Well, 91¶¶Ňő Bench has a solution for both – a Spend Report built right into every project and a Spend Summary in your Forecasting Dashboard.

Let’s start at the project level and work our way up.

The Project Spend Report

The Spend Report, found in your Project Reports, is where you’ll find project-specific insights and a summary of the labor required to satisfy the project’s staffing plan. The report will consider all roles on the project to paint an accurate picture of your resource usage throughout your project.

The Project Spend Report provides better visibility into the total resource demands of each project, keeping you closely connected and helping to track and understand, in detail, the impact of project changes and project-specific variables and outcomes. The report was also built to be flexible, so each user can display the staffing and resource plan in the most helpful way.

• Example #1 – Your Field Manager wants an overview of their craft workforce, week over week, but also wants to see the number of unfilled roles they’ll need to fill to support the project. Done.

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• Example #2 – Your Operations team wants a detailed cost breakdown of the entire project team at a high level and which months will be the peak resource spend. Easy.

Your ops team can access historical Spend Reports to get a better understanding of how costs previously ramped up and down on similar projects to help inform staffing plans on current/upcoming ones. And your precon team can use the same information to help inform labor budgeting and estimates.

Customizations? You got it. The Project Spend report is fully configurable:

• Display your entire project team or just your hourly or salaried workforce.
• View your project in monthly or weekly intervals for a more detailed breakdown.
• Display the information that matters to you. Hours? Costs? Filled and unfilled roles? We’ve got you covered.

For a detailed, step-by-step walkthrough of the Project Spend Report and Workforce Spend Summary, .

The Workforce Spend Summary

Where the Project Spend Report was built for project-level insights, the Workforce Spend Summary was built to provide a 10,000 ft. view of the roles, costs, and hours required to staff your entire project pipeline.

The Spend Summary provides top-level totals for your pipeline AND visibility on every project, which helps to better understand your cost of staffing without needing to comb through and consolidate all your project spend data.

The Spend Summary can help inform high-level workforce planning and forecasting, which is why you’ll find it in your Forecasting Dashboard. It’s the perfect complement to the Supply & Demand Report. One helps to understand your labor demands at a high level, the other helps to explore those demands in greater detail, project by project.

While the Project Spend Report helps to understand the peaks and valleys of resource spending at the project level, with the Workforce Spend Summary, you can understand those same peaks and valleys at the corporate level. Let’s run through an example. Let’s say we want to see how many roles we’ll need to fill to satisfy our staffing plan at a company level, pictured below.

We’ve configured the summary to display our resources as unique roles on our projects, broken down by the role status – filled or unfilled. We’re looking at it month over month and can immediately see we’ve got a lot of unfilled roles over the next 6 months that we might want to get ahead of now.

If you’re running a scenario with your pursuit projects to see the potential impact, the scenario you’ve built will also be reflected in the Spend Summary. Need to see how far a couple of pursuits will push the total planned hours for your company? No problem. Just run the scenario and Bench will provide the insights you’re after.

Just like everything in Bench, we’ve carefully built the Project Spend Report and Workforce Spend Summary to reflect the permission sets you have in place for your team. No one will see financial or cost information they shouldn’t be seeing. To learn more about setting up custom permission sets,

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Note: At the least, the widget requires you to have default cost rates for your project roles set up in your Bench account settings, as well as the Budget field in your project details. Adding individual cost rates to your team members’ profiles will make this widget even more accurate.

Labor costs sure can add up quickly

Depending on the project, a labor budget can range anywhere from 40-60% of the total budget. Ensuring you have a strong, capable project team that is also cost-effective is no easy feat. It’s a balancing act with calculations that need to include working hours, days, allocation percentages, cost rates for every individual, project schedules, a side of fries, and a large soda.

It can be done, but it’s certainly not easy.

Until now.

The Budget vs. Planned Workforce Cost Widget

Displayed in each project in 91¶¶Ňő Bench, the Workforce Cost Widget makes it easy to understand how the cost of the planned workforce on your project tracks against the budgeted labor cost.

We left out the soda and the side of fries, but all other variables are included when calculating your planned costs. That way, you’ll always know exactly how cost-effective your project team is at an operational level (we can’t promise they won’t be standing around from time to time).

Your planned cost includes both your salaried project management team, as well as your hourly craft and field teams with respective calculations for each. Don’t worry, the Budget vs. Planned Cost widget is only available to users that have access to view financial-related fields in Bench.

How it works

To calculate the planned cost, the widget looks at the total hours for every role across the entire duration of the project and uses cost rates to come up with a consolidated total.

For your salaried team members, the widget will assume a 40-hour work week, and then use the project dates, cost rate, and allocation percentage to calculate the total cost.

For your hourly craft labor, the widget will consider the working days and times on the project, as well as the cost rate, to calculate the total.

Sounds pretty straightforward, right?

Where is the financial information coming from?

Great question.

Knowing the planned workforce cost of a project before any people are actually allocated is incredibly helpful in planning. We’ll pull cost rates from a couple of places to calculate your planned costs as you build your team accurately.

Unfilled roles – We’ll look at the default cost rate at the role level in your project settings.

Filled roles – We’ll look at the individual cost rate in the assigned team member’s profile. If that cost rate isn’t in Bench, we’ll use the default cost rate at the title level in your people settings.

In the case you have a role that doesn’t have any cost rates at any level, the widget will let you know the specific role so you can reach out to your account administrator to get that updated.

For a step-by-step walkthrough to getting all the financial information you need in place to start leveraging the new Budget vs. Planned Cost Widget, check out the .

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Keeping labor requests organized can be a challenge

Without a standardized process or technology to consolidate labor requests, making sure every project has the support it needs is challenging on a good day. Your Ops and Field Managers often deal with emails, phone calls, and text messages asking for extra labor. Sometimes it’s just scribbled on Post-its.

You’re then left to pull all of that information together and make sense of the labor demands you have coming in and the team members you have available to take on the work.

Until now, that is.

Head to the Roles page in Bench

The Roles page in 91¶¶Ňő Bench, located right beside Projects in your navigation bar, provides a consolidated list of every unfilled role across your entire account. You read that right – One view for all your unfilled roles. Well, in some cases, two views. Let’s take a closer look.

Salaried Roles

The Salaried tab provides two lists that work together to fill roles quickly – Unfilled Roles & Available People

• Unfilled roles – exactly what it sounds like. On the left is a list of all the unfilled roles across your project pipeline and their respective details. This includes roles on active, upcoming, and pursuit projects. All of them.
• Available people – again, pretty straightforward. On the right is a list of your people sorted by availability over the next year. The longer they’re on the Bench, the higher they’ll be on the list.

You can apply project and people filters or directly search for specific people or titles in your list of available people to narrow down your options. When you’re ready, simply drag and drop your people from the list onto the chosen role and hit save.

Prefer to use the Smart Suggestions? No problem, you can open any project from the list of unfilled roles and place a person the old-fashioned way, too.

Hourly Roles

The Hourly tab provides a list of all the requests for craft labor coming in off your projects. Because craft and field teams tend to move around more frequently than your project admins, we’ve also built in the ability to get a two-week look ahead at your unfilled hourly roles. That way you can always stay on top labor requests that need urgent attention.

Same as the salaried roles, to assign a member of your craft team, just click on the project to open it up and use the Bench Smart Suggestions to allocate the best person for the role.

Roles on mobile

It’s tough to standardize any process if you’re only coming at it from one side. We added the Roles page to the Bench Mobile Application for that exact reason.

Just like on your web-based version of Bench, the mobile Roles will display any unfilled roles coming down the pipeline, but with two exceptions:

1. New roles can be added to the list on the fly. Just tap the plus sign in the top right, select your project, fill in the role details and add it to the list. Just like that.
2. You’ll also have a tab for Filled Roles. That way, the team member that requested the labor can see their request has been filled and who they can expect to see on site.

While the mobile Roles page makes it easy for site supers and foremen to request additional labor for their projects, it can also be used to fill requests if you can’t be at your desk. Just tap into an unfilled role to fill it and, if needed, use the Filled Roles to send the assigned team member an Assignment Alert for their new project.

A note about permissions

Permissions you have set up for your users will be reflected in the Roles page on both web and mobile applications of Bench.

Let’s say you want to set up a custom permission set for site foremen who will be requesting labor, but won’t need to fill any labor requests or see any salaried or project management roles on their projects. By selecting view + manage hourly roles, and view projects, you can ensure that your foremen won’t be able to fill any labor requests or have to deal with the extra clutter from the project management team.

Similarly, if you have an Ops Manager that plans project teams, but doesn’t need to be seeing hourly craft labor, those permissions will be reflected on both web and mobile Bench applications.

Below is a quick overview of requesting labor on the Bench Mobile Application.

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