Our Approach to Showing Money
Summary: Exposing financial information to employees is usually a good thing.
Exposing financial information to employees is usually a good thing. It makes visible to all employees just how precious each dollar is, how difficult it is to make money, and how no one is running out of the office with buckets of money every month. Making profits is hard work, and profits are usually small. As of early 2015, the average services sector business produces a net profit after taxes of 8%. On a rate of inflation of 3%, the rate of return that isn’t much better than that of a savings account.
Tip: Creating transparency into finances will likely have the biggest effect among revenue generating employees.
Runcible shows issues, points, and time in the Tasks Panel but requires that users expressly look for money.
We made a deliberate decision to not show money (cost, revenue, and profit data) up front.
Usually, when profit and loss is exposed to people they will modify their behavior to generate profit. The exception is when this asks too much of them. We encourage you to consider the individual people, their role in your organization, the type of business, and the situation.
Some examples:
- People who support your organization with overhead work may feel offended when they realize everything they do is a cost. Their work should be evaluated by cost (staying on budget), time, or possibly points.
- In some businesses (like movie production or book publishing) most projects lose money. The very small percentage of successes make the total effort profitable. In such businesses, exposing everyone to profit and loss data might have a net demoralizing effect.
- When a business is undergoing stress or restructuring, there may be temporary situations where opaque finances are necessary employee certainty.
Note: A second reason why we designed the interface around tasks and time is that designing it around money would limit Runcible’s potential market to organizations that bill by the hour. Runcible’s appeal is much wider. It is entirely possible and enjoyable, to Use Runcible to manage a business, even if users don’t bill for their time. We did not want to clutter the user interface with monetary information when many workers in the world operate on a task and time basis.
Hint: If permissions allow it, Users can find cost, revenue, and profit data the Tasks Panel’s Quick Reports or under the Money Tab on the Profile Page of any Organization, Project, Deliverable, or Task.