Work roles: what an hour costs

A work role is a trade you attach an hourly rate to: excavator operator, foreman, labourer, volunteer. It is what lets a task say not just "eighteen hours", but "eighteen hours, $660" — and tell machine hours apart from hours of manual work on the same job.

You describe them once. After that, every member carries their role, and the time logged on a task arrives with its cost, without anyone having to pick anything while logging.

Where: left navigation bar, under Organization → Work roles.

Creating a role

The section opens on the list of your roles and their rates.

Create one role per kind of work, not per person: "Excavator operator", not "Marc". That is what keeps the list short, a rate revision quick, and the whole thing bearable when the crew changes.

The name is yours to choose, but it has to be unique in your place — the app refuses a duplicate. Pick the word you actually use in the field: that is what will show next to each participant and in your reports.

The hourly rate

The rate being asked for is the cost to your organization — taxes and benefits included —, not the person's take-home pay. For machinery rented with an operator, enter the rate the way the supplier invoices it: the role name carries that information, you do not have to break it down.

A role can carry no rate at all. Leave the field empty and the role shows No cost: that is the case for volunteers, whose hours you want to count without wanting an amount. The hours are recorded, the cost stays at zero, and nothing invents a figure on your behalf.

The rate is frozen at the moment of the entry. Every time entry keeps the rate that was in force that day. A raise applied in July does not rewrite the cost of the work done in May — that is what lets you hand a figure to a funder without it changing between two readings.

Amounts are in Canadian dollars.

Assigning a role to your members

The role lives on the person, not on the entry. That is why there is nothing to pick when logging hours.

Three paths lead to the same result: this board, the Work role field on a member's page, and the invitation — you pick the role when inviting someone, and the person arrives already sorted. On mobile, a member's role can also be read and changed from their page.

A member with no role can still log time: their hours count, they simply land under Other when the task breaks its cost down.

Changing someone's role does not touch their past. Hours already recorded keep the role and the rate they had; the new role applies from the next entry onward.

What the role changes next

Once your roles are in place, they show up in four places with nothing more to do:

• on the task, which displays its total and its breakdown by role;
• on the dashboard, in the period's labour cost, broken down by role as well;
• in the Without an account area of an entry, where a role alone is enough to price a resource with no Sentinel account — a subcontractor, a rented excavator;
• in the Excel export of tasks, on the time entries sheet.

Changing a rate, deleting a role

Editing a role's name or rate is done by opening its row. The new rate applies to entries to come, never to the ones that exist.

Deleting a role is gentler than it sounds:

• the members who carried it move back to To assign;
• the role is no longer offered when logging time, neither on the web nor in the field;
• the hours already recorded with it keep their role and their cost, and your past reports do not move.

A role that was never used, on the other hand, disappears for good — a typo does not have to leave a trace.

Who can do what

You need the Work roles right to see the section, and the same right in write mode to create, edit or delete a role. That right also governs changing a member's role: without it, nobody can give themselves a rate by editing their own profile.

Amounts are a separate right. The Amounts right decides who sees the dollars. Without it, the roles still show everywhere — on participants, in a task's breakdown — but the rates and the costs do not. A field crew can therefore log its hours without ever seeing what they cost.

The section also requires a plan that includes work roles.

Three pieces of advice

One role per kind of work, not per person. Four or five roles cover most organizations. A list with as many roles as members is a list nobody keeps up to date.

Set a rate right away, even a rough one. A roughly right rate beats an empty field: it can be corrected later without breaking anything, whereas hours recorded with no rate will stay without a cost.

Create a no-cost role for your volunteers. You get the number of donated hours — the figure most grant applications ask for — without mixing those hours into your payroll.