FAQ: Understanding QuoteX - Staffing Rules

1. Purpose and Overview

Staffing Rules eliminate guesswork during the early stages of a project by providing a systematic way to generate costs. Instead of starting from scratch for every quote, SMEs build Rate Blends that act as pricing "blueprints" for the sales team. These calculated rates are ultimately used within the Scope Library to derive the Average Calculated Cost for delivering specific project scopes.

2. Creating a Rate Blend (The Parent Template)

The process begins in the Staffing Rules tab by adding a new Rate Blend.

• Identification: You give the blend a clear name that identifies the roles and regions involved (e.g., "PM(US)|Dev(IND) - USD").
• Currency Alignment: You must select a specific currency for the blend. This is critical because users can only apply these rules to quotes that match the same currency.

3. Defining Blend Rate Roles (The Calculation Logic)

Once the parent record is created, you add individual Blend Rate Roles in the "Related" tab to build your pricing model. For each role, you define three critical factors:

• Presumed Rate: You manually input a rate for the chosen role based on your organization’s standard rate cards or an informed assumption from previous project experience.
• Percent Allocation: This field identifies how much of a specific role is needed relative to total project time.
  • Example: If a project lasts 1 hour but only requires a Project Manager for 30 minutes, you would enter a 50% allocation. If the PM's hourly cost is $20, the calculated cost for the PM in this project would be $10.
• Expense Allocation: You can add a percentage to cover additional expenses associated with that role. This ensures the final rate is "all-inclusive" by summing the calculated rate with the associated expenses.

4. The Roll-Up and Result

The power of Staffing Rules lies in the automatic aggregation of data. As you add different roles and allocations to a template, the following occurs:

• Aggregation: All individual role costs and expenses "roll up" to the parent Rate Blend record.
• Final Metrics: The system automatically calculates the Average Rate Calculated and the All-Inclusive Rate Calculated for the entire template.

Application: When a salesperson uses the Rate Blends to build the scopes, these rates are pulled in to provide an accurate, data-backed estimate of the costs required to deliver those specific scope items.