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BPO billing

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BPO management add-on, billed separately · Admin or Manager role
Add-on
BPO management, billed separately. To add it, contact our team.
View BPO billing
Admin or Manager role
Or a custom role with BPO management set to Can manage BPOs and allocations on the Data & integrations tab
Change billing setup
Admin or Manager role
Or a custom role with BPO management set to Can manage BPOs and allocations on the Data & integrations tab

People with restricted sites can't change billing setup.

Admins set roles and permissions in Manage team > Roles and permissions.

Use BPO billing to check your BPOs’ invoices against the hours they actually delivered. It shows how many billable hours each BPO provided, compared with the hours you required and scheduled, so you can spot discrepancies before you pay.

To open it, go to Report > BPO billing. The page has two tabs: Report and Setup.

Required hours come from BPO planning, so upload your requirements there first.

Set up billing for each BPO

Billing setup decides what counts as billable for each BPO, because contracts differ. Some BPOs bill for productive hours whatever the adherence, while others bill only for hours in adherence.

  1. On Report > BPO billing, select the Setup tab.
  2. Find the BPO site’s section.
  3. Under Productive hours definition, choose Productive hours (regardless of adherence) or Hours in adherence (the default).
  4. Under Billable non-productive event types, choose the non-productive event types the BPO bills for, such as Lunch or Training.
  5. Select Save.

The report updates to use the new setup.

The Setup tab for a BPO site, with the Productive hours definition and Billable non-productive event types settings

Filter and group the report

  • Group the report by Team, Site, Skill, or Queue, up to three levels deep.
  • Choose a date range of up to two months. The range can’t include today.
  • The report adds up each metric over the whole date range. To see it by day, hour, or week, download the report.

Download the report

  1. Select Export, then To CSV or To Google Sheets.
  2. In Configure download, choose up to three fields in Segment data by: Channel, Queue, Team, Site, or Skill.
  3. Choose the Date range.
  4. Choose the Time interval: Hour, Day (the default), Week, or Aggregate data over entire selected time frame. If your company uses 30-minute intervals, Half hour is also available.
  5. Optional: use Filter data by to narrow the data, such as to one channel or queue.
  6. Select Download.

Billing metrics

The BPO billing report grouped by site and skill, showing productive, non-productive, and total billable hours and line adherence for each BPO

Metric What it shows
Productive hours: Required The productive hours you required from the BPO, from your BPO planning uploads.
Productive hours: Scheduled The productive hours scheduled for the BPO’s team members.
Productive hours: Billable The actual productive hours that qualify for billing, based on the BPO’s productive hours definition.
Billable non-productive hours The scheduled hours of non-productive events that the BPO bills for, such as lunch or training.
Total billable hours Billable productive hours plus billable non-productive hours.
Line adherence How closely billable hours matched required hours in each interval, so whether hours were delivered when you needed them.

To choose which columns appear, select Select metrics.

Where the numbers come from

Required hours

Required hours are the requirements you upload in BPO planning, ideally by the hour or a shorter interval. Because they’re set for each BPO site, they don’t come from your forecasts.

Billable productive hours

Hours in Assembled are often counted in adherence, but BPO contracts differ, so billing lets you choose the definition for each BPO in billing setup.

Billable non-productive hours

You choose which non-productive event types count for each BPO in billing setup, and this metric is the total scheduled hours of those events. There’s no actual value, because Assembled doesn’t track whether non-productive events were actually worked.

How line adherence is calculated

Required compared with billable hours tells you whether the right number of hours was delivered. Line adherence tells you whether they were delivered when you needed them. A BPO can deliver exactly the 100 hours you required in a day, but at the wrong times. Some BPO contracts include bonuses or penalties based on line adherence, such as below 95%.

For each requirement interval:

Interval line adherence = 1 − (|billable hours − required hours| ÷ required hours).

The report shows the average across the intervals in the range, as a percentage. 100% means billable hours exactly matched required hours in every interval. Anything less means too few or too many hours in some intervals.

For example:

Time Required Billable Difference Interval line adherence
12:00 AM 40 33 7 82.50%
1:00 AM 40 45 5 87.50%
2:00 AM 40 42 2 95.00%
3:00 AM 40 41 1 97.50%
4:00 AM 40 38 2 95.00%
5:00 AM 40 37 3 92.50%
Full day 240 236 20 91.67%

The day’s line adherence is the average of the six intervals: (82.5 + 87.5 + 95 + 97.5 + 95 + 92.5) ÷ 6 = 91.67%.

Keep in mind: Line adherence is most useful when you upload requirements by the hour, or a shorter interval, in BPO planning.

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