Verifying BPO invoices is a slow, manual process that often leads to overpayments, delays, and a ton of spreadsheet work. The BPO Billing Report eliminates guesswork by giving teams a clear, structured way to compare actual hours worked vs. what’s on the invoice — so they can spot discrepancies fast and pay accurately.
The report is designed to identify exactly how many billable hours a BPO has provided, and to compare that to what was scheduled and requested
Note: you'll need to have the BPO planner enabled to see the billing report. Reach out to support@assembled.com if you don't have it enabled.
Metrics overview
The billing report shows a set of core metrics
Productive hours
required, scheduled, and actual
actual hours can be configured to be actual productive hours or productive hours in adherence
Non-productive billable hours
Scheduled hours that have been marked as 'billable' for a particular BPO, such as 'lunch' or 'training'
Total billable hours
The sum of actual productive hours and non-productive billable hours
Line adherence
Identifies whether actual hours matched required hours per interval. Shows whether hours where delivered when they were requested.
Segmentation
Metrics can be segmented by Site, Queue, Team, and Skill.
Metrics can also be segmented by time period (i.e. interval or day, etc) via the export button.
Configuration
Use the reports configuration tab to set the non-productive billable events and the definition for productive hours.
These are both set per BPO
Productive hour definition: choose how a ‘productive hour’ is computed. Some companies pay by productive hours, regardless of adherence, while others pay in adherence.
Non-productive billable events: choose the event types that a BPO will charge for.
The report will automatically update when saved.
Export
The export button at the top right allows the report to be exported in a CSV format.
Just like in the report, the export can add columns for data segmentation, choose the date range and filter by channel, queue, etc.
The export also allows aggregating data by time interval, which is not currently supported in the report. The report's default setting is to aggregate over the entire selected time frame.
Exporting allows aggregating by smaller granularity, down to the interval level.
Metrics In Depth
Line Adherence
Line adherence expresses how closely actual hours matched required hours as a percentage at the most granular level possible. It expresses ‘how well did my BPO meet required hours per interval' across an entire day, week, month, etc.
Required vs Actual tells us if the right number of hours were delivered. Line Adherence tells us if the right hours were delivered when we wanted them.
100% line adherence means that per interval the actual hours delivered exactly matched the hours requested. Anything less means there’s a mismatch (either too few or too many actual hours).
Why it’s useful
- A customer could require 100 hours during the day and get exactly 100 hours delivered. Line Adherence tells us whether those 100 hours were delivered when we wanted them.
- Some companies have bonuses / penalties in their BPO contracts for Line Adherence (say < 95%).
How it’s calculated
It’s based adding up the absolute value of the variance for each interval throughout the day. At the end the line adherence is (1 - variance / required)
In this chart the Line Adherence number is in bold
| Time | Required | Actual | Variance | Interval Compliance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | 20 | 91.67% |
Making the most use of line adherence requires publishing requirements by hourly interval (or less) in the BPO Planner.
Non-productive billable hours
This is a fully new metric introduced by the billing report. The idea is that some customers pay BPOs for non-productive hours like training or lunch. The specific event types are configured per BPO on the report settings page.
This metric show the total number of scheduled hours for billable non-productive events. There is no concept of ‘actual’ because
Actual Productive Hours
What’s new in the billing report is that we allow the customer to select their own definition of productive hours. BPO contracts will frequently require & charge based on productive hours, regardless of adherence. By default ‘actuals’ in Assembled are generally productive hours in adherence, so the billing report allows selecting which definition to use.
Required Hours
Required hours come from the BPO planner. In order to see them in the report you'll need to first upload them into the planner, ideally at the hourly (or less) interval.
Because required hours are segmented by site, they are not taken automatically from forecasts.
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