Managing Editorial Assignment Costs with Desk-Net

The assignment cost feature in Desk-Net allows you to easily assign standard or individual costs to an assignment and to track them.

This feature is part of a feature bundle designed to support the commissioning of (freelance) users (learn more about this).

We structure the support post into the following sections:

• Activating the Costs feature
• Entering individual costs per assigment
• Who can see the cost values?
• Working with standard costs
• Defining standard costs per assignee and task
• Tracking costs

Activating the Costs feature

To use this feature you need to activate on the page Admin > General Settings. Admin rights are required for this.

Entering individual costs per task

Once you have activated the feature you will see the Cost field in the task panel of your stories (make sure you have added a task to a story). You can find it on the right side, potentially just after clicking on the More Options link.

Here you can enter the value and change the currency if needed.

Who can see the cost values?

There is a simple rule to all places where the cost values are displayed:

• Internal users can see all costs to which they have access if they have permission rights to cost data. An administrator can activate this in the user profiles. Internal users can view their personal costs even if they do not have access to cost data.     

• External users, i.e. freelancers only have access to the costs of their own assignments. Even if two freelancers work on the same story (e.g. reporter and photographer) one cannot see the costs of the other.

Working with standard costs

In many companies there is a list of standard cost per assignment type. In such a case entering the same cost values over and over again can be burdensome and error-prone.

In Desk-Net you can define standard costs per assignment type. These values are then pre-entered into the above-described cost field of assignments and can then manually be edited if needed.

To enter such standard costs access the Admin > Tasks page (you need admin rights for this).

Open an existing task for editing or create a new one. In the edit widget you will find the cost field and currency. Enter the standard cost value for this type of assignment and change the currency if needed.

When you now add a task to a story the cost field will be pre-filled with this value. This value can then be manually edited on a case-by-case basis if needed.

Entering or editing a standard cost value does not affect already existing tasks.

Defining standard costs per assignee and task

You may not have a list of standard costs or you work together with freelancers for whom different costs per assignment apply.

To support this business case Desk-Net allows you define standard costs per task and user. If a specific task typically costs $50 but your senior freelancer gets $55 then you can enter those $55 as a standard cost for that user.

And you can enter such user-specific standard costs for all tasks.

To do so access the User List (you need admin rights for this), open a user profile for editing and in the area with additional options select the cost settings.

A widget opens that displays all non-user-specific costs. In it you can then define the user-specific standard costs.

Once such a user-specific standard cost value has been entered the cost value will be automatically changed to that value as soon as that user has been selected. Exception: If a different value had been entered before manually that value will not change.

Tracking costs

You can track and review your assignment costs by downloading the task list on the page Tasks.

The xls file contains the cost values.