Services

IN THIS ARTICLE

A service is a unit-based product estimate that is repeated for the entire duration of a phase, and whose total price updates as the schedule changes

Services are used to estimate recurring costs - such as managed services, license subscriptions and hosting plans that are based on a number of units/volume of a pre-defined product.

For example:

A monthly 'gold' support package priced at $5K a month
An per-user subscription for 500 users / month
An analytics service priced at 10K events / day
A backup service priced at up to 100GB / month
An excessive supply of caffeine to maximise productivity of developers (100 coffees / hour)

Services are located in Deal > Estimates > Services.

Example of recurring services (from the updated sample deal)

Estimating services

Services are similar to features - however you can only estimate fixed price and unit-based product resources (not roles or streams). You only have to estimate the units for a specific time period (months, days, etc) and Estii automatically calculates to total units and price based on the phase duration.

You can assign up to 10 estimates per task.
Products automatically displays the units and time period based on the product settings
If a product doesn’t have a time period, it will default to month (e.g. 1 user / month). You can easily change the units and time period to suite your estimate (e.g. 10 users / day)
You can also estimate against unit Variable units that change over time

Some examples of the different types of product supported in services

You can either fix the time period within the product, or set one in the estimate

Variables

Variables allow for estimates that change over time based on a predetermined range or growth rate such as user licenses or hosting services that grow with increased activity.

Breakdowns

You can click on any value in the units or total column to view a detailed breakdown of the calculations - this works across all the estimation categories, and is available for individual estimates, tasks totals, features totals and even page totals!

Products contain a breakdown by units and ranges (e.g. tiered pricing)

The services total contains a breakdown for all estimated services

Limitations

A phase can have up to 50 services.
A service can contain up to 20 tasks
A service task can have up to 20 estimates

Import / export services

You can bulk import and export services via the ... menu. You can use this to duplicate services between different phases and deals, or to integrate with external platforms.

CSV Format

Both import and export use the same format that supports multiple services and tasks in order.

Column	Description	Allowed values/length	Notes
Service	Service name	Maximum 60 characters	Required
Priority	Service priority	None, Low, Normal, High, Critical	Required
Risk	Service risk	None, Low, Normal, High	Required
Task	Task name	Maximum 60 characters	Tasks only
Description	Task description	Maximum 240 characters, supports multiple lines if wrapped in “ “ quotation marks	Tasks only
Product	The name of an known resource (product)	Maximum 20 per Task	Tasks only
Estimate	The number of units to include	Number (float)	Tasks only
Unit	The unit type of the product	The unit type of the product	Tasks only
Period	The time period (if set)	minute, hour, day, week, month, quarter or year. Defaults to month	Tasks only. Optional

CSV Example

Service,Priority,Risk,Task,Description,Resource,Estimate,Unit,Period
Intrastructure,None,None,Cloud costs,"* Assumes production, dev and test environment",Compute,3,instance,
,,,,,Bandwidth,10,GB,
,,,,,Storage,1,GB,
Managed IT services,None,None,Based on volume of managed events,,Backup,1,none,
,,,,,Support package,2,event,
Licensing,None,None,Assumes average of  5K users a month,,Tiered license,500,user,