Calculating Residual Labor Cost for Regulatory Projects
I work for a contract dietary supplement manufacturer, and I have recently been promoted to a regulatory and compliance role. I am a salaried employee. We have never charged customers for regulatory and compliance projects, but we are starting to know that I am in the role. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to calculator determine the residual labor to charge on top the actual cost of the project, i.e. having documents notarized, travel to embassies and government offices, etc.
Just a nominal or whatever it costs you to do the work. Was it not included before?
Could you just track hours and misc expenses in a spreadsheet?
Interesting. I have been in a regulatory compliance manager role in a few previous positions but was never that granular in tracking. I would imagine my customers would push back on any bills, as costs like you describe generally get rolled into your total costs when calculating pricing. Typically getting a document notarized is rolled in to overhead, as the office manager in every facility I've worked in was a certified Notary Public.
How often do you have to travel to embassies or gov regulator offices, and are they customer specific visits?
We have never charged our customers for anything related to it before. But now that we have been in business for a while we are seeing more requests for international compliance, etc. So notarized documents, notary authentications, great seal amendments, etc. I am travelling to embassies, notary offices, clerk of courts at least once a week and we have not had any charges like this factored into overhead so we are literally starting from scratch on calculating how to charge our customers for this. And normally we would not be this granular but i am the only person managing this and the requests and projects are getting bigger and bigger so the company wanted to start to earn money back on the time and labor that was going into this.