I have entered amounts for billable expenses and matched them with sales invoices but on my balance the amount for billable expenses doesn’t go down to zero.
Is there an option to set the billable expenses ledger to zero?
I assume you are referring to the Billable expenses account balance in the Summary. Click on the blue balance figure to drill down and see what contributes to it. Make sure everything has been billed out.
Another, perhaps easier approach–depending on how many customers and expenses you’ve had, is to go to the Customers tab and look for a customer who has a balance in the Uninvoiced items column. Drill down on that balance and see what hasn’t been invoiced. This is explained here:
https://forum.manager.io/t/tracking-billable-expenses/5503
The transaction(s) causing the balance to be greater than zero should be easy to find.
Thanks you for the information.
I have been using “journal entries” to enter all sorts of billable expenses I made for my clients. These have been paid for with cash, private bankcards, private creditcard etc
I notice that these journal entries do not show up on the Customers tab, although that wouldn’t matter too much for me as I “collect” the total amount and bill out only a part of it (I have to take an amount as own costs).
I did set the status of the billable expenses to Invoice and linked the correct invoice to it.
If the journal entries will not be added to the billable expenses module than would the correct work-around be to make a fake supplier with the amount for the “error” in my balance? (I know, it’s rather dirty. But to re-enter is a lot of work 
)
These transactions should be entered with expense claims, not journal entries. Expense claims get associated with specific customers.
No. Fake transactions are never appropriate.
This sounds as totally inappropriate accounting - If the total amount is 1000 but you only bill out 600 then you are understating your income. As suggested above, use the Expense Claim tab in lieu of the Journals, Journals are only used to record adjustments and must not be used for cash based transactions.
@Tut I know the quick-and-dirt workaround isn’t appropriate but I needed some correct numbers to show up. (I would fix it later.) As suggested I have moved all my entries to cash books (GBP and EUR) now, which took me more time than wanted but that did seem to correct 99% of my balance error.
@Brucanna I spent € 500 off which I can invoice £ 300 to my client. I do need to record all my expenses and see a loss for the unclaimable part. I am not withholding any income if I made that suggestion.
Follow-up question:
I am working with GBP and EUR. My main valuta is GBP so the Billable Expense ledger is report in GBP as well. I have 2 transactions that don’t match up:
- I had expenses (€ 22,50) on 23/09 in EUR and billed it out on 03/10 for (€ 22,50). Of this transaction (£ 18,86 - £ 19,60)£ 0,74 -/- remains.
- I had a lot of expenses in both EUR and GBP between 06/10 and 16/10 (reported as £ 554,28) and billed the part I can claim with my client out on 17/10 for (€ 327,24). The sales invoice is listed as £ 560,05 in the billable expenses ledger. Of this transaction £ 5,77 -/- remains.
How can I get the total £ 6,51 off the balance?
Technical issue?
I only tried this on #1 but if I set the 23/09 date to 03/10 the £ 0,74 -/- disappears (*) which suggests that the system is using the billable expenses module correctly to check them against each other. Both amounts then get reported as £ 19,60. Am I correct to think that when the expenses and the sent out invoice are checked against each other the module is not applying “sum off billable expenses in main valuta up to the date of the invoiced amount of billable expenses” = “to be reported as the total amount of billed out expenses”, leading the plus or minus to be reported in the P&L as mark-up or unrecoverable?
(*) But then the dates for the claims don’t match up with my physical receipts.
If you spent more on the project then you can invoice the client why not record the loss as that could be offset against other income.
Your small variances appear to be foreign exchange gains or losses - so write them off.
(In my reports I add all the expenses and costs of sales together so the total will be offset against other incomes. But that doesn’t matter here.)
But how can I write-off the small variances? The expenses have all been matched with invoices.
How depends on where the balance is sitting.
One way would be to use the same exchange rate for both the taking up of expenses and the billings - using the billing rate. This would have the same effect as writing off - the adjustment would be reflect in the GBP figure of the expenses instead of being reflected in Foreign Exchange Gain/Losses account.
I have removed all the exchange rates and this fixes my billable expenses problem.