Hi,
The billable time feature is great and works perfectly.
Maybe the best solution here is that I need to get my business processes more organized, but realistically, I don’t think that will happen, so…
I would like a way that i can record a sale of a product, either from the inventory or not, as being sold to a customer, but un-invoiced.
Then every month or week or whatever, like with Billable time, I would like to be able to go and put all billable items for a client into an invoice, preferably the same invoice as the billable time.
What you have described does not make accounting sense, because there has been no accounting transaction. You can post a purchase to Billable expenses, such as when buying materials for a job you are doing for a customer, and then invoice the customer later. But you cannot “sell” an item to a customer without recording either a receipt or sales invoice. That item has to come from somewhere.
Manager cannot obligate an item to a customer without selling it. That would make the program a prediction system. Accounting records what has already happened.
Thanks for the explanation Tut.
Every other system I have used allows this, and Manager also does when manually creating an invoice, but I understand that it might not be strictly compliant with proper accounting principals.
Manager cannot obligate an item to a customer without selling it. That would make the program a prediction system. Accounting records what has already happened.
Yet it does this (i think) with the billable hours.
Anyway not trying to argue, just trying to understand and ensure im not missing something.
You are incorrect in your interpretation of billable time. Once the labor has been expended on behalf of the customer, the obligation exists and remains only to be invoiced. The labor has occurred and been recorded. But items you intend to sell have not been sold. Those are important distinctions.
You missed my point. It hasn’t been sold, so there is no way to show it has. You still own whatever it is. This is unlike billable time, which is sold when you expend the labor.
How about you create a Sales Invoice with the date set to the end of the current month?
Every time they buy something, add it to that invoice.
Then send the invoice to them at the end of the month containing a summary of everything they bought.
To help track this, you could:
Use a custom field to indicate if it’s a “Draft” sales invoice or “Sent to customer”
When adding new items to the invoice, use the line item description field to indicate the date they purchased the item, so that when they get the invoice it has a list of everything they bought that month along with the date for each line item.
I am confused. An invoice is not yet a financial transaction, only when you add payments against it they will clear. An invoice thus itself is a record of sales that have yet to be paid, when the actual financial transaction has been completed the receipt is entered against it.
In this case I do not know why for every sales @njm does not enter a sales invoice. Once the customer pays it will clear out these invoices even if using one receipt for the total amount. This way the sale gets recorded by the principles of double entry accounting and remains an accounts receivable until paid for.
So not sure what this is all about but sometimes the business processes must be aligned with the principles of accounting in this case double entry.
@Ealfardan there is no need for Sales Order nor Delivery notes is the objective is as stated. If @njm would just create invoices using non-inventory items for each sale and then when receiving payment clears these for that customer as invoices as in customers name then there is no need for anything else.
I think this will be my best option.
Unfortunately this will mean that sometimes, a client will get 2 or 3 invoices.
1 for Items they purchased.
1 for billable time.
1 for reoccuring invoices.
A way of merging invoices would be fantastic, but I think I can make this work.
The way I used to (when I previously used Manager) sell items was to leave “Item” field blank, and set the account, tax type etc, and put the product details in the description field. THat way i dont have to worry about items/inventory/non-inventory items, but I understand this may be considered wrong.
@njm, there is no need for multiple invoices. You are struggling to hold on to a workflow that is incorrect, both from a purely accounting viewpoint and from the design of the program. Billable time, billable expense, and other line items that might be on a recurring invoice can all be combined.
