Billable is working well for us where a customer has a high volume of tasks and billable jobs which are converted to invoices at the end of each month.
Now the crew carrying out these tasks and entering their billable time in Manager indicate that it will be highly convenient in the Billable Time tab to have another line to record say travel Km’s expended on a particular job. This will greatly help the business to ensure this info gets charged out and applied to the invoice. (No $ slipping through the cracks). See image below.
I do not understand this request. Billable time exactly does what it is supposed to do. Adding mileage, materials and supplies, are part of the Invoicing process,. A billable record gets assigned to an invoice and note that you can not even create an invoice from a billable time view screen. The invoice contains all elements that the customer will be charged for.
@compuit, you are recommending duplication of features that already exist in Manager. Deductible expenses for distance traveled should be entered as expense claims, as should purchases of any goods or services by an employee on behalf of the business that are billable to the customer. Purchases of goods or services directly by the business on behalf of the customer should simply be posted to Billable expenses.
You seem to be thinking of this only from the standpoint of a one-stop entry screen. But from an accounting perspective, billable time and travel allowances are quite distinct. Billable time creates value that is an asset, because that asset in the Billable time account can later be turned into revenue by invoicing. The asset creation is balanced by an offsetting post to Billable time - movement that represents income from work in progress, but not yet invoiced. Before the time was expended by the employee, there was no asset. The employee creates the value through labor.
A travel allowance, however, represents an actual expense by the company, because the employee must be reimbursed. Because the expense is billable, it is eventually offset by invoicing the customer. But by incurring the travel expense, the employee does not create value (an asset). She creates a liability through the expense claim. That liability is eventually transferred to income (Billable expenses - invoiced) and an offsetting expense (Billable expenses - cost).
The multiple postings involved with recording and later invoicing both billable time and expenses are hard-coded into the program and are completely separate, despite the fact that there are similarities in their respective processes. But they cannot be considered parts of the same transaction because of the way one creates an asset while the other creates a liability. That would be like combining a sales invoice and a purchase invoice on the same form in the same tab.
Gentlemen as pointed out by eko it will no longer be appropriate to call it “billable time” as adding a component like this will extend beyond the limit of billable time. It can potentially allow multiple people to record their time and kms in an efficient way and allow us to create these high dollar value invoices from the customer tab as we already do with billable time.
Main drivers from operational perspective
Simple and fast for Techs in the field
Techs can focus on their job eg time, the resolution and Kms
Speed all round because of simplicity
Accuracy of invoice creation
The tab can still be used for plain billable time
Similar work flow Ealfardan and yes where do you stop.
This is a thought from the “coal face” and worth mentioning as I am interested in not loosing out on chargeable Kms on large invoices over the duration of a month.
Tut you are pretty technical, appreciate your thoughts but this has been done in systems and no real duplication of process.
Sometimes it is not only an accountants or bookkeepers using Manager but real people that work in industry. Let’s think about them too.
You apparently missed some of my points, @compuit. The Billable Expenses and Expense Claims tabs already let you invoice billable time and billable expenses at the same time, in one step, from the Customers tab. If you are not doing that already, you can simplify your workflow with features currently available. All 5 of your “main drivers” are already addressed by the program.
I beg to differ. It is a 100% duplication of available features. Your only innovation is to suggest those features be combined on a single entry form. And I’ve explained why that is not practical. It also creates the requirement for other users to enable features they don’t want or need. Many people charge for travel distance without ever recording billable time. Yet under your system, they would have to enable that module.
I am neither an accountant nor a bookkeeper. I’m a real person with real businesses who has used the various tabs discussed in this thread extensively for years, doing exactly what you say you want to do.
Hey Tut share with us your mechanism to handle the challenge the Techs have thrown at me?
As you say all drivers are addressed, how? In particular the invoice creation from customer tab, that is the real gem oh yes and the part where the techs can focus on one area of manager to record their work. The other modules like Sales orders etc are not practical too fiddly for this purpose… I and the techs are missing your wisdom.
All you basically said in a nut shell it is not feasible.
Only real “addition” pointed out by the boys is travel kms. Yes travel kms is not billable time, it is cost per km. So the thinking the guys and I have is if it could be somehow added it would be super efficient. Of course the billable time tab may need to reflect something else that was picked up very early in the conversation.
So again Tut as you are a Tech and business owner how do you run this up say 50 lines in an invoice faster than the billable time method?
You should look into applications that are used for this such as Tradify and Jobber. Yes these are pretty expensive but they do what the Techs have thrown at you and use Manager for your tax accounts.
Alternatively you can also handout preprinted job cards or use an free task manager app and have someone verify the information the Techs put into these for accuracy because tampering with such information is the most common problem found with job cards. This person can put the verified information into Manager in the tabs they belong such as Billable time and Expense claims. If you have many employees this maybe a better option than paying for example GBP21/m per staff for Tradify.
Read the Guides about billable expenses. Your repeated posts about wanting to be able to invoice in a manner similar to billable time suggest you have not, though I’ve called your attention to it several times.
Travel for these jobs is charged directly to the customer … We are not accounting for personal Staff expenses as Expense Claims are geared for. All techs have company cars and fuel cards. Nothing personal for expense claims.
Now please we are focusing on invoicing the Customer not company or personal expenses.
The method is described in the Guides. I’m not sure why you are resistant to reading them. Tangible expenses are entered as payments, posted to Billable expenses. Imputed expenses like travel allowances are entered with journal entries, posted to the same account. Invoicing is identical to billable time and can be done simultaneously.
I have read the Guides and there is nothing fast and consolidated like Billable time and why are you encouraging people to use Billable expenses which is obsolete? Well sort of, you have to specifically enabled it. Billable expenses is not the solution here, in fact even if enabled it in version 22.12.29.575 the tab and functionality does not appear in Manager either so it looks like it is pretty dead… also will it slip into the same invoice created by Billable Time method?
Anyway we digress. It will be great to have one place to go to and the Techs get their Job done without jumping to other tabs (That do not appear / work). I leave this with the powers that be.
The accounts and procedures associated with billable expenses are not obsolete. They still work exactly as before, except there is not a dedicated tab. Nor do you need one. Billable expenses are entered—as they always have been—in other tabs. In your case, this would be Payments and Journal Entries.
Rather than continually fighting this, I wish you would just try it.
Not fighting anything Tut - I am not the one needing this the Techs are. There is speculation as to whether “Billable Expenses” is still to be considered: - Ref Lubos - “Although I wonder whether it’s needed at all. Billable expenses tab was never needed for the workflow since recording new billable expenses was done in other tabs and invoicing was done through Customers tab. So it seems like billable expenses should have been always a report at most”.
Billable Expenses - Does not fit the Request (Maybe if integrated in Job Card / Billable Time Tab - Yes)
One additional line in the now current “Billable line” can solve the Techs Issue
It will mean One place for them to go and run up their Job Card / Billable Time"
Fast and easy for them to focus and enter Km distance with guaranteed charged out
Fast for Admin to construct large accurate multiple line invoices
You are arguing for your own Tech’s needs for job cards. Following this discussion I seem to understand what you want but if each and everyone of us wants to add just a line here and there Manager would become a messed up soup of options.
In another topic I already warned of this mission creep that seems to add more and more non essential features. Indeed more elegant as some others raised would be similar to what competing accounting software does and allow for third-party add-ons or integrations and use for your specific needs something like Tradify.
Good- to-haves are not must-haves. Applications such as MS Word would never gotten so bloated if they did not include as many options as possible when trying to win the market during their early days. Users suffer this until to date with only a fraction of users using more than 5% of the features available, while hardware demands are huge and speed of operation poor. Simply said "there must be a better way "
Yes you are right Eko… Any business owner will want to look after its crew at the coal face ( it is very often a company’s most expensive asset). Bluntly put : No people = No Business
Lets not lose sight of the other point lighted - the creation of large invoices from the customer tab and here this “idea” looks after the admin crew too.
Potentially it looks after the businesses interest by not letting money slip through the cracks. (pretty important in my book).
Manager does overall do a reasonable job. In terms of application bloat and performance I believe the developer will not introduce or deploy components that will break Manager or any accounting rules.
Now from the conversation it seems clear to me that this idea is not useful logic and will only really benefit our small businesses and crew. So many thanks for the feedback.
"