Charging a fee (non-hourly) to customers

1

Hey everyone,

So I am a freelancing language teacher, who usually charges per hour, for which the billable times works perfect, but in some cases I teach at the customers home, for which I charge a transportation fee. The transportation fee is a fixed fee, not an billable expense.
Is there any way for me to record this, without manually adding it on the sales invoice?

Thanks in advance!

2

you can record this by adding a separate line when making a sales invoice.
else, you will have to set the hourly rate to a value which would include this charge.

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3

You might be able to use Billable Expenses for this, and keep using Billable Time for anything that is hourly.

Then, when you go to convert your billable time entries into an invoice the regular way, you’ll notice that the billable expenses (travel costs) also appear in that list and get added to the invoice automatically.

4

Billable expenses can only be recorded by a Bank/Cash Transaction, Expense Claim or Purchase Invoice.
So it is a better option only if the user is recording any of these transactions.

5

@Yaman_Taie, I think the easiest approach is to define your transportation fee as a non-inventory item. Call it Transportation fee. Give it your standard, fixed charge. See this Guide: Create non-inventory items | Manager.

The workflow would be:

  1. Enter billable time as normal.
  2. When time to invoice, go to Customers tab and click on the Uninvoiced balance for the customer.
  3. Check the desired entries to be invoiced and create a new sales invoice.
  4. Edit the sales invoice and add a line. Choose the non-inventory item Transportation fee. Update the invoice. If desired, rearrange the order of items on the sales invoice using the double-headed arrows to the left of the line items.
  5. If necessary, edit the number of Transportation fee items to match the number of lessons. Or repeat Step #4 and edit descriptions by adding dates that the fees were incurred.

This method still involves manual entry as you are creating the sales invoice. But you would also require manual entry if you were creating a type of billable entry. Only the timing differs. The billable time entries on the sales invoice will serve as a visual reminder of dates for which transportation fees must be added, so there is little chance of forgetting them. The only thing to remember is that you cannot add billable time to an invoice that has the transportation fees on it already. You must create the sales invoice for the billable time from the Customers tab first.

This approach has the advantage of being financially correct at every stage. Since you are not basing the transportation fee on distance traveled, it is really just an arbitrary additional profit amount you are adding to the sales invoice. Therefore, it has no value before invoicing and should not appear in any asset account. This is unlike billable time, which represents an actual investment of your effort prior to invoicing and is shown as an asset in the Billable time account even before invoicing.

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