I have realised that I can change the price in the sales invoice to reflect what I want the customer to pay, rather than what I paid and having to add another line for my commission. So I think that disbursements should work very well for me for subcontracting the installation services and graphics design services.
However, if I quote a client for a network install. I cannot choose Disbursements income. I have to choose an account like Sales. Same thing for Sales Orders. So I would have to select Sales Account for sales quotes. When I copy to Sales Orders it will remain the same. When I copy the Sales Order to a Sales Invoice, I will need to chang the Sales account to Disbursements Income.
Same concept for Purchase Orders. I cannot choose disbursements recoverable. I can only choose disbursements recoverable at the purchase invoice stage.
Generally speaking, you don’t have to select any account on Sales Quote.
If you use billable time or disbursements, then you can’t copy sales quote into sales invoice. You need to create new sales invoice out of billable time/disbursements.
I think the issue here is that you are trying to merge two concepts which don’t really work well together. The fact you are quoting customer means that it’s irrelevant how much time (or money) you spend since you have already gave the customer price upfront. So there is no point tracking billable time because it’s not really billable time.
Billable time is when you tell customer you charge $50 per hour. Billable time will help you track your hours and then bill client for the time you spent on their assignments. If you give client quote upfront for final amount, they are going to pay you that regardless whether you spent 1 hour or 10 hours. Therefore tracking time is irrelevant.
I understand your point about billable time. That makes sense, however I am not tracking time.
What I am trying to do is this:
A client will ask me to quote them for a wireless installation system.
I will quote them for wireless access points, POE switches and my time to configure the wireless access points. That part is straight forward.
I will also quote them for installation of network points as the wireless network points will need network connectivity. However I do not install the network points myself. I subcontract that out to someone else.
So what will happen is the sub contractor will quote me £1000 to install the network points, I will quote the client £1100 for the network installation. I would like to use Disbursements as the account for expense and income for the network installs. This will link my subcontracting work to the specific client.
I can create a purchase invoice for my contractor to pay him for his work. I can create a sales invoice for my client (under disbursements) for the network install work.
However, I do not see any reason why I cannot create a quote for my client and select disbursements in the same way that I could select sales on inventory - its really the same thing in one sense. I also don’t see why I cannot create a purchase order with the disbursements expense as I frequently will ok a project which will not start for a couple of months, so I want the purchase order to put the contract on the system, but I don’t want to be invoiced yet.
I am ok with creating a sales quote and purchase order without putting in the expense/income account as I appreciate that the disbursements invoices works slightly different from the rest of the quote - sales order - sales invoice process. Now that I know that I don’t have to put an expense account in, that might help address my issue where i need a sales quote and a purchase order.