I’m a little confused about how to get monies received showing in the correct income accounts.
At the moment, I’m tracking time with Billable Time (love it!), and then issuing invoices from there. This all works fine. When a client pays, I’m receiving the money, but have to do it into the ‘Fees from work in progress’ account. If I put it into the income accounts I’d like to use (for the different services I provide) — via editing the Sales Invoices directly (editing the ‘Account’ item for each line entry) then all the items under ‘Billable Time’ no longer show up as having been invoiced. And sometimes the invoices then show as being Unpaid.
Also, if I edit the individual Billable Time entries to say that their status is ‘Invoiced’ — it does provide me with the correct invoice to link them to, but then it doesn’t change anything in the main Billable Time screen, and they still come up as being ‘Uninvoiced’.
So, now I have all these ‘Fees from work in progress’ (and they are fees from work that has been completed) — but I can’t separate this income into the appropriate categories within my income accounts, without the invoices then showing up as unpaid.
I’m also a bit confused that both paid and unpaid entries are showing up under the ‘Fees for work in progress’ tab within my Account Summary.
Is there any way around this? Am I doing anything wrong?
This account name indicates your version is obsolete. You should update. This account now has a default name of Billable time - invoiced. Functionality is the same, though.
The reason you can’t do what you’re trying to do is that accounts in the Billable Time tab are interrelated via hard coding in the software. I think @lubos is still tinkering with this tab, so you may see some changes in the future.
Two ways you might handle things:
Use tracking codes for your different types of business, but leave the time and related income where it is.
Transfer amounts from Billable time - invoiced to other income categories, but without modifying anything on the invoices. You could do this once a month or even once a year.
This is because Manager is an accrual accounting system. Accrual accounting recognizes income when it is earned, not when payment is received. This is a more accurate reflection of your company’s financial position.
If you want cash accounting, you can select that in the relevant reports, such as the Profit & Loss statement. When editing the individual report, the dropdown box for that is in the upper right corner.
OK, thanks @Tuts2013. Yeah, I was running 15.3.82. Now updated.
The only way I can see to transfer funds from one income account to another is to edit the ‘Account’ setting for each item on the entry, in the Billable Time - Invoiced section? And that leads me to the same issue with the amount then showing up as ‘Uninvoiced’ in Billable Time. Is there another way to achieve this transfer?
What I’ve been doing:
Edited to:
This then makes these amounts ‘Uninvoiced’ under Billable Time.
I use cash accounting, and have set that up for reports. So there isn’t an overall ‘cash accounting’ setting I can select?
When you edit anything to Editing services, you are disassociating everything in the Billable Time module. Don’t do that. The accounts that interrelate are:
Billable time
Billable time - movement
Billable time - invoiced
Each has subaccounts for the customers for whom you’ve recorded billable time.
If you want to later transfer amounts that you’ve invoiced into different income accounts to differentiate sources of income, you cannot do it directly from Billable time. You will need to use journal entries, debiting Billable time - invoiced and crediting the alternate income account. When you do this, you will only be moving money, not hours. The reason you cannot mess with the three accounts listed above is that they are linked to time recorded and a rate.
I urge you to consider carefully whether you really need to do this. When you make a new entry of billable time, there is a field called Category. Here, you could have as many categories as you like. When you select the Billable Time tab and see the listing, the Categories will be displayed. If you need to analyze them in some way, you can export the list to a spreadsheet.
Not that I know of. Manager is designed for accrual accounting because that is the de facto standard in the accounting world. Once you have a set of records kept on the accrual basis, you can produce cash basis reports from it. But you cannot go the other direction.
Don’t change account to Editing services. If you like Billable time - invoiced to be called Editing services, go to your Chart of accounts and rename Billable time - invoiced to Editing services.
The issue here is that I have about 5 different services I offer. So while editing the title to ‘Editing services’ would work for editing, it won’t work for ‘Indexing services’, ‘Graphic design services’ etc.
What I’d like to be able to do is somehow be able to allocate the ‘Billable time - invoiced’ income into my different income stream categories. But it sounds like this might not be possible?
You can get most of the way there with Billable Time. For each entry in Billable Time, enter a category. For this to work best, choose category names that are not typically used in the description of the work. (In other words, don’t describe work as “…editing services on marketing material…” and then categorize as “editing.” Perhaps codes would be more reliable, such as EDTG, GPHC, INDX, etc.
At the end of a chosen financial period (month, quarter, year), search the Billable Time listing using the category name/code. You will get a list of entries with that category. Either add them up manually or export the search results to a spreadsheet for manipulation. Once you know the total amount, use a journal entry to transfer the income from Billable time - invoiced to a regular income account named however you like.
The other way to do what you want is to define sales invoice items, with unit prices and target accounts named for your five types of services. The unit prices would be the hourly rate. There would be no journal entries this way. And you would not need the Billable Time model to be enabled.
