Been using Manager Software for a while. Really works well.
Now we have a problem I run an IT consulting services. We follow the below workflow
Our Business involves providing IT Man Power to Companies. Whenever a client asks for some man power we provide him with
Create a Sales Quote and email it to the Customer
Based on the Sales Quotation we convert it to Sales Order.
Customer provides us with a Purchase Order stating the No of Days he needs a consultant for.
For e.g. Purchase Order would have Quantity as 120 Days is the contract duration is 4months
On completion of every month we are suppose to raise an Sales for 30 Days.
Now I need to maintain an inventory of pending days in the given Sales Order
For e.g Whenever the customer asks me how many days of work is left, i should be able to send him an statement wherein i total up all the Sales invoices quantity & subtract against Sales Order and the difference is the no of days left in the contract.
Apart from this, if there any indication that we can get if the sales order against sales invoice quantity reaches Zero or -ve.
i do not know if it is a good practice to record the days as an inventory item.
anyway, if that is the way you wish to proceed,
create one inventory item each for the service you provide every customer.
for the inventory item created, set its starting balance as the contract duration i.e 120. (you can also enter a purchase invoice) Now the Qty on hand column will show the value 120.
if you are making an invoice for every 30 days and every day you work for 8 hours, enter the time spent as 240 hours. so for 120 days you will make a total of four entries.
then you can invoice each of these at an interval of 30 days.
@arul_k, you should definitely not be treating the days as inventory. Inventory refers to goods held for sale or production. Inventory has value that shows up on your balance sheet in the asset account Inventory on hand. Potential services have no such value and should not appear on your balance sheet. @sharpdrivetek’s approach for tracking days is very creative. By having no cost, you avoid the problem of balance sheet distortion. But when you sell days, you would end up with many zero-value transactions going into Inventory - cost. And because the method relies on starting balances, you need to create a new inventory item every time the customer authorizes you additional service days. It all gets very messy.
In your situation, your sales quote is not an accounting transaction and has no impact on your financial situation. It is just a convenient way of providing information to the customer in advance of the service. Manager makes no use of this information unless you copy the sales quote to another transaction (as you are doing).
Likewise, the sales order has no financial impact and just moves the information further through your particular workflow. In fact, I question whether it is useful in your situation. Your goal involves project management, not accounting, although your desired knowledge (days remaining) makes use of accounting information. Sometimes, various project management activities must be performed outside any accounting system.
Billable time is probably the best way to record time spent for a customer. @sharpdrivetek provided links to the relevant Guides. You can record time daily, weekly, or monthly. This has the benefit of showing up immediately as an asset on your balance sheet and in Billable time - movement on your profit and loss statement. It will also appear in the Customers tab under Uninvoiced column. If you want to know how much time has been spent, go to the Billable Time tab, search on the customer’s name, and you will see a list showing time and value. This can be exported and manipulated in a spreadsheet if further refinement is required. (When exporting, you can copy only the rows needed for the dates in question.) In this way, the Billable Time tab becomes your principal project management tool.
