Hi,
I’m looking to quote for labour, I have been using billable time for all my labour chargers sofar,
Do I:
Create a non-inventory item for Labour
Quote with that item
When converted to a sales invoice
Create the billable time - associate it to the invoice as invoiced
Change the line to Billable Time - Invoiced and complete?
Or is there another preferred method?
You definitely can, making sales quotes easy to generate.
This process will not work. Billable time can only be invoiced from the Customers tab by creating a new sales invoice. It cannot be added to an existing one. See this Guide: https://www.manager.io/guides/5502. After the new sales invoice is generated, you can edit it to add other items.
Billable time is meant for situations where you record time as you go along and then invoice. So if you create a sales quote with an estimate of what the billable time will be, you can still use non-inventory items for the labor. Since sales quotes have no financial impact on your record, you ignore that quote when it is time to invoice and generate the sales invoice using the uninvoiced time under the Customers tab.
Your method would end up double-charging the time.
The other approach, if you are billing out labor in pre-determined amounts, is just to stick with the non-inventory items. Then the copying of the sales quote to a sales invoice works fine. For example, if you are an auto repair shop, you might quote and charge a standard amount of labor for an oil change, regardless of how long it actually takes. In that situation, there is no reason to use billable time at all. Even if you bill actual time amounts, you can still edit an invoice created this way for more units of the standard, non-inventory labor item.
The key point when using billable time is that you are charging a fixed amount per unit of time and recording those time entries prior to invoicing. You may or may not have reason to do that. Read this Guide for more: https://www.manager.io/guides/6935.
Thanks,
Didn’t realize till now the option to edit billable time invoiced status has been removed.
Ill create a labor item for quotes and fixed labor charges and use billable time for when im onsite and charging at the end of the job
No, it is still there. In the Billable Time tab, click Edit beside the specific time entry. At the bottom of the screen is a dropdown status field:
But there really is no reason to use that feature if you follow the intended workflow for recording and invoicing billable time.
Also, be aware that you will want two different income accounts. When using billable time, you automatically get Billable time - invoiced. That is the only place billable time can be posted.
You should create another income account, if you don’t already have a suitable one, named something like Fixed charge sales. That is where you will post charges for the non-inventory items you set up for fixed labor. This account choice must be selected under Settings when you create or edit the non-inventory item.