Regarding billable time
Our company does a number of things some are taxable some are not. Each item is a separate item for an income category as required by our state. I use a control account to separate different contracts and a custom field for the income category.
My problem arises when using billable time all the time goes to a billable time category under income, not to the income category that I need for reporting. This tends to skew all of my reports though, most of income showing under billable time not under the income category it was intended for.
Currently I do a breakdown manually for reporting to the state.
Granted I could just do each of the services as a separate business then consolidate each of those to a parent company but I think I would have to hire another bookkeeper to keep it all straight.
Some of services:
Architectural services non taxable
Construction (General Contractor) taxable
Property Management non taxable
Real Estate Sales non taxable
Commercial Leasing non taxable
General retail taxable
Consulting non taxable
Example:
Client has vacant space to be leased. Time and material contract, consulting, leasing then design and construction categories .
To me billable time is more of a payroll item than income, it shows me who did what, when, where and how to bill it. Not all of payroll just specific time applied to what job. Most of my employees are on billable time so that in itself would be a great help. From payroll, each invoice could be done to the correct income category with a contract total of hours for the time period rather than a list of daily hours on the job as it currently shows. I do not need to send a five-page or more invoice to a client.
Just my random thoughts, great product. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated
This is a questionable practice, depending on exactly what you mean. The use of a control account means you have subsidiary ledgers. Adding individual contracts as subsidiary ledgers to your chart of accounts will result in excessive clutter over time, because those accounts can never be deleted once used. And control accounts are only for balance sheet accounts. Your goal is to categorize income, not assets or liabilities.
You can get around this when creating invoices. Yes, the initial invoice will post all billable time to Billable time - invoiced. But you can immediately edit the sales invoice and select different accounts for the various line items. In my experience, almost every sales invoice produced from uninvoiced time or expenses needs to be edited anyway to add or adjust due date or terms, re-order line items for more logical presentation, edit descriptions, etc.
The approach would be to set up an income account for each of your reporting categories. Then edit each line item on the invoice to post to the desired income account. As an added benefit, when you define these income accounts, you can select appropriate tax codes for each. That way, as you change the posting account, the relevant tax code (if any) will be automatically applied. (Note: this will not affect previously entered transactions, only new ones going forward.)
You might want to adjust your thinking on this. Billable time is immediately an asset, because it represents the possibility of future cash receipts. That is why the Billable time account falls into the Assets category. When you invoice, that asset is transferred to Accounts receivable. But you will notice that billable time entries also appear immediately in an income account named Billable time - movement. This is real income, because you have earned it even if you haven’t invoiced it yet. Some people call this work in progress.
The bits of who, when, how information can all be added to a billable time entry with custom fields. Those will guide editing of the invoices, but have no direct financial impact.
If you want summary billing, enter summary hours rather than individual daily entries. There are many time clock apps available. You would not need to give your employees access to Manager at all. You just need to transfer the weekly or monthly totals from the time clock app to Manager.
Thank you , I do edit each of the invoices mostly to set the tax code or edit pricing, but I did not think of changing the billable time invoiced to the correct income account.
Yes I do use this for most accounts, unfortunately the construction tax code is different for each municipality that the work is done in.
You might not want to clutter your P&L statement with so too many income accounts. But you could create accounts for construction work in separate jurisdictions, for example, Smallville construction sales, Bigtown construction sales, etc. You probably already have different custom tax codes for each jurisdiction.