I’ve been testing Manager for the past month trying to switch from Quickbooks. Very impressed so far. I came across 1 issue that I haven’t been able to get past. I run an I.T. consulting company in Canada. Most of my clients are on some sort of Maintenance contract which I do with Non-inventory items when invoicing. Part of their contracts are banks of pre-paid hours at discounted rates. But all of my clients want any work done tracked even if it falls within the bank of hours and isn’t charged separately. I use the Billable Time module for that and if it falls within the bank of hours the time charged is 0 hours.
The issue I noticed is that if all of my billable time entries for a Customer is zero for the month, there is no clickable amount under Uninvoiced in the Customers tab for that client so I can’t add the entries to the invoice, but if I have even one entry that is charged then I have a clickable amount and can select all entries even the 0 hour entries. My workaround currently is to make the first Billable time entry each month for at least 1 hour even if it falls in their bank of hours, then once I click the amount under Uninvoiced I can edit that entry back to 0 hours, update it, then still select all entries from the screen to be added to the invoice. It’s an extra step to remember and in practice if I forget to change that entry back to 0, then I’ve just overcharged my customer for an hour. Not to mention not all customers have monthly maintenance contracts so that first entry for an hour may be legitimate for some clients.
My question is: Is there an option or can it be added in a future version to have a placeholder amount under the Uninvoiced column in Customers for $0.00 so that there is at least a clickable amount to get to the screen to add them to a new invoice even when all of the Billable time entries equal zero for a Customer?
A possible solution is for you to enter the charge rate at a very low rate per hour of say 1 cent then use the theme enhancer to create a theme that will round down to nil any sales invoice line items that are less than, say 50 cents.
I will look into that but I haven’t played around with the themes at all. Still hoping for a cleaner way if possible. Having floating pennies around to account for eventually will drive my ADHD insane lol. Thanks.
I used the following instructions for the theme enhancer and it converted the first invoice into the second invoice, see copies below.
Round item lines that are less than 0.50 to nil, reduce the invoice total by the line items rounded to nil. Exclude the unit price to the line items rounded to nil without removing the column lines
Yeah I noticed the same thing now after trying, which if I still have to make an adjustment, I will probably stick with my original workaround to keep it cleaner. Thanks.
Hi Ealfardan, Actually I used to do it that way years ago under Quickbooks, until I got audited one year and had to explain why I had thousands of entries all discounted at 100% with no tax charged even though the timesheet module in Quickbooks was showing there were hours charged. Eventually they understood that I do have a Non-inventory item for Monthly maintenance that includes the retainer hours for the discounted ones. But that was a headache I hope to never go through again. Also going through the invoice after it adds all the uninvoiced billable time to set each line item to 100% discount, some of my clients have 1000’s of employees and no in house IT support so it could mean going through 20-30+ line items for some of my clients some months, when my current workaround is changing 1 item, depending on the client.
I am currently using a separate excel sheet to keep track of what entry for which clients I need to change when invoicing them now. Keeping track of the 100% discount and which billable time entries they apply to would mean a lot more entries in that sheet to keep track of for the monthly invoices. But I appreciate the suggestion .
We are also IT consultants. It would be nice to be able to have different billable rates to choose from under the billable time entey. Engineer - tech - maintenance rates. That would make invoicing much easier when pulling in from the billable time entered.
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