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Capture More Billable Time with RangerMSP

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    Capture More Billable Time with RangerMSP

    Using RangerMSP can helps you capture more billable time and bill your customers for all of the work without missing any time spent.

    In order to use the options offered by RangerMSP in the best way, below are some tips which can help capture more billable time:

    Charge using the Timer. You can activate the RangerMSP Timer easily by clicking Ctrl+T from any window. So if a customer calls in, you can simply open the account window and click Ctrl+T to start the timer for this customer. When you are done with the phone call, hit the Charge icon in the timer window, and easily charge customer for this time.

    The timer is easy to use and this way you will not forget to charge the customer for all of the time spent on providing service.

    If you work on more than one issue at the same time - no problem - open as many Timer windows as needed. You can pause the timers when you are working on something else, and go back to the timer window to continue working on this issue. This way you can effectively count the actual time spent on each issue.

    Charge Appointments and Tasks. Using appointments and tasks can help you track all the work that needs to be done in order to resolve an open issue and close the ticket. After the work is performed, you can simply charge the appointments and tasks, thus making sure you do not miss any work you have done for this job.

    From the Calendar, simply right-click the appointment or the task, and select the "Charge Appointment" or "Charge Task" options. This will already copy the description, the account, the time spent (for appointments), etc.

    Charging tasks and appointments makes the action of entering charges much easier and this way you can make sure you haven't missed anything.

    Update charge information when on customer site. When you are still on site, finishing a job, take a few more moments to update the tasks and appointments with the job details. This will save time when back in the office - you can then easily charge the appointments and tasks which are already updated with all the details (as explained above).

    You can also create the charges online directly via the Web Interface while on site. This way you will make sure to enter all the relevant information while it's still fresh and verify you do not miss anything. You can then also generate charge reports and let the customer sign them for approval.

    Track tickets with no charges. Sometimes tickets are closed but the tech forgets to enter the charges for the work performed. You can easily find such tickets by generating tickets reports, and filtering the report to show only "Completed" tickets, and use the "Include only tickets with no charge" flag (you can find the flag in the report generation window). This will help you find all these tickets which were missed, and charge them.

    Track employees' billable time. Charge reports are helpful for various purposes. Using the "Monthly Hours Summary by Employee" can help you detect employees who haven't entered any billable time for certain days, which may indicate that they forgot to enter the charges for that day into the system. This report display the total hours logged by each employee on each day of the month. This is an additional monitoring tool which helps you make sure all charges are logged properly for all of the days.

    Bill over-used contract time. In some cases, work for a customer may extend beyond the hours defined in a Block of Time Contract. In this case, the system will warn the user when trying to add a Charge for a Contract that has reached its limit, and then you may set the charge as billable and set a special hourly-rate for the over-used hours. This can help you charge the correct rate for the specific service agreement with the customer, and bill the customer for all the hours which are not covered under the contract.

    Perform smart dispatching. Using the RangerMSP Dispatcher you can dispatch by geographical area by using the Account's 'Region' field. In the account's details, you can define a "region code" for this account's location. This field is displayed in the Dispatcher's tickets list (only for tickets which are created after the region code was updated for the account). This way you can easily sort the Tickets by the region and dispatch tickets which relate to the same geographic area together. This can help the technicians reach more sites in a shorted time thanks to smart dispatching, and be more efficient - thus logging more billable time.



    Do you use your own methods to capture more billable time? Please share it with us and reply to this thread helping other community members.

    Enjoy!

    The RangerMSP Support Team

    Re: Capture More Billable Time with CommitCRM

    "Using CommitCRM can helps you capture more billable time and bill your customers for all of the work without missing any time spent."

    I must disagree with this statement in some respects: We're moving to Commit, from a home-grown system. With our home-grown system, we entered ALL of our time working on a ticket. Whether it was an onsite visit, or a five-minute phone call, or logging into a server for two minutes to check and see if a process was finished. We would supply the customer with a service record that listed the time as a lump sum, rounded to nice, neat numbers.

    With CommitCRM (and every other PSA we've looked at) the system is set up to show the customer each individual charge. Customers would freak out if we tried to bill them five minutes each for the twelve e-mails we had to send back and forth over a two-day period, but they are happy to pay an hour charge for solving their problem.

    CommitCRM doesn't allow us to keep track of time, but then roll it up into a single charge, therefore, we're having to record little things as history notes and hope we remember to add some extra into the final charge when it comes time to complete the ticket.

    We must be unique in the way we do things, since no PSA seems to support our methodology (even though they all claim to allow us to capture all of our time).

    Comment


      Re: Capture More Billable Time with RangerMSP

      Hi BryanP,

      I believe that what you're referring here has nothing to do with capture the billable time - RangerMSP offers different tools for this and we plenty of good feedback that it actually does help users capture more billable time (sometimes even dramatically).

      From what I understand your requirement is to show your customer the total time spent instead of showing the time for each Charge logged.

      This is doable by customizing the Customer based Charge report to only show time totals without showing the time spent on each Charge entry.

      This way employees will log 15 minutes, 1 hour, 30 minutes, 5 minutes, etc. each in a separate charge with a short description, and the customer will only see the total time spent and the description of each step taken, without seeing how much time has been spent on each step.

      I hope this makes sense.
      Thanks,
      Dina

      Comment


        Re: Capture More Billable Time with CommitCRM

        Until you generate the Quickbooks invoice and it shows each charge as a separate line item.

        Comment


          Re: Capture More Billable Time with CommitCRM

          Yeah, ascendnet hit the nail on the head. I'm not sure how the best way is to handle this, but there does seem like there should be a better way. QB invoices get really long if you are working on a job that takes a week or two (even worse if there are two techs working).

          This can be overcome partially by using a block of money/time/global contract and charging against that and then billing once per month for the time used on that contract; however, that doesn't allow you to bill the total for each ticket - in QB. I know from a programming perspective it's a difficult compromise...

          Comment


            Re: Capture More Billable Time with RangerMSP

            Interesting feedback.

            In case a lot of Charge records are logged the QuickBooks invoice is indeed long, however, the Charge records tells the customer what they are paying for, which is the main idea here.

            lpopejoy is right. If you want to invoice your customer monthly and not on a per-ticket basis, you can indeed bill for the Contract and not for what's included (the Not-Billable charges).

            There may be other options here, not trivial though.

            Thanks,
            Doron

            Comment

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