Mark charges as billable when over contracted hours.....

[benj180]

Hi,

We would like any charges over the contracted hours to automatically be set as billable, is this possible?

Kind regards

[Support Team]

Re: Mark charges as billable when over contracted hours.....

Hi,

When using block contracts, the system alerts you when you attempt to add a charge which exceeds the block limit.

When this happen, you can choose what you want to do with these charges. In some cases you would like to charge the customer for this time as extra-hours, which will be billed on top of the block contract. In other cases you would like to transfer these hours to the next date range contract. The system does not decide what to do with these charges, but rather lets you decide.

If you wish to bill the customer for this time as over-used hours, you can set the over-used hours charges as "billable" and invoice them to the customer on top of the block invoice. This should be done manually, as you may not always want to operate this way. You can read more about managing over-used hours this way in the Introduction to Charges and Billing manual, under Rates for Over-Used hours.

If you wish, you can also transfer the over-used hours to the next contract, which can be the next block (if this is a recurring block contract), or to a contract specific for over-used hours. You can create the new contract in advance (using the Batch Copy Wizard, see more details here), and simply select the new contract for charge when creating the charge. This will reduce the amount from the new contract. In this case, the charge should stay "not billable".

You can read more about the billable flag and how it is determined here.

Neta

[SmartIT]

Re: Mark charges as billable when over contracted hours.....

I think this is a poor way to do it.

If a customer has 3 hours left on their block buy. An employee then adds a charge for 5 hours to carry out the work and gets a warning saying the customer is over their limit. So he can click the billable tick box and the customer gets charged for the full 5 hours, even though they had 3 hours spare. Or the employee does not click the billable tick box (which by the way is very easy to forget to do in the first place) and we loose 2 hours worth of money.

The only way around it I can see is to split the charge into 2 hour + 3 hour charges, which makes the process very complicated and prone to human error.

Why cant we not have the option to either have CommitCRM store these hours up on the account for deduction by the next months contract (or something along those lines). Or like we have done in the past, charge the over billed hours at the normal global system contract price, or a discounted price if the contract is setup to charge a discounted price for labour.

anyone else know an easy way around this?

[smeggar]

Re: Mark charges as billable when over contracted hours.....

Yes this is bit frustrating. That anomaly is why we cant use what would otherwise be a useful feature. We cant trust techs to worry about it. +1 vote for retifying it!

[Support Team]

Re: Mark charges as billable when over contracted hours.....

Hi Guys,

Thanks for posting these comments, this is great feedback.
I've passed all your comments to the product manager, so that we can address them.

As mentioned above, there are various ways to handle charges which over-use the contract, so it's not a trivial decision what should be done with these hours, and this is why it's currently in the hands of the user. In any case, we realize this can lead to human error would need figure a way to make this more automated but in a very flexible way...

Thanks for your input on this.

With regards,
Reno Breen

[g2computersolutions]

Re: Mark charges as billable when over contracted hours.....

Commit.....what you seem to be missing in here isn't that people don't want to decide. I think it's that we don't want to decide each and every time what to do with the additional time. Perhaps giving the option once in the TOOLS menu would be good.

As it stands, the responses about this issue seem to be little more than an attempt to spin the issue into something that sounds like it's done for our benefit.

I vote to have a simple option in the TOOLS section that ask what to do with extended hours/units in contracts. From there we could decide to accept and bill at XXXX rate, or decline. Either way, it's decided before hand and not each time it comes up.

[Support Team]

Re: Mark charges as billable when over contracted hours.....

2computersolutions, thanks for expressing your thoughts to us.

I've attached your comments, as well as your vote to this feature request, in the hopes that this feature will received the suggested feature.

Keep on the great feedback!

Doron

[wereman]

Re: Mark charges as billable when over contracted hours.....

Just wondering if there has been any update on this? We roll the hours over into a new Block of Time contract for a majority of customers.

[Support Team]

Re: Mark charges as billable when over contracted hours.....

wereman,

Thank you for following up. We haven't made much progress with this. We may get to it in one of our coming releases.

In any case, I believe that what you're requesting is slightly different than what is requested here - I understand that you wish to automatically roll the remaining hours to the next contract (thanks for suggesting this) while the other guys here wish to automatically bill the client for the over-used-hours and therefore ask for the system to automatically mark these Charges as billable.

Rinat

[mundycomputers]

Re: Mark charges as billable when over contracted hours.....

Please add my vote. I'm not using block hours contracts yet but will do in the future, and I can see this would be frustrating, especially when you have other techs who may not "care" as much about the billing side, they just want to close the ticket and start working on the next one.

[JoshuaB]

Re: Mark charges as billable when over contracted hours.....

This is a pain for us also. I almost hate managed service agreements because of the end of month admin work deciding what to bill who. Can't leave it to the tech to decide - it won't happen right. +1 when able - thanks always.

[geeky_jason]

Re: Mark charges as billable when over contracted hours.....

+1

I need overage to be pushed to the client's default contract.

[hugicr]

Re: Mark charges as billable when over contracted hours.....

I am adding a vote for this feature.

We need overages to be marked as billable, or to at least have some control over what is billable or not.

It would also be nice to be able to have any remaining time from the block to "rollover" to the next contract.

....and/or if at all possible to be able to automatically add in new monthly hours. We work our contract similar to cell phone plans with rollover minutes. Any remaining minutes you have "rollover" to the next month, in addition to the contracted monthly minutes.

[aaspeer]

Re: Mark charges as billable when over contracted hours.....

I don't know if I have already voted for this, but if not... count me in! We constantly have clients going over their block time contracts. It is a pain to find this and then bill it seperately.

Austin Speer
Onward Incorporated

[bdbrower]

Re: Mark charges as billable when over contracted hours.....

+1