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

[sudogreg]

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

+2 here

[nattivillin]

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

+3 It is a pain finding lost income from unbilled services.

[Support Team]

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

We're watching this thread... Thanks for voting.

[lpopejoy]

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

As you are thinking about how to implement this - could you consider automatically marking "products" as billable (maybe under the system contract or something)as opposed to deducting them out of a block of money. For instance on a service contract that covers time only, the ticket goes in under the block of money contract, but then the tech has to remember to change the contract to "system" for any products used.

That would be huge!

Thanks,

Luke

[Support Team]

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

I'll add your note so it'll be evaluated together with the other related options.

Thanks,
Dina.

[centurion]

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

I realize this thread is 5 years old - has there been any design improvements to address this issue?

Lets say we have 40 clients all setup for block of time (all 8 hours/month or whatever). At the end of the month 15 clients go over their allocated time by varying amounts. Ideally these overages should be invoiced/billed to the customer.

At the end of every month we are currently having to manually track & invoice customer overages on a per-customer basis - which is time consuming and overly complex for what it needs to be. Due to the nature of the problem - a manager needs to perform this to ensure proper invoicing for each customer while also making sure we are not losing money. Additionally this overage usually occurs during the course of 1 entry further complicating the billing process. The manager has to go in, identify which customers have overages at the end of every month, identify where the split in overages occurs - take & split the technicians time entry into two entrees and then mark the remainder of the tickets billable. Do that 15 times in a single day? Really? An additional side effect of this is customers calling in with questions due to how charges appear on their invoices.

This should be a no brainer regarding contract overages:
1. Do nothing - manually address every occurance (seems to be the only current option)
2. Be allowed to invoice overage amounts automatically as an alternative

While I understand it has been left to a manual process so everyone can do their own thing - I find it equally strange there are no other choices allowed.

Folks, I cannot stress how cumbersome and problematic this single issue has become. Someone please tell me there is a work around or that I am missing something . . .

[Support Team]

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

Thank you for asking and for sharing the details. It seems that you are familiar with the different options that are supported, the other option would probably be to ask your staff to mark overages as billable. When a new charge is added to a fully-used block contract the system warns the user about this case, but does not prevent the user from logging their time. You should ask staff (some/all, depending on their privileges) to check the Billable flag for Charges they log and see the block-overage warning message. This will not solve everything but may reduce the number of monthly contract you would need to more manually take care of. It has been discussed here but the problem is way more complex than it seems, but yes, we understand that some additional tools may help here and will be considering the options. Thanks for asking!

[centurion]

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

Based on the number of replies to this thread - this is the 3rd largest thread in the past two years. It appears the original thread was started in 2008 and still appears to be a highly sought after 'feature'. As we are all highly technical, I can certainly appreciate the difficulty in programming.

That said: Total contract hrs. minus contracted hours = Billable hours. 1 line exported to QuickBooks (or your favorite accounting software) to indicated contracted hours overage. I know we have the option of including billable (or non billable) items on the invoice and can understand this would be a programming nightmare (side note: welcome to our world, we have to do this monthly/manually) - however i'd be happy just to forgo this choice just to have 1 line exported to the accounting system that says: "Monthly Contract Overage, Qty hrs. and total cost calculated automatically.

While your suggestion does address the root of the problem - in practice a majority of technicians, administrators and engineers are simply not the best folks to determine customer invoicing. This may work for a small office with 5 people - but beyond this, the recommendation falls apart.

Anything you can do to close this gap would be greatly appreciated. We certainly thank you for your time, recommendations and continued effort to meet the needs of your customers, and appreciate all that you continue to do with this product.

[Support Team]

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

Thanks and we appreciate your additional feedback and comments. That is a complex problem not in regards to a logical issue, but rather to the risk of you ended up with incorrect billing, let me explain - think that you add 3 hours, 2 hours, 3 hours (overage occur) then another 2 hours (will auto-set as billable) and the you review the charges and edit the older 3 hours charge to 2.5? What happens? how will the system know what exact needs to change, that another charge need to split, etc.? That's complex in real life, even before dealing with programming, and the above is only a simple case.
We do understand your suggestion with the one-line of billing to QuickBooks, however, it might introduce new issues (as the overage charges needs to be clearly linked to the overage time that you are billing).

In any case, thanks again for your additional feedback that will be considered. Thanks!

[nattivillin]

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

It is such a pain to "review" each ticket/contract for charges that got marked as billable when they had hours left. This wastes about 2-5 hours of our time each week.

[nattivillin]

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

Commit, would a simple fix be an option for what the system does with overages? (I think this was mentioned).

Then depending on our settings, we will know what happens and can act accordingly.

The biggest issue i see is the time split. What we do now is (3 hour charge 2 hours billable), is make 2 charges. 1h non billable, 2h billable. This leaves the techs with finding a clever way to "split" the time into coherent tasks. 1 hour we did this, 2 hours we did that.

When a tech messes this up the client gets billed incorrectly, and they call complaining and we have to go back fix the ticket, fix the contract, fix QB, eat crow, beg them not to fire us just because we cant get our billing correct.

[Support Team]

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

Thank you for providing your input on this!

[bdbrower]

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

I first +1'ed this over five years ago. Here's hoping it won't be another five years before this highly requested and discussed issue is addressed.

[lpopejoy]

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

For you guys who want this feature, would it be possible to run a report on your "block of money/time" contracts and check for which contracts are over their block limit?

You could then create a single charge entry for each contract/account where there was an overage for the overage amount.

You could use a special charge item for "overage" charges to allow you to easily track these charge types as well.

This report would only need to be run during each billing cycle.

Just an idea here!

[nattivillin]

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

The main issue is we have to depend on the techs to get it right. Since overages don't automatically turn billable, people (forget) and the overages all get mis-billed. Usually for us things are marked non-billable that should be billable.

I could run a report (thought about that a few years ago) but the report is wrong when the charges are wrong. Garbage in garbage out type of deal.

Unless i am off base with your suggestion....