Reporting & Not-Billable Charges

[JoshuaB]

Not-Billable charges adds a very difficult layer to collecting data for reporting outsideCommitCRM. I'm just starting to keep up with production vs. collection daily and monthly along with other important data such as hours billed. However, not-billable charges skews everything as it is so variable. Maybe I'm not doing this right.

We log not-billable charges for hours logged by employees that should not necessarily be billed to customers. Eg. admin time such as research or quoting. We use contracts for managed service agreements. These automatically log not-billable. When we run a report for hours worked for a period of time, we have actual production hours in not-billable due to the contract recording as not-billable. These also are at $0/hr, so production doesn't reflect correctly. Understandably, the dollar amount for production is accounted for monthly, but hours logged are grouped now with other not-billable, and truly not produced time.

I'd like to point out we bill all not-billable charges *for contracts* to customers. We want them to see the value of our service. Its also a CYA/liability decision as this documents and communicates changes and work completed.

Options I see:
A) Set all contract charges as billable initially (can this be done by default)?
B) I just found the “exclude contract-price charges” option on reports (from this article). This may work, but would require running this same report about 3 times to get all the numbers we need and could get some errors from time to time (user).

I'm not crazy about either above options I found. Is there anyway other way of doing this? I'm open to suggestions.

(Well, option B is out – testing, it doesn't report hours charged to the contract, rather only the original/monthly charge contract-charge grrrrrr)

[Support Team]

JoshuaB,

Thank you for posting this.

Here's what may work for you -

For all internal/non-production activity, which is Not Billable by nature (though you do want to show it to the customer) you should log Charges to which you select specific predefined Item/s. (Use standard Charges, do not use Contract-Price Charges, which are designed for a completely different purpose).

You can assign each Labor Item to a specific Labor Type (a customized drop down list of options). Add new values to the Labor Type drop down, ones that reflect the type of services you perform, and add another Type called, 'Internal-Activity' (or anything you like).

Then go over all your Labor Items and edit them. Assign each to the relevant Labor Type.
This way you'll have Labor Items of Type X which should be used for billing, and Labor Items of Type Y (Internal Activity) which should be used to log non billable activity).

After all Charges have been logged, you can go to generate any of the available Charge reports.
When you click 'Generate' a Window opens. Using this Window you can filter which Charges will be included in the Report.
One of the filtering options available, is to include Charges that have been logged using Items that belongs to a selected Labor Type/s.

This way, you can filter your reports to include all Charges with Labor Type Items X, or X AND Y, or just Y. This will allow you to easily show all Charges logged for a customer (no filtering), or, only Charges that are of type Y (internal activity), etc.

I assume this may sound a little complex, but it actually isn't. The point is that you categorized all your Items into different types, and then filter the Charge reports by these types.

I hope this helps.
Sherry

[JoshuaB]

Sherry,

Thank you for your reply. I understand, but worry we still don't have the best solution. I'll try this for a while and see if we can make it work.

[hayden]

I have the same issue. The best thing I've found is to add charges to everything with a $0 value.