Need 'Ticket Status' for billing purposes

We have begun to implement a procedure for charges created by junior techs to be approved by a manager. However, when a ticket is marked as a 'Pending' item, the associated charges still appear as billable in the 'Charges' window and are listed in the 'Generate Quickbooks Invoice' screens.

Simple solution? In order to keep from billing 'pending' charges I need a 'Ticket Status' column in 'Charges' screen and the '2. Charge Selection' screen under 'Generate Quickbook Invoices -> Account'.

Let me know what the options are.

Thanks for your feedback regarding this work-flow of Charges approval. I believe we may add some additional support for this in one of our coming release.

In any case, at the moment, I believe the best way to approach this is from the Charge aspect, rather than the Ticket status aspect. You can use the Charge's Field1 (if not used for other purposes...) for this purpose.

Once the technician has finished all the work for the Ticket and has logged the work using Charges, they can set the Ticket as Completed as usual, and the Ticket status can stay independent of the Charge approval process.

If you manage the Charge status using the Charge itself, you can then filter charge reports by the review-status of each Charge, not by the status of the Ticket. The same goes for the QuickBooks wizard, which shows you the Charge Field1 in the "Invoice by Account" window, and you can sort the list by this flag.

Please review the suggested work flow as follows:
1. Employee enters a Charge, and leaves the "billable" flag as is. The Charge Field1 stays empty for now.
2. The manager then reviews open Charges for the relevant employees (which have an empty value in Field1).
3. Once you approve the Charge, change the Field1 value in the Charge to "Approved"
4. Run "Accounts charges summary" report, and filter by the Field1 value: Note that you can set the Field1 label (name) to a more meaningful name by right-clicking the "Field1:" label and selecting "Field Settings…"
5. Alternatively, run the QuickBooks Wizard and sort the Charges list by the charge status (Field1).

I hope this helps.

Sherry

this solution creates way too much work for the manager(s) and will most certainly be fouled up by user error.... is there another way? All we need is the ability to sort the charges by status. How are others doing this?

//ray

A simpler approach, which may also provide you with what you need, is reviewing all charges entered by the junior technicians by dates (or at any time before creating invoices), and filter the charges list according to the relevant date.

This way you can easily review all charges entered today and make sure you approve all of them.

I hope this helps.

Eitan

Hi Raymond

We had a similar situation and what we did was create a ticket status of "to be billed" - all the junior techs, when the job was completed, would assign the appropriate charges and set to ticket status to "to be billed" (rather than completed). The Manager would then just go into the Ticket window, filter for all tickets with the status "to be billed" and then quickly review (and adjust if needed) the charges. Any tickets that were good to be billed, were then set to Completed and became part of the usuall billing process.

Cheers

Rebbecca
Protocol 1

that's similar to what we have set up (we even figured out what "status groups" each "status item" belonged to and assigned them accordingly for easier workflow) however, if a ticket is in a (custom) "to be billed" status, it still shows up for the accountant when they run the tickets for billing in QB.... currently there is no way to filter on status, which is a real problem when thinking about workflow.... the only viable way to filter tickets @ the "create invoice" level (the workaround using the field1 method is simply not realistic....) is on the billable/not billable check box which is incredibly limited and causes more work for the managers (which is me at the moment....).

this is an area that REALLY needs to be fixed if this software is going to have a chance of supporting shops with more than 2 or 3 persons!!!

thanks --

//ray

Raymond, thank you for the additional feedback. As I believe you already know by now - all feedback is noted and seriously evaluated and considered for new releases. We usually try to make our users happy :-)

Thanks,
Dina

PS: The system is already being used by IT service provides with 30 techs and more!

thanks....I can't imagine doing what we are trying to do with the product with 30 techs.... we just have 4!

thanks again!

//ray

From our experience we can tell that it is all a matter of carefully defining the processes and finding the best way to use the system for your business.

As always, feel free to consult with us, and with any other community member, any implementation question you may have.

Dina