Billing and time tracking

Hi,
we've been using CommitCRM for around 4 years now but suspect we don't have it setup right. As we're growing the manual processes of time tracking and billing are killing us.

We have 3 types of contract really:
1. Monthly rolling, fixed price, unlimited support. These customers will have project work too which we bill for.
2. Block of hours.

In the main this is working ok but we are struggling in 2 areas:
1. I need to review everything before we bill or decide that each charge goes to the report for the client or gets deducted from the block. Just now we print a report and I manually update this, then the admin person updates CommitCRM, changing time our engineers have added if I feel it is not enough or too much. I feel there must be a better way here?

2. The contact customers often get work done that falls outside their contract. This work is billable in my terminology. They will get their monthly bill and they will get a bill for this specific task which wasn’t included. Just now CommitCRM makes all the charges “billable” on these contracts but we don’t really bill for these – they are included. I’m struggling a bit with concept here and have read a lot of the online documentation.
Should we have another “contract” for that customer and set that charge to that contract? Or should that charge go to the Global System Contract and at end of each month we just run a report for everything in that and bill all of those?

Any pointers appreciated here.

Brian.

Thank you for posting this.

While you probably need to continue reviewing and approving Charges before sending the invoice, setting correct Contract type and rates may save you time and reduce manual updates in the entered Charges.
For example, you can set Block of Time Contract if customer pays for monthly hours amount, when adding Labor Charges under Block of Time Contract hours are automatically deducted from the block and marked as Not-Billable (assuming that customer has already paid for them), Expense and Part based Charges under the same Contract will be set automatically to Billable. In case the block is exceeded and extra hours should be billed - you still can put them under the same Contract and just mark these Charges as Billable.

For customers with unlimited support usually Block of Money is used, all Charges added under it are defaulted to Not-Billable and deducted from the block (even if you do not cap the monthly services to a specific amount, you can still use this type of Contract for an "all-you-can-eat" type of month service and use the block value internally, for example to track profitability e.g. to get an alert when the services you've provided so far exceed what you get pay for this month.

In case you need to manage more than one project for customer, you can define several Contracts and select the appropriated Contract when billing.

Please find the summary how the type of Contract and Charge affects whether or not a Charge defaults to Billable or Not Billable:
- Global are always Billable.
- Block of Time are Not Billable for Labor and Billable for Expenses and Parts.
- Block of Tickets are Not Billable for all types of Charge.
- Block of Money are Not Billable for all types of Charge.


We recommend adding Contract-Price Charges under the Contract to define what exactly included and covered under the Contract.

You may found it helpful to read about using Custom Pricing to adjust prices and rates per customer or contract.

Hope this helps.

This speaks to the whole custom contracts request that has been "in the works" for the last 4 or 5 years -- this is such a simple fix: we need the ability to determine how these contracts default billable items. For us, we want all contracts to default all charges to non-billable... this is a "so simple to implement and so much to gain" requests. Why not add this Tools >> Options >> Contract section? A simple list of the contract types, and a check box to toggle it as billable or non-billable for labor, expenses and parts. Simple. Done.

//ray

thanks for replies.

I don't quite follow the block of money one - I would need to manually create a new one of these for every customer, every month as we operate on a monthly basis? This would take a long time each month as we've about 50 of them.
Would we need to use the batch renew for that?

All our contracts are currently "Global" type - how do I change to block of money?

I actually went searching for the option Raymond mentions before I posted this - seems like a logical feature to me too.

In terms of reviewing and approving charges - how do I go about doing that?

thanks.

Yes you can use the batch copy wizard to renew all Contracts in one go, along with Contract-Price Charges if you use those - a couple of clicks and it's done. More details on recurring Contracts are here.

To change your Global to Block of Money would require simply creating the new Contract for each Account by copying an existing Contract and selecting Block of Money type.

You can review Charges in whichever way you find most convenient - per Account, Ticket or Contract or in the Charges window. Use filters to show/hide billable or not-billable, billed and not billed or whatever other criteria you want to filter the reports/list of Charges with.

Regarding the feature Raymond mentioned, we are working on something in that direction.

Hope this helps.

I am so happy to hear something about updates for the contracts feature. It has been desperately needed and frequently requested.

Hi,
is there any further update on the changes to contracts?

We've swapped mainly to block of money. My problem is what do when we do a mini project or something ad-hoc for that customer. I can set that charge as billable but it might be for fixing a home PC for the customer (nothing to do with the contract).What does everyone else do with these ad-hoc charges?

Seems like the new feature may help. At this time we do not have anything organized in a share-able way, we'll have something to share with the release once it'll all get summarized.

thanks, when is this new release coming out?

If all goes well it'll start Beta by the end of April (2015) though many parts are still moving. Anyhow, hopefully that's reasonably soon this way or the other.