Contract Pricing

I am demoing CommitCRM and have searched everywhere but am still not sure how to do what I want so I thought some input from the forum would be worth while.

I am an MSP and have tiers of service for clients that they subscribe to. I am trying to create contracts that reflect the levels of service I offer. I have setup items for various services: "Server Remote Support" and "Server On-site Support" for instance. In some cases, a customer may have a contract with me whereby remote server support is fully covered. In others, both remote and on-site may be covered (and clients with no contracts are billed at a normal rate).

In Commit, whether I setup a global contract or a money contract, I can't see a way to mark the items as non-billable for a given contract. I would think that changing the rate for those services to zero would defeat the purpose of tracking anything as I couldn't easily tell what has been charged to the client account to see if the contract is profitable.

I've read all the documentation and even noted that the "How is the 'Billable flag' determined" section shows different charge types as being billable/non-billable by default and that you can change those defaults - but nowhere in the documentation does it tell you how to customize that so I got lost trying to go down that avenue.

Also, looking at the Custom Pricing tab of a contract, I see I can change employee hourly rates as well as fixed price item pricing (expenses, products) but neither let me change even the price for a labor item...

Am I missing something? How would I go about setting this up so that I could easily track/bill clients with contracts to reflect the labor items that are included in their service contracts with me?

The way we handle this is by setting up a contract "Block of Money." That block of money amount matches the total value of that customer's contract.

When charges are logged against this contract, it automatically sets the charge to "not billable" and decreases the "block of money" value.

This is a nice way to gauge the profitability of a given contract.

I agree that it isn't the most flexible, and I would like to see improvements in this area as well. But, for now, it works.

I appreciate your input, lpopejoy. I've seen the answer you provided mentioned in other posts but it doesn't seem to address the issue (or seems to side step around saying that what I want to do is not possible in Commit).

Am I understanding correctly that in a "Block of Money" contract, you can't differentiate between labor service charges being billable and non-billable? So in my case, I couldn't cover just remote labor charges as non-billable while allowing on-site labor charges to be billable in a customer contract?

Hi skifast, thank you for posting this. lpopejoy described how you should manage this. We understand that you're looking into further customization of the billable flag and our recommendation would be to use a different Contract for the non-covered Charges. This way, everything that is covered will be logged under the Block of Money Contract while everything that isn't will be logged under another Contract (or directly under the Account) that collects billable Charges. You will then be able to easily invoice your customer for these billable Charges.

Please note that each customer Account can have more than one active Contract. Also, if you'll decide to log un-covered Charges directly under the Account you can use the Custom-Pricing tab of the Account to configure the custom rates with this customer.
And, a Ticket can include Charges that each belongs to a different Contract, so the Ticket history remains the same without loosing any functionality.

Hope this helps.

Thank you for posting your follow up. Is there a way to tell which types of labor charges are covered under the Block of Money Contract vs another contract or does this require the tech to remember for every client contract what is and isn't included?

Currently you cannot and you will have to log the billable charges (1) under the same contract but with to set the Billable flag, which defaults to Not-Billable, (2) under another Contract dedicated the non-covered Charges, or (3) Under the customer Account without any dedicated Contract.

Having said that, some good points were mentioned here and will be considered. Thanks.

It would be nice to know that this is being actively considered. This has been in discussion for several years now, hasn't it?

I'm back again with trying to find solutions to make contract in CommitCRM to match the ones with our clients. I am now considering using block of time contracts for our clients. This seems to give me the ability to have the system mark Labor items as non-billable while Expense and Part items would be billable. This seems to be how most of the MSP's that I know handle our contracts.

This seems to be the only way I can do a contract where I don't have to rely on the tech to properly mark a charge as billable or not. Can someone tell me the downside of doing it this way vs the block of money that is always suggest for MSPs?

Thanks in advance

ascendnet,

Even a block of money doesn't mark products and expenses as billable. You still have to remember to change them to your "global" contract - or mark them as "billable". However, if you mark them as "billable" it will still decrease your block of money that you have available (unless you change to the the global contract).

That being said, I think "block of money" style contracts are definitely the best way to handle MSP type contracts. There is some definite room for improvement in this area - as we all know - but hopefully we will see some improvements before TOO long!

We are currently using block of money contracts but struggle with making sure items are properly marked as billable or not since it automatically marks all charges as not billable.

I just noticed that the block of time contract would automatically mark labor as not billable while leaving parts and expenses billable, which is something we need to do. So I am considering changing all of ours over to this type of contract.

The block of money contract never really fit our contracts anyway. Our clients don't prepay a block of money that we would charge against until it ran out. I can't really picture anyone using this method with a customer but who knows. We did at one point sell prepaid hours of service but parts would have always been billed separately.

Our contracts seem to be very similar to skifast. I am just trying to figure out what I would lose by not using a block of money and instead going with a block of time.

Sorry, I misread your original post! That's an interesting idea...

I've having the same headache, also when i bill say an hour and a half to the contract that has an hour included, it makes it all unbillable, when in reality it should still bill the excess charge and not just tell me about it

Thanks tiimbo.

When the block of time is used in full a message pops warning you about it or the Contract details are displayed in red. As you mentioned, a Charge record is either Billable or Not-Billable. I definitely understand what you're saying, however, at this stage we do not have plans to have a single Charge record separated into a billable 'part' and not-billable 'part' of the same Charge. This would end up making the system much more complex and harder to track. For example, think of 'part' of charges being sent to QuickBooks for billing purposes.

I'm demoing CommitCRM as well. It has alot of ticks on requirements. Just a few nagging ones that need to be resolved either by a workaround or something.

I would like to thank the original thread starter as I believe any like me have a similar situation and the use of the BLOCK OF TIME contract helps. This is the reason why support forums should be kept open like this. Its community help. Thumbs up!

My question - On a ticket that is on a BLOCK OF TIME contract, we can charge labor as required and this will come up "not-billable" - which is what we need. On the same ticket, if we add in an expense or parts, this will come up as "billable" - which is great too. But ... on that original ticket, you have tried to view the TECHNICAL SERVICE FORM INCLUDING CHARGES (1 or 2)? It will print out both the labor and the expense or part and will include a total value for both. For example

- new ticket
- account has a block of time contract
- charge 1 hour of time
- charge 1 unit of parts (i.e. power supply unit)
- resolve and close the ticket
- go to charges and the 1 hour of time is marked as not-billable
- go to charges and the power supply unit is marked as billable
- select the ticket and do a print preview of either
TECHNICAL SERVICE FORM INCLUDING CHARGES 1
TECHNICAL SERVICE FORM INCLUDING CHARGES 2
- both the 1 hour of time and the power supply unit is shown and the grand-total is a total value of the hour and the power supply unit.
- shouldn't the service form show a total value that equals to the power supply unit only without labor?

Thank for posting this and for your feedback.

Not-billable Charges should be printed on the Technical Service Form including Charges. However, by default, they are shown without totals and are not included in the the total summary. So this should actually work as you wanted it to.

You can view and modify the related default setting under Tools-> Options-> Charges & Items tab - by un-selecting the option 'Include Not-Billable Charges in the summary'.

Hope this helps.

Yes - that solved it! Thanks!

What is the downside to changing this default value? From the way this is described it seems like it should always be set to unselected.

Yes, indeed and normally these are indeed the default settings. However, many times you may want to know the ticket value regardless of how you bill your customer and regardless of what's already covered, if this describes your work flow better then selecting it may be a good idea as it'll default to it.

Is there a way to change this on the report itself? For instance, some invoices should show non-billable and others shouldn't. I've been showing them all the time and then explaining that the "unbillable" charge is just for time tracking.

You can select to include or not to include Not-Billable Charges in the summary when generating the "Technical Service Form including Charges" from Charge Reports.

In other Charge Reports there is an option to print only Billable Charges.

When generating Invoices using RangerMSP-QuickBooks Link there are default settings to show/do not show Not-Billable Charges in the Invoice, these settings can be selected manually while generating the Invoice. Please note that these settings control whether to show and include these Charges in the QuickBooks Invoice - but - when they are included they are zeroed automatically. So the customer see them but is not being asked to pay for them.

From a ticket, I would like to have the option to print two different invoices: one that shows not-billable charges and one that does not.

This would obviously happen by editing and saving the reports as desired, is this possible?

I'm not concerned about not-billable charges in Quickbooks, but I do know that is possible.

Thanks!

Unforutnately it cannot be selected there. From the Ticket details you can print the form with Charges (including not-billable) or a tech form without charges at all. Good idea though. We'll have this logged. Thanks.