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I was wondering if you can suggest the best way to track all mileage. I don't charge for travel but I do record mileage for tax deduction purposes. I am currently creating an Expense Item for each customer location. In the Expense Item I record the standard mileage to the customer location in the Description field. When I go onsite I add a Charge (one of my premade mileage Expense Items) to a ticket. Right now I have to copy the mileage number from the Description field of the Expense Item to Field1 of the Charge. I then run a customized report that lists all Travel Charges (Name, Date, Mileage, etc.).
What I would like is to enter the mileage when I initially setup the Expense Item, lets say in the user definable Field1. When I book a Charge to a ticket the mileage from Field1 in my Expense Item would automatically populate Field1 in the Charge. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks |
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Hi ateckstrom,
Thank you for letting us know how you implement mileage currently. This sounds like an interesting way to track mileage. I see what you mean about populating the mileage value from the description to Field1, however, I'm trying to think of an easier way to log your mileage without using Field1, which is an extra step in this case. If I understand correctly, you have a separate item per customer, describing the mileage amount in the item description. This may result in a very long list of items, and when entering the charge for the mileage, you need to find the item in the list. This part sounds tedious. I'd like to suggest an alternative, which may be easier to implement: 1. Create a single item for Mileage Expense. 2. For each account, define a Custom Price for this item (in the account's Custom Pricing tab). In the custom price, you can set the mileage as the price for this item. You can read more about setting Customer Pricing here. 3. When creating the charge, you should select the Mileage Expense Item. This will put the mileage in the Rate field. Now here's the trick - at this point you should copy the number to the charge's Units field, and change the rate to zero. This way, you will be easily able to find out the mileage per customer, and have this information directly in the charge units. The charge price will be zero (you can also set it as "not billable"), so it will not affect other charge reports. To find out all the mileage, you just need to generate a charge report, and filter it by the Mileage Expense Item. I hope this makes sense and that it can make this process easier for you. Ethan |
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Ethan,
Thank you for your suggestion. You are right about having a lot of mileage Expense Items. I tried what you suggested but I encountered a problem. Most of my clients have multiple locations. I could only add one custom price to the mileage Expense Item. I had an MS Access DB that I used to track billing. In that DB I had a table called Location that had all of the specific information for a location (Name of location, Location ID, Site Contact, Address, Phone, Fax, Default Bill to Address, and Mileage). Each record in the Location table was tied to a specific Customer. Each Customer could have multiple Locations. When I entered my billable hours I would choose the location that I was working at from a drop down box (filtered by the customer I was working for). To enter mileage there was a check box that I could check for being onsite. When the checkbox was checked, the mileage for that Customer Location would then be auto-populated into the Mileage field or I could manually enter in the mileage. I would then run reports to find the total mileage by employee or for all Customers. I know that many companies reimburse their employees for mileage when they use their own vehicle. At a previous employer we had a separate mileage program that we used to keep track of our mileage (talk about tedious). With the simple addition of a table and some code, CommitCRM could easily track mileage. I know that ConnectWise found the concept of mileage tracking so important that they advertise it on their sales video. Thanks for you help. |
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Thank you for your suggestions. Feedback like this is great especially this is an important subject and I added your comments to the feature request in our system.
Right now, in order to use separate rates for your different locations via custom pricing, you may consider using separate contracts for each location, and define the custom pricing in the contract level. I'm assuming you represent each location as a secondary contact, and I'm not sure this will fit your work-flow, but it might be useful - the benefit of this is that you can define custom pricing for each Contract. This will override the account's custom pricing, and as long as you make sure to use the correct contract for each location, this can work well for you. This depends of-course on whether it's okay with you to manage a separate contract per location. Note that you can use a sequential contract-code for all of these locations, so you can easily generate charge reports for all of these contracts at once (using a contract-code-range filtering, click here for more details - see the Contract Code field description). I hope this is of any help! Neta |
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I am looking for an easy way to calculate a mileage report for my employees. We pay mileage to our employees for each trip they make to a client. The client is not billed for this. I do not want to have the employee enter in a seperate charge for the trip.
In the address tab for a client we have a field called mileage where we can enter in the mileage to a client in the field (I am not sure if this was a custome field that we renamed or if it is a standard field in commit). Since they will enter in a chargeable item for each trip they make, I can easily run a report for each employee, so I could easily get a list of each time they went to the client. It seems as if there should be a way to run a report that includes this mileage field on the report and then sum up this field in the bottom of the report. Any thoughts? |
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Hi,
Thanks for posting this. Using the RangerMSP Reports Designer, you can have the Mileage field added to the Tickets List report so that it shows up next to each ticket. If you add the same field to the Summary section of the report, then you should get a consolidated amount of miles traveled based on the tickets in the report. The problem is that from what you describe you store in the Accounts database and it cannot be pulled for each Ticket automatically. This means that you’ll need to enter the mileage factor into each ticket (you can use any field or [urlmp-wiki/Field_Customization]create your own field[/urlmp]) and use that field in your report. The important thing here is to use a numeric custom field so the system will be able to run the SUM() function on it. For more information about Tracking Mileage, please click here. For detailed information on customizing reports, please use the links below. Let us know if you have any questions. Regards Rinat |