I am a Simply Accounting by Sage Certified Consultant and Development Partner. Besides providing Simply Training and Support to a wide range of clients, I develop reporting solutions utilizing Simply and the Microsoft Office© suite. I have been a user of Simply since its Bedford days in the ‘80s.
As well as being a partner in a bookkeeping practice, managing partner of a real estate investment group and providing controller services to a number of clients, I am also an active contributor to the Simply Forum.
I look forward to the opportunity to provide my thoughts on life and technology in the accounting community. If you have questions or ideas let’s hear about them and we’ll discuss them.
August 2008 - Posts
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Invoicing Your Customers - Using Time & Billing
Billing has always been a dreaded process in our office. Don’t get me wrong, I love sending out invoices and getting paid! It’s just that it is time consuming to actually prep the invoices showing the time and details of work completed. We usually try to send our invoices out at the end of the month. Some months, it’s a day’s work of unbillable time – ouch – even when most of the details have been recorded digitally. The same applies to any type of business – if you are doing it yourself or paying someone else – it costs you time and money to invoice.
For many years, I used to scratch my notes on sheets of paper along with hours and then try to figure out what they actually meant at the end of the month. Sometimes I’d forget to write the date down or the times! I am sure that we left at least 10% of our billings for our clients’ benefit for a number of yearsNext I graduated to using Access as a way to track time. I built a little application that has worked for years. The only problem is, I designed it for my use and since I was using productive time to design it, I definitely did not do a real great job on it as far as proper database structure goes. It works but I also end up entering everyone else’s time because it is not sophisticated enough for other less technical employees in our office to use. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have an administration person do this work? By now you are probably sensing my frustration.
My Access program was also portable. It would synch with my first handheld HP and subsequent Smartphones and carry over all the descriptive billing details to my desktop. This allowed me to stop for a coffee on the road to update billings or take a few minutes to enter info before moving onto the next client’s site.
To be honest, I have really resisted Simply’s Time & Billing module. When first released, it did not do a lot, or at least what I wanted it to do plus the fact was, of course, my little Access program was far better.
A few weeks ago, I started to play around with Time & Billing in Simply. Prompted mainly by a prospective client that wanted to streamline their manual billing of associates and employee time and migrate to a computerized system. I knew the basics of the module and its features but had never put it to practical use. So, I began recording my own time in anticipation of this month’s billings.
Here’s what I like about Simply’s Time & Billing – After you set up a Service item and make sure that you check off the ‘Activities’ box you can start using it. Time Slip users can be set up so they can only access Time Slips in Simply. You can set them up to see only their own name or any number of employees if they are an administrator. Another nice feature is that you can hide the ‘Billable Amount’ column so that someone in the back shop can enter their time but is unable to see how much you are billing them out at.
When you invoice or complete payroll, you select the Customer or the Employee from the Sales or Payroll Module and then add the Timeslip info with a click of the mouse.
The Time Sheet Detail report allows the Payroll Administrator to look at each pay period hours and to drill down into each time slip to edit. Other reports like the Customer Time & Billing Summary quickly show you how much you billings for the month-to-date. You could go on to analyze non-billable time, etc. and use the T&B functions as a part of your management tools.
The one thing that I do not like about Time & Billing – the synchronization with a Smartphone is not satisfactory – if you enter details of the work you did in the description column into Simply Mobile, it will not store these details – it reverts back to the default description. I think that this is very important to mention as most of us will be using Smartphones within the next three to five years and relying on them to conduct business.
I am planning on using Time & Billing moving forward as it is going to put a few extra hours in each month and provide some good analysis of time useage. with no comments
