Deb Reidy training day - May 13th, 2008
As was evidenced by time focus on Netsuites 'Invoice Billable Customers', the best way for us to manage the following are essential to our daily business operation:-
- Job Costings
- Job Invoicing
- Job Profitability
The other issue discussed with Deb on the day was the ability to track and review Technician Utilisation as a management KPI. see here for more on this... http://www.testedgroup.com/book/training/management-kpi-technician-utilisation-percentages
The following is a more detailed treatment of the above
1. Job Costings - issues discussed were
- job types - faults and projects, where invoice billable customers is for faults (not projects)
- labour - both internal labour and subcontract labour may be involved with the one job
- materials - commonly sourced from preferred trade suppliers we supply with Purchase Orders
- expenses - less common but include travel and accommodation for remote work
- different labour rates - for normal business hours or out of hours & for call outs where service fees apply
2. Job Invoicing - issues discussed were
- job types - whether it is a quoted job or not
- where we choose to originate the Invoice (invoice billable customers or Estimate/Sales Order)
- the types of Item Codes used (for resale or not, single or grouped items)
- layout/appearance to client (whether we group items/expenses/time or not)
- whether we want technicians to enter timesheet data for Payroll or simply utilisation purposes
- how we manage discrepancy between actual hours and billable hours on a Job
3. calculate resulting Job profitability (subtracting job costs from job revenue) - issues discussed were
- Job profitability report options (within Netsuite/outside Netsuite)
- whether transaction costs are marked as billable or non billable
- subtracting Job expenses from Job revenue
We asked Deb what she considered the best practice way of using "Invoice Billable Customers", and then explained how we manage the process currently in Netsuite. She provided answers to the following:-
Query: With Customer Invoice layouts, how do we avoid having multiple lines displaying on an Invoice if several Technicians entered in time against the same Job.
Answer: Setup>Accounting>Invoicing Preferences provides us with the option to group labour items together.
Query: How do we manage the discrepancy between actual hours and billable hours on a given Job. Which contains several issues.
Number 1 is what do we ask the Technician to place on their 'time sheet and tech report.' e.g what item codes are to be applied when and why?
Number 2 is whether time is marked as billable or non billable.
Number 3 is what codes are applicable to the Invoice and how does the Invoicing staff member ensure the client is invoiced correctly.
Number 4 is whether the time-sheet figures can be used to calculate technician utilisation as a KPI and or technician payroll purposes.
Answer:Billable time will always be marked as Billable. Technicians - would only write 'actual time' on the Time sheets, and Technicians note additional information on the Tech Reports.
Invoicing Staff - will always use the Tech Report for Invoice purposes. When creating an Invoice via Invoice Billable Customers, they need to evaluate the appropriate invoicing action. e.g. they can zero out the rate in the Billable Time Sub-tab, and then add the appropriate labour code in the Item Subtab. As appropriate additional charges can be added at this stage too. Such as a Service Charge.
Query: Currently we need to receive a supplier Invoice and process this, before Invoice Billable Customers will display this as a cost. But If we have a large Supplier purchase (e.g. $30K fire panel) which we receive the Panel and complete the Job, and want to Invoice the Customer, but the Supplier is slack in providing their Invoice to us, how do we recover money (to manage cash-flow) as the customer is ready to be invoiced.
Answer: One solution to test is change a switch in Setup>Accounting Preferences>Order Management>Receiving called "Bill in Advance of Receipt". Which would allow us to bill purchase orders before we receive them. NB..Jim to make some comments on this.
