30 Oct 2020 - Control project expenses

Control what expenses are included in the burn of a project budget with options to set each expense as billable to customer as well as specifying a billable amount. New options to filter resourcing by project status or positions.

Included in this release:

• Choose which expenses burn project budget and are billable to the customer
• Set the billable amount for an expense, with the option to mark up by a percentage or amount
• Project settings for default behaviour of expenses
• New filter options on resourcing screens
• New columns on the expenses directory, and resizable columns
• New columns for "hours" added to the project directory
• A draft invoice can be saved without a billing contact
• New setting for option of excluding inactive budgets from the invoice template (conditions apply)
• Changes to the API
• There have been no changes to the SQL views

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Control how expenses are tracked in project budgets

In the last week we made a significant change to how expenses are handled within a project. All expenses recorded against a project were consuming the project budget, with the only exception being an option to exclude pending reimbursable claims.

This was a big change as up until this point expenses weren't being factored into the consumption of a project budget at all.

Choose which expenses burn the project budget. 

Project managers now have control over which expenses will contribute to the consumption of the budget. In short, you can specify whether an expense is "billable to customer" and what value an expense should be booked against the project.

Make an expense billable to customer

Project Managers can choose which expenses are to be treated as billable to the customer and factored into the burn of the budget. 

• Tick billable to customer to include an expense in the budget burn
• Untick billable to customer to exclude an expense from the budget burn

Set the billable amount of an expense

Depending on your commercial arrangement, expenses may be oncharged to your customer at the cost price, or with a margin added on top of the purchase price. As well as choosing whether sales tax is included, new options to allow the billable amount to be marked up or down have been added.

Include purchase sales tax

On each expense you can specify whether the sales tax of the purchase is included in the burn amount.

• Tick include purchase sales tax to include an expense in the budget burn
• Untick include purchase sales tax to exclude an expense from the budget burn

Mark an expense up or down

The billable amount for an expense can be marked up, either by specifying a % to be added, or setting an extra amount.

• Marking up a $100 expense by 10% will result in a billable amount of $110
• Marking up a $100 expense by adding $20 will result in a billable amount of $120
• Marking down a $100 expense by 50% will result in a billable amount of $50

Project settings to control default behaviour of expenses

There are new settings for how expenses should be treated by default on a project. Project Managers can choose which kinds of expenses are to be automatically set as “billable to customer” so they can see the project budget burning down as expenses are raised.

Expenses in project budgets

The burn of the project budget will include time entries (at customer billable rates) and the billable amount of all expenses marked as billable to customer. The billable value of each expense will either be the purchase price, or the marked up/down price if an alternate amount has been set. 

Extra filter options on resourcing screens

Improvements have been made to the three resourcing screens/reports, with new options to filter by project status and position.

The new filters will allow you to really hone in on areas that are of interest, such as all resourcing on unsigned opportunities, or resourcing for all developers regardless of which team or organisation they are in.

Invoices

We will soon be embarking on a series of changes to strengthen the options for creating and managing invoices. As part of the journey we will be releasing some small "quick wins", with two included in this release. 

Invoices can be created and left in draft without a billing contact

You can create and save an invoice without a billing contact being set up. It can only be saved in draft mode, a contact is needed to advance the invoice to any other status.

Invoice template (using the budget table)

This one is particularly aimed at our engineering and architecture customers who have their invoice template set up to include a budget breakdown.

A new setting has been added in the admin section, where you can specify whether all budget phases or only active  budget phases are presented in the budget table of the invoice template.

Directories are more powerful

Work continues on making the directory screens more powerful. Include in this release are changes to the expenses directories, project directories and the people directory. We've made more columns available to display and made the columns resizable.

Expenses directories

Changes have been made to the all expenses, expense claims for a person, project expenses and company expenses screens. Columns can be resized, and two new columns added:

• Billable
• Billable amount

Project directories

As well as the columns for "dollar values", columns for hours can now be shown. This will be really useful if you are wanting to report on the hours allocated on timecodes for a project, or hours worked but not invoiced yet

Changes have been made to the projects screen and the companies projects screens. The following new columns have been added:

• Worked hours
• Uninvoiced hours
• Invoiced hours
• Allocated hours
• Project currency

People directory

The columns can be resized and a new column for email address has been added.

API changes