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Invoicing: Report & Write-Up/-Down Feature
We are completing our first full month with Harvest. While we love the time tracking feature, invoicing is a bit difficult for our business. We need a way to write-up and write-down the value of chosen time entries. When we complete a project in less time than we estimated, we want to write-up the value. When we go over the budget, we need to write-down the entries. The only way I know to write-down is to edit each time entry as unbillable. If we don’t write-up or write-down the time entries, then the project status report becomes inaccurate. We also need an invoicing report that shows how much we have invoiced to-date against the contract amount. Thanks for the forum! Help please! We want to stop using spreadsheets. Advice welcomed.
We’ve had situations like this too. The solution is easy but not obvious: create an additional line item at the end of the invoice of qty 1 for the value you need to mark up/down — set it’s value to a positive value to mark up or negative value to mark down. This is nice because you don’t actually edit any of the “real” time entries.
That is the same solution we have adopted. However, the Project Status report then becomes much less useful to us because it tracks all time against the budget, instead of the invoiced time against the budget. We need to track time per month, then invoices to-date. I use a Google Docs spreadsheet to post invoices to-date vs. budget for all of our projects.
Jean: Oh, I see. That sounds a lot like the “Project Retainer” http://forum.getharvest.com/forums/feature-requ…" feature that’s being discussed.
@Jim. No one pays us first in the form of a retainer. We just have a contractual not-to-exceed amount. If Harvest included the invoiced dollar amounts in addition to the hours spent on the Project Status Report page, that would solve our problem. I think I will post that suggestion in Feature Requests.
in via Thought Nozzle Jan 12, 2010, 05:10AM:
original post here:
http://forum.getharvest.com/forums/feature-requ…
I’d like to be able to easily — and with some granularity — comp a certain amount of time on a per-task or per-project basis
When I’m working on a project and performing an unfamiliar task, I may underestimate the amount of time it takes to accomplish — as I did recently, designing PDF forms with calculations for a client. In order to come in at budget — or at least a renegotiated amount over — I need to be able to comp the client a certain amount of time for the task — often across several time sheet entries.
In my own home-grown Filemaker solution, I can see how much time I’ve actually spent on a task, along with the amount of time and money I’ve comped the client for on a particular task or project, which is valuable for project post-mortem, and great reinforcement for making the estimate more accurate next time. :)
As it is, I can currently create a “comped time” item to add to a timesheet or an invoice, but it would be cumbersome to add and track on a per-task basis — especially since my tasks tend to be more fine-grained than just “graphic design” or “web design”. I have many clients for whom I do “sub-projects”, for which I bill them on a per-piece basis. So even though I’ve just started with Harvest, I can tell my Tasks dropdown menu is going to get very long… But that’s really for another thread. :)
So… I guess this is kind of a second to the write-up/write-down feature request in the linked post…
Thanks!
