How Do I Track Overhead Time?

In many companies, you have to keep track of internal activities and expenses even though they can be non-billable. You might want to track overhead time like vacation, holiday, sick, company meetings, training, research, etc.  In any case, time and expenses flow to the project, allowing you to track utilization of all employees and their billable and non-billable activities –whether you do them for a revenue project or an in-house overhead project.

BillQuick Online requires you to set up projects with some required data such as client, manager, contract type and so on. An overhead project will require you to set up your company as a ‘client’ and then assign the overhead project to it.

To track overhead time:

1. In the Client screen, set up a client record for your company, say ‘BQES’.
2. In the Project screen, set up a project for general office activities, say ‘Overheads’.

3. Assign the client ‘BQES’ to this project.
4. Next, assign the owner/principal/manager of your firm (whoever checks and approves general office time and expense) as the Manager.
5. Select Overhead as the contract Type and set the Status to ‘Active’.
   
   Overhead contract type triggers a business rule to flag all time and expenses charged to an overhead project as non-billable, regardless of the activity code’s default status.
   

3. Now you can record your time entries against this ‘Overheads’ project with any general office activities.
   
   When comp time is to be used, you would use the special activity code (for example, GEN:COMP) and charge the hours to the company’s Overhead project.