Using BillQuick Online, you can track billable as well as non-billable hours to measure performance, utilization and profitability effectively. Non-billable hours can indicate how much time was lost or given away to gain or keep the business. Depending upon your preferences, you can choose the frequency and method of capturing time and expenses for accurate billing and reporting.
BillQuick Online provides an accurate and flexible billing system for billing managers, though in some cases you can delegate these tasks to accountants or project managers. Billing decisions can be made in real time (on-screen) or through a printed billing report (off-screen). When creating invoices, billing decisions can range from ‘no-decisions-needed’ to application of retainers, discounts, etc. After executing billing decisions, you can review and sign off on draft invoices, generate final invoices, send them to clients and receive payments. You can produce billing reports on-demand to keep yourself updated on all projects.
BillQuick Online provides the following solutions and benefits, enabling you to manage your billing:
BillQuick Online allows recording of time and expenses in any screen that suits your timekeepers—Sheet View, Simple Time Card, Timer, Expense Log, etc.
Many companies outsource tasks to vendors or consultants. Whether paid an hourly rate or a flat project fee, it is beneficial to track their hours for reporting and analysis. This information can help improve future estimates, budgets and other decisions. That is why BillQuick Online allows your vendors to record time and expenses with appropriate security permissions.
BillQuick Online’s built-in submit and approve feature enables timekeepers to follow company policy and submit time and expenses, invoices, vendor bills, etc. to a designated reviewer or manager. After being submitted, BillQuick Online notifies these managers to review the entries for approval and billing. BillQuick Online allows a chain of reviewers to check time and expense entries before a final reviewer approves them. For convenience, you can review both time and expense entries in a single Reviewer screen.
The Workflow tracking system gives you the status of all submitted timesheets, expenses, invoices, etc. –all in one screen. From here, reviewers and managers can check the details of the event, action taken and status.
BillQuick Online does not prevent you from accumulating time and expenses above the contract amount. Nor are you prevented from billing more than the contract amount for a fixed-type contract. However, BillQuick Online applies a Red Flag Rule to all time and expense entries charged to fixed-type contracts (except Percentage) to determine if it goes beyond the contract amount. If it does, BillQuick Online prompts you and changes the status of the entry to ‘non-billable’, drawing the attention of employees and project managers.
BillQuick Online is smart enough to recognize that managers are busy and at times can miss things. Rather than inadvertently over-bill clients and likely lose them, the red flag prompts you to check the non-billable item.
To provide your company with day-to-day accounting capabilities, BillQuick Online provides some core accounting features that make it easier to keep track of financial information. With these capabilities, you can create purchase orders, receive items, create vendor bills and manage your chart of accounts.
You gain a major advantage of recording vendor bills in BillQuick Online because of the ‘Pay When Paid’ feature. When your client pays for an invoice, BillQuick Online includes a link to a vendor bill, prompting you to schedule payments to your vendors. In essence, you pay your vendors when your clients pay you.
BillQuick Online enables you to specify payment terms to indicate when you expect to receive payments from customers. In case of forgetful clients or late payments, you can charge specified interest rates or late fees. These user-defined terms are available at the project, client and billing level.
An invoice is a marketing document that nurtures client relationships. It must communicate positive images to both new and long-term clients: Quality, Capability, Professionalism and Confidence. BillQuick Online offers more than 150 invoice formats for you to choose. These templates support detail or summary information, time and expense descriptions, retainers, memos, employee titles, value-added taxes (for example, GST) and so on. BillQuick Online can even customize these templates for you.
All invoices associated with a specific contract type have their own default invoice format. However, for demanding clients, you can assign an invoice template per project. For example, most of your clients can like a particular invoice template because it displays detailed memos for each time and expense entry. Nevertheless, a certain client wants his invoices to display time entries by activity and without memos. BillQuick Online accommodates all such preferences.
When setting up BillQuick Online for the first time, managers need to consider whether to start with a new invoice format or use the last invoice number from an old time and billing system. BillQuick Online enables you to define invoice numbering on a global level or customize it at the project level. You even have the flexibility to structure the invoice number so that it has a static and variable portion (automatically incremented). For example, you can include the fiscal year in the invoice number as static information while the variable will be the incremental part in curly brackets.
With BillQuick Online, you can set a retainage percentage and a maximum retainage amount that a client can hold back while making payments on invoices. This is most common in the construction industry, but you can find it in any project-centric company. The client pays the accumulated retainage amount later — when the project is over or until the client verifies the quality and completeness of a project.
One of the best features in BillQuick Online is the ability to assign an unlimited number of bill and cost rates to employees, activities and projects. It supports default bill rates (employee rates), special bill rates (fee schedule rates) and activity rates. BillQuick Online also enables you to specify classification or title of employees for these rates. After negotiating with clients, the project or billing manager decides which rate to charge. By defining the rates up front, you eliminate non-billable administrative hours otherwise spent checking and correcting rate information. In addition, you can allow your timekeepers to record their time without any knowledge of the rates.
BillQuick Online enables you to determine the ideal bill rate for producing the target profit per hour, the utilization rate of your employees and day rates. Such information is extremely useful in making business decisions.
BillQuick Online handles most of the tax rules in various countries – taxes on time and expense line items, taxes on invoiced labor and expense, and taxes on taxes. BillQuick Online supports taxes at two levels. At the first level, there are three item taxes, summed and applied to the pre-tax bill amount. You can modify these tax rates during time and expense entry.
At the second level, there are two main taxes on the total invoiced services and invoiced expenses. A common example is GST in Canada and VAT or MST in other countries. Item taxes are in addition to these main taxes and both taxes carry to the invoice.
Your business can be located in United States with clients in Canada, Mexico, China, and so on. With different countries and foreign currencies, billing can get confusing. However, BillQuick Online enables you to convert bill and expense amounts of your home currency to the local currency of the client (or project) when generating an invoice. The only time you will see a foreign currency is on the invoices and when recording payments. BillQuick Online reports will always appear in your home currency.
BillQuick Online enables you to set up billing schedules to bill clients on a scheduled date for a scheduled amount. Depending on your needs, you can define billing records for the entire life of a project or only for the initial period of work. While you can define a billing schedule for any contract type, you would most likely use it for fixed-type contracts.
BillQuick Online offers multiple and flexible options for billing managers. For detailed or advanced billing, Billing Review is the best screen to use; Manual Invoice allows you to create quick invoices, with or without time and expense entries. BillQuick Online enables you to determine the net bill amount based on project contract types, billing schedules, discounts, retainers, fixed fees, retainage, taxes, etc.
You can opt for batch billing when you want to bill records as-is. Since they require no billing decisions—no adjustments, no exclusions, no editing—batch billing is the fastest way to create invoices. You can process and print invoices in one simple step.
BillQuick Online allows you to generate percent complete invoice using the ‘% Complete’ value of the project. You can calculate this value based on the contract amount spent and bill the client accordingly. Percent complete billing supports both single project per invoice and joint invoicing. You can set BillQuick Online for automatic billing at the project level and memorize invoices for future billing.
BillQuick Online provides options as to where and how billing managers want to generate invoices. While you create most invoices using Billing Review, there are situations when Manual Invoice is a better option. For example, when you want to:
Create a quick invoice from an estimate, budget, billing schedule or time and expense data
Resell software, hardware or other products having no significant services associated with them
Enter invoices (summary or detail) manually from a previous time billing system, including your old invoice numbers
Create an invoice with no time or expenses charged to a project.
Whatever the reason or situation, you can make use of any billing screen in BillQuick Online and do your billing in no time! You can also memorize your manual invoices for future billing.
BillQuick Online has a huge collection of useful billing reports. Some billing managers use pre-billing reports to speed-up the billing process. Others record billing decisions on the report and hand it off to the administrative staff to complete billing. You can use the post-billing reports for analysis and decision-making.
BillQuick Online allows you to create, print, email, reverse and finalize invoices in a single Invoice Review screen. You can even apply late fees to them and generate late fee invoices. It contains everything you need to manage current, historical and draft invoices. BillQuick Online also supports electronic invoices, popularly used in European nations.
At times, clients request another copy of an invoice. Using BillQuick Online, your billing staff can easily reprint or resend invoices from Invoice Review. You can specify default settings for emailing invoices to clients, at the client as well as project level.
BillQuick Online allows you to define and calculate late fees or finance charges on outstanding invoices based on a preferred date. You can define these settings at various levels. If you want a common interest rate for all your clients, that can be specified at the global level. For selective interest rates, you can set them up at the client or project level. BillQuick Online generates late fee invoices separately.
You can record late fee payments in the Payment screen and view them on several reports, such as Account Transaction and Cash Receipts Journal.
Tracking invoices to full payment is a critical task, well handled by BillQuick Online. Prompt receipt and recording of payment results in the most up-to-date information, drives cash flow and other management decisions as well as affects future billing decisions. BillQuick Online enables you to record payments in many ways, to one invoice or multiple invoices, manually or automatically.
You might want to inform your clients that you have reduced their outstanding balance. For such situations, BillQuick Online supports recording of credit memos against client invoices.
To ensure proper cash flow and to lower the risk of reduced profits, it is important to manage receivables and track individual invoices for timely collections. To help you, BillQuick Online includes various accounts receivable and aging reports for managers.
The aging reports have client sections that list aged project invoices along with client contact details and project managers. In addition, you can identify payment deficiencies and other issues from reports such as Monthly Billing, Cash Receipts, Statements, Collections, etc.
In BillQuick Online, you can have two types of retainers—client retainers (advance received from client for all projects) and project retainers (amount received from client for a specific project). Retainer Management maintains a complete history of all retainer activity, including retainer invoices, receipts and application to invoices. This information is also available in-context throughout BillQuick Online from client, project, billing and payment records, and reports. You can also memorize your retainer invoices for future billing.