If your business tracks and bills time to clients, then you should be doing this within QuickBooks. In this episode of MissionBusinessPodcast.com Bernard Roesch explains why you should use QuickBooks for your time tracking and billing and how to start.
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Why Track And Bill Time Within QuickBooks?
If you track and bill time in your business but do it in a separate system such as Microsoft Excel or another time tracking software, you may be missing certain opportunities that you could pursue if you did this within QuickBooks. Few of these are listed below;
Track time efficiently – Once you configure QuickBooks to track time, you can efficiently track and bill time without having to spend additional resources gathering the data.
Missed billing opportunities – If you track your time manually, it’s likely that you’re missing certain opportunities to bill clients for time that you are spending on their projects.
- While you may be billing most of your work, if you don’t rigorously track time such as you would in QuickBooks, then there are bound to be billable hours spent on projects that don’t get billed.
Opportunities to bill more to clients – Many service-based businesses bill time to clients, however the billable rate often changes depending on what work is being done, who is doing the work, and other variables.
- Accommodating for this more advanced billing in a manual time entry system is challenging.
- If you use QuickBooks to track and bill time, you can configure this and use it quickly which enables you to collect more revenue and generate more profit from your clients.
Set Up QuickBooks To Track And Bill Time
The first step to using QuickBooks to track and bill time is ensuring you have the version of QuickBooks that fits your needs. For example, QuickBooks Premier or QuickBooks Enterprise may be needed depending on your specific time and billing requirements.
Once you have the appropriate version of QuickBooks, it’s time to design your process for time tracking and billing.
Tracking and entering time – Each business is unique, but it’s important to have a simple process for tracking time and appropriately entering it into the system. Using QuickBooks, you can integrate this into your daily work flow so the data is entered as it is used.
Billing time – Once the time is logged within QuickBooks, you need to bill it to the client.
- QuickBooks can be configured to bill time to clients in a number of ways including one time invoices, recurring transactions, and more.
Set up billing levels for items and people – If you want to have unique billable rates for different services or team members, this is the time to configure that. Once you have these in place, you can use advanced billing procedures with clients and generate more profit.
Ensure proper quality control – An important part of an effective time tracking and billing system is ensuring you have proper quality controls in place. With QuickBooks, you can configure reports to ensure you are billing time appropriately to clients.
Configuring Your QuickBooks
The specific configuration of QuickBooks will vary depending on your business needs. Contact Bernard today to discuss how you track and bill time to clients so we can help you do this within QuickBooks. You can also visit MissionBusinessPodcast.com for more insights that Bernard has been sharing with us in the previous episodes.
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