Today’s video is going to focus on functionality within web timesheet that will be related to billing. That could be billing clients, or billing internal customers or departments. During the video we are going to take a look at project setup to optimize for billing after the time entry has been done. Part of that will consist of roles and rates, billable vs. non-billable tasks, then we are going to look at approvals and how you can actually have your clients do this for a portion of your timesheet approval path to ensure accurate billing. Then we are going to look at some time entry from an end-user standpoint, and finally we will take a look at reporting and we are going to focus on three main things in the reporting section: accurate billing, faster invoicing and profitability of projects.

Let’s first take a look at project configuration. We will go to the project tab on the upper menu. Then we will go ahead and edit the customer portal project that I have set up here.

Now there are several sections you want to concentrate on in relation to billing on the project screen. First of which is going to be the clients frame. Here you will define the clients or client that are associated with your project. Below that we have the billing rates frame, the billing rates frame outlines all of the available billing rates to this project. Now the first rate here, being the project rate, exists on all projects. You can choose to assign that to users or not.

Below that I have 3 rates based on roles within the system. And we will take another look at that when we are actually on the timesheet entering some time, but these rates are related to the type of work a user would be entering on their timesheet. We do have full rate history with all of the rates associated with a project. So, you can choose to edit them, or add historical rates with effective dates in the past, this allows historical entries to reflect those historical rates, and they can change at any time during their project.

Below the billing rates frame we will see the project team frame. Now, in addition to identifying the users that can enter time towards this project, the team frame also allows you to define which rates they have access to on their timesheet. So, with the exception of Jordan Glass here, all the other users that are assigned to this project are using the project rate. Jordan Glass, you will notice, has several rates assigned for this assignment, and we will show you how to take advantage of those on the timesheet in a second. Now, from the approval standpoint, the project will also allow you to define an approver. In this case a client external approver can be defined and added tot he timesheet approval path to ensure that whenever a time entry is made to this project, that timesheet is routed to an external approver as per the approval path.

Now let’s take a look at how an end user would enter time towards this project. Navigate to the timesheet by clicking the timesheet icon in the top menu bar, and this will bring up the current time sheet period. You can see that I have several projects and tasks already added to my timesheet, from the Customer Portal project, as well as another project called Customer XYZ project.

In addition to the project task column, you can also choose to expand the client column, and you'll see to the right of the project/task column, we have the billing column. The billing column determines the rate that will be applied to the time entries for that row.

For the Customer XYZ project I have several different role rates that I can choose from, determining the rate that will be applied to my time. For this project I was working as a designer so I will choose that billing role, and enter some time towards the project. I also have several choices for billing options on the customer portal project.

I can add or remove rows as required, directly from the timesheet interface, in this case I've actually done work as a project lead and as a designed for the Customer Portal project so I'm going to duplicate the row and enter some design hours here, I can very easily duplicate the row and enter time for yet another role, here I will enter time to programmer.

Now, let’s go to the reporting section so we can see how to extract this data out of the system and use it for billing customers, invoicing. Going to the reports button in the top menu, bring up our default report list of all the reports in the system, we're going to scroll down on the left hand side to all of the billing reports. Expand that and choose the timesheet billing report, this is a very flexible report, you will see that there are many filters at the top that you can use to restrict what time is coming out. There is a detailed and consolidated view of this report, and its got several layers of grouping by default, that are going to make it very easy to present billing data to your accounting department, or even to customers if they request detail on an invoice that you have presented to them.

Here you will see that all the time entries are grouped by client, and then project, and then task, they'll give you user details, the rate that was associated with the time they've entered, and of course, billable amounts. All of those hours and billable amounts are also rolled up to summaries for project client, and a full summary so that if you has multiple clients and projects on this report, you would be able to see a full summary- maybe your monthly billing, or your quarterly billing at a glance.

As with all reports, you do have the ability to email this data, send it to excel, or PDF it if you want to forward it off to your clients to review. Now even though this report is going to allow you to ensure accurate billing and faster invoicing, it’s not going to tell you if your projects are making you money.

For that information, go to the detail task report; take advantage of a new feature that will allow us to add a calculated column. You'll see on this report the same grouping by client project and task, and it has the hours summarized and the billable amount, it also has the cost amount. The cost amount is based on a loaded user cost that we put on the user profile for all of the users. It then takes the hours calculation and applies it with this rate to come up with the cost amount, now we can see the billable and the cost amount, but lets add a column here to give us some kind of an idea of how profitable this project is based on t he data that we're seeing.

Call this column profit, and the calculation is going to be cost amount and billable amount minus cost amount, formatted as a number, and now we are going to save this, and run the report again. You'll see an additional column has been added here that does the math for us, telling us our rough profit is $900 so far on that project, based on the hours we've entered, the date range we have in the filters.

So remember, today during our video we took a look at configuring project information to provide billing details and reports after the fact, we looked at setting up rates and roles to use different rates for users, we took a look at timesheet entry from a user's perspective, applying those different rates and roles, and the set up of approvals to have an external user approve timesheets. Then we took a look at reporting and how to ensure accurate and quick invoicing and look at some of the numbers on a project that would tell us if that project was profitable or not.

So, I thank you for your time, if you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at one of the methods below, we would be happy to walk through anything with you. Thanks and have a great day.

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