Mark charges as billable when over contracted hours.....

Hi,

We would like any charges over the contracted hours to automatically be set as billable, is this possible?

Kind regards

Hi,

When using block contracts, the system alerts you when you attempt to add a charge which exceeds the block limit.

When this happen, you can choose what you want to do with these charges. In some cases you would like to charge the customer for this time as extra-hours, which will be billed on top of the block contract. In other cases you would like to transfer these hours to the next date range contract. The system does not decide what to do with these charges, but rather lets you decide.

If you wish to bill the customer for this time as over-used hours, you can set the over-used hours charges as "billable" and invoice them to the customer on top of the block invoice. This should be done manually, as you may not always want to operate this way. You can read more about managing over-used hours this way in the Introduction to Charges and Billing manual, under Rates for Over-Used hours.

If you wish, you can also transfer the over-used hours to the next contract, which can be the next block (if this is a recurring block contract), or to a contract specific for over-used hours. You can create the new contract in advance (using the Batch Copy Wizard, see more details here), and simply select the new contract for charge when creating the charge. This will reduce the amount from the new contract. In this case, the charge should stay "not billable".

You can read more about the billable flag and how it is determined here.

Neta

I think this is a poor way to do it.

If a customer has 3 hours left on their block buy. An employee then adds a charge for 5 hours to carry out the work and gets a warning saying the customer is over their limit. So he can click the billable tick box and the customer gets charged for the full 5 hours, even though they had 3 hours spare. Or the employee does not click the billable tick box (which by the way is very easy to forget to do in the first place) and we loose 2 hours worth of money.

The only way around it I can see is to split the charge into 2 hour + 3 hour charges, which makes the process very complicated and prone to human error.

Why cant we not have the option to either have CommitCRM store these hours up on the account for deduction by the next months contract (or something along those lines). Or like we have done in the past, charge the over billed hours at the normal global system contract price, or a discounted price if the contract is setup to charge a discounted price for labour.

anyone else know an easy way around this?

Yes this is bit frustrating. That anomaly is why we cant use what would otherwise be a useful feature. We cant trust techs to worry about it. +1 vote for retifying it!

Hi Guys,

Thanks for posting these comments, this is great feedback.
I've passed all your comments to the product manager, so that we can address them.

As mentioned above, there are various ways to handle charges which over-use the contract, so it's not a trivial decision what should be done with these hours, and this is why it's currently in the hands of the user. In any case, we realize this can lead to human error would need figure a way to make this more automated but in a very flexible way...

Thanks for your input on this.

With regards,
Reno Breen

Commit.....what you seem to be missing in here isn't that people don't want to decide. I think it's that we don't want to decide each and every time what to do with the additional time. Perhaps giving the option once in the TOOLS menu would be good.

As it stands, the responses about this issue seem to be little more than an attempt to spin the issue into something that sounds like it's done for our benefit.

I vote to have a simple option in the TOOLS section that ask what to do with extended hours/units in contracts. From there we could decide to accept and bill at XXXX rate, or decline. Either way, it's decided before hand and not each time it comes up.

2computersolutions, thanks for expressing your thoughts to us.

I've attached your comments, as well as your vote to this feature request, in the hopes that this feature will received the suggested feature.

Keep on the great feedback!

Doron

Just wondering if there has been any update on this? We roll the hours over into a new Block of Time contract for a majority of customers.

wereman,

Thank you for following up. We haven't made much progress with this. We may get to it in one of our coming releases.

In any case, I believe that what you're requesting is slightly different than what is requested here - I understand that you wish to automatically roll the remaining hours to the next contract (thanks for suggesting this) while the other guys here wish to automatically bill the client for the over-used-hours and therefore ask for the system to automatically mark these Charges as billable.

Rinat

Please add my vote. I'm not using block hours contracts yet but will do in the future, and I can see this would be frustrating, especially when you have other techs who may not "care" as much about the billing side, they just want to close the ticket and start working on the next one.

This is a pain for us also. I almost hate managed service agreements because of the end of month admin work deciding what to bill who. Can't leave it to the tech to decide - it won't happen right. +1 when able - thanks always.

+1

I need overage to be pushed to the client's default contract.

I am adding a vote for this feature.

We need overages to be marked as billable, or to at least have some control over what is billable or not.

It would also be nice to be able to have any remaining time from the block to "rollover" to the next contract.

....and/or if at all possible to be able to automatically add in new monthly hours. We work our contract similar to cell phone plans with rollover minutes. Any remaining minutes you have "rollover" to the next month, in addition to the contracted monthly minutes.

I don't know if I have already voted for this, but if not... count me in! We constantly have clients going over their block time contracts. It is a pain to find this and then bill it seperately.

Austin Speer
Onward Incorporated

+1

+2 here

+3 It is a pain finding lost income from unbilled services.

We're watching this thread... Thanks for voting.

As you are thinking about how to implement this - could you consider automatically marking "products" as billable (maybe under the system contract or something)as opposed to deducting them out of a block of money. For instance on a service contract that covers time only, the ticket goes in under the block of money contract, but then the tech has to remember to change the contract to "system" for any products used.

That would be huge!

Thanks,

Luke

I'll add your note so it'll be evaluated together with the other related options.

Thanks,
Dina.

I realize this thread is 5 years old - has there been any design improvements to address this issue?

Lets say we have 40 clients all setup for block of time (all 8 hours/month or whatever). At the end of the month 15 clients go over their allocated time by varying amounts. Ideally these overages should be invoiced/billed to the customer.

At the end of every month we are currently having to manually track & invoice customer overages on a per-customer basis - which is time consuming and overly complex for what it needs to be. Due to the nature of the problem - a manager needs to perform this to ensure proper invoicing for each customer while also making sure we are not losing money. Additionally this overage usually occurs during the course of 1 entry further complicating the billing process. The manager has to go in, identify which customers have overages at the end of every month, identify where the split in overages occurs - take & split the technicians time entry into two entrees and then mark the remainder of the tickets billable. Do that 15 times in a single day? Really? An additional side effect of this is customers calling in with questions due to how charges appear on their invoices.

This should be a no brainer regarding contract overages:
1. Do nothing - manually address every occurance (seems to be the only current option)
2. Be allowed to invoice overage amounts automatically as an alternative

While I understand it has been left to a manual process so everyone can do their own thing - I find it equally strange there are no other choices allowed.

Folks, I cannot stress how cumbersome and problematic this single issue has become. Someone please tell me there is a work around or that I am missing something . . .

Thank you for asking and for sharing the details. It seems that you are familiar with the different options that are supported, the other option would probably be to ask your staff to mark overages as billable. When a new charge is added to a fully-used block contract the system warns the user about this case, but does not prevent the user from logging their time. You should ask staff (some/all, depending on their privileges) to check the Billable flag for Charges they log and see the block-overage warning message. This will not solve everything but may reduce the number of monthly contract you would need to more manually take care of. It has been discussed here but the problem is way more complex than it seems, but yes, we understand that some additional tools may help here and will be considering the options. Thanks for asking!

Based on the number of replies to this thread - this is the 3rd largest thread in the past two years. It appears the original thread was started in 2008 and still appears to be a highly sought after 'feature'. As we are all highly technical, I can certainly appreciate the difficulty in programming.

That said: Total contract hrs. minus contracted hours = Billable hours. 1 line exported to QuickBooks (or your favorite accounting software) to indicated contracted hours overage. I know we have the option of including billable (or non billable) items on the invoice and can understand this would be a programming nightmare (side note: welcome to our world, we have to do this monthly/manually) - however i'd be happy just to forgo this choice just to have 1 line exported to the accounting system that says: "Monthly Contract Overage, Qty hrs. and total cost calculated automatically.

While your suggestion does address the root of the problem - in practice a majority of technicians, administrators and engineers are simply not the best folks to determine customer invoicing. This may work for a small office with 5 people - but beyond this, the recommendation falls apart.

Anything you can do to close this gap would be greatly appreciated. We certainly thank you for your time, recommendations and continued effort to meet the needs of your customers, and appreciate all that you continue to do with this product.

Thanks and we appreciate your additional feedback and comments. That is a complex problem not in regards to a logical issue, but rather to the risk of you ended up with incorrect billing, let me explain - think that you add 3 hours, 2 hours, 3 hours (overage occur) then another 2 hours (will auto-set as billable) and the you review the charges and edit the older 3 hours charge to 2.5? What happens? how will the system know what exact needs to change, that another charge need to split, etc.? That's complex in real life, even before dealing with programming, and the above is only a simple case.
We do understand your suggestion with the one-line of billing to QuickBooks, however, it might introduce new issues (as the overage charges needs to be clearly linked to the overage time that you are billing).

In any case, thanks again for your additional feedback that will be considered. Thanks!

It is such a pain to "review" each ticket/contract for charges that got marked as billable when they had hours left. This wastes about 2-5 hours of our time each week.

Commit, would a simple fix be an option for what the system does with overages? (I think this was mentioned).

Then depending on our settings, we will know what happens and can act accordingly.

The biggest issue i see is the time split. What we do now is (3 hour charge 2 hours billable), is make 2 charges. 1h non billable, 2h billable. This leaves the techs with finding a clever way to "split" the time into coherent tasks. 1 hour we did this, 2 hours we did that.

When a tech messes this up the client gets billed incorrectly, and they call complaining and we have to go back fix the ticket, fix the contract, fix QB, eat crow, beg them not to fire us just because we cant get our billing correct.

Thank you for providing your input on this!

I first +1'ed this over five years ago. Here's hoping it won't be another five years before this highly requested and discussed issue is addressed.

For you guys who want this feature, would it be possible to run a report on your "block of money/time" contracts and check for which contracts are over their block limit?

You could then create a single charge entry for each contract/account where there was an overage for the overage amount.

You could use a special charge item for "overage" charges to allow you to easily track these charge types as well.

This report would only need to be run during each billing cycle.

Just an idea here!

The main issue is we have to depend on the techs to get it right. Since overages don't automatically turn billable, people (forget) and the overages all get mis-billed. Usually for us things are marked non-billable that should be billable.

I could run a report (thought about that a few years ago) but the report is wrong when the charges are wrong. Garbage in garbage out type of deal.

Unless i am off base with your suggestion....

Yeah, I probably didn't explain well. I'm saying that you don't worry about the billable status - instead make sure techs get the contract set right.

At month end, run a contract report on "block of time contracts" for the month just ending.

You will see for account "abc" - "block of time 35 hours used of 30" for example.

Now, go to account "abc". Create a charge for item "service agreement shortfall item" for 5 hours.

Complete the contract so no one can charge to it any longer.

Now, your problem is solved.

Doing it this way also allows you to then report on "service agreement shortage item" to see how many hours over the year you were short. Then you can use this data to suggest a change.

I do a similar process to verify no "products" have been charged to our "block of money" msp agreements.

Hopefully this makes sense. If it still doesn't, I'll post a screenshot.

--Luke

Gotcha. Not a bad idea. Have employees enter hours no matter what, then use the reports to charge for the overage based on how many included hours they get.

One downside is a potential big charge at the end of the period vs a few smaller charges on each ticket \ invoice. Sometimes clients stop calling with trivial things when they are out of the included hours.

Us to client "BTW, you owe another $1500 this period because you went over by 10 hours!"

The other thins is the constant "over hours" reminder CommitCRM gives you when they are over hours. This is just a minor annoyance though.

When we did quarterly contacts we would just make a new "interim"contact for the rest of the quarter for overages. Complete the first one and leave one for the last month of the quarter or so.