OpenPro ERP Service Billing Examples
How to use OpenPro to Track and Invoice Billable Hours
OpenPro has the ability to track time and invoice billable hours. This feature is excellent for consultants who provide professional services throughout the day.
The process of setting up the tracking of billable hours can be outlined as follows:
- Enter your customer information into the OpenPro CRM system.
- Copy the customer information to the “Customer Table”.
- Go to the customer table and find the customer. Add a default billing code for accounting purposes.
- Create a “Billing Code or Codes” to attach to each event logged into the calendar.
The process of collecting billable hours and generating an invoice is as follows.
- Go to the OpenPro calendar and select the day to post your event.
- Enter the name of the event and the start and stop times.
- Enter the customer name into the event.
- Enter the billing code into the event.
- Post the event into the calendar.
- Process the sales order.
- Print the invoice.
The tutorial that follows will walk you through the process step-by-step.
If you do not have an OpenPro installation in your business, you are invited to follow this tutorial using our OpenPro live demo site on the Internet. If you have a log in account, please go to the demo site and log in before proceeding. If you do not have a demo account, please contact OpenPro and we will set one up for you.
Once you are logged in we will be starting this tutorial using the CRM Calendar.
Go to the calendar, pick any day or the week and click on the actual day in the upper left corner of the box. This will open the event box seen on the next page.
In this window you can enter the name of the event in the Title line. The text box will hold any comments you may have about the nature of the meeting or a summary statement. Enter the start and stop times of the meeting in five-minute increments. The Site Location field will hold the location of the event, such as Office, Client’s Office or whatever you choose. The fields in this lesson are left blank. We encourage you to enter your own event and times. You can enter any customer you want from the customer list and use the standard Billing code Con101. Customers have to be setup before billing for that customer. To setup a customer go to Receivable, Customer find and ADD a new customer.
Next you will need to insert the customer into the event. Click on the Get Customer link and the Customer Search Window will open.
Enter in the name of the customer and click on Go and your customer will appear in the next window or just click on Go and all the customers in the list will appear.
Notice how the customer name is now next to the Get Customer field in the calendar event.
Next we need a billing code. Click on Get Billing to open the billing code window.
If you know the name of the billing code, you can enter it here in the Bill Code field. If you do not know the code. Simply click on Go and select it from your list of billing codes. Billing Codes are just inventory Items that are flagged as NONE tracking. This is considered services. Billing codes have to be setup before trying to bill a customer.
This is the billing code list. In this case, we only have one code listed.
Click on Select and the billing code will be entered into the event.
Notice the billing code Con101 is next to the Billing Code field.
The Billing Info shows a rate of $140.00 per hour for consulting services. Once you have all this data gathered, click on the Post button and the event is recorded.
The event is now in the calendar. This event has not yet been processed for invoicing. The event window shows a Labor Quote button. This feature will show the details of the event before it is posted in the accounting system. This can be helpful to verify charges before the event is posted. To see the labor quote you need to open the event from the calendar by clicking on the event.
All the events for the current day will be listed here. In this case there is only one event. To see the details of this event, click on Edit link next to the delete link.
You will now see the Labor Quote button that you had not previously seen.
Click on the Labor Quote button.
A summary of the event and the charges are seen here. You can right click your mouse and send this summary to the printer.
Next we need to process this order for invoicing. From the main OpenPro menu, go to Sales Orders and then click on Process Services.
This is where you begin to process a group of sales orders. Sales orders can be batch processed or processed one at a time. In our current example, we posted our event in the calendar and will process it the same day. In the minimum and maximum date fields, you can enter +0 (enter a plus sign and a zero) into each date field. This plus-zero code represents today’s date. Next you can either checkmark the box Process all Representatives or you can enter into the fields below, the reps you wish to process.
Once you have selected your options, click on Submit Processing
Once processing is complete you will see a summary screen with a similar set of statements.
Once this process is complete we move to the next phase.
From the main menu, go to Search Quotes.
On this screen, you have many options for searching. If you don’t have any specific details to choose from, you can simply click on the Search button and all invoices will be seen. In our current example we searched by clicking the Last Name radio button and entering the last name into the Search For field. The screen shot below shows all the sales orders related to this customer.
To the right of the screen, you would see additional info. What you can’t see in this example is the last link, Resume Quote. If you are using the demo software you can see that 2 of this customer’s sales orders have been invoiced and 2 have not. The two that have not been processed are the ones we need to process. To do this, click on Resume Quote. At this point you can also add more line items to the invoice if needed.
You will now see this window summarizing the details of the sales order. If everything looks good, click on the yellow, Pay Order button.
On the next screen you will see several options for payment. This customer has a default option to pay by check, so you see the dollar amount of the sales order is already populated in the Check field. You could move the dollar amount to another field if the terms of this transaction were modified.
Once again, if everything looks good, all you need to do is click on the Checkout button. Most of these fields are self-explanatory. The Tracking field is for a delivery service tracking number, if applicable.
After you click on Checkout, you will be prompted with a second chance dialog box.
Click on the OK button and the process is finished.
This window above shows the summary of the sales order. The last step to take is to click on the Generate Invoice link and the invoice will be displayed for printing. Notice this window states “$560.00 paid” “$0.00 owed back”. The terms of the sales order allowed for payment by check. It would be assumed that in this example, the customer is present at the time of the sales order and has written the check and presented it or a check has been sent in along with an Order Form for a purchase.
This is the actual receipt you would print and present to the customer.
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