Feature request : Categorise individual invoice items to generate nice report

I guess the ideal solution would be to have this optional with an ability to create your own categories, then you could use this for your own internal reporting but it wouldn't necessarily relate to any of the official accounting reports.

That was exactly what I meant. The ability to create your own categories, and generate reports only for internal reporting, nothing whatsoever to do with official accounting.

Add me on the wish list for this too... would be very useful

Add me to this list. I think this is a basic and essential tool that's offered by many accounting applications. Crucial to a multi service type business.

Perhaps there could be section in the My Account settings page where you can input your business service types. These options would then be available to select from the already existing drop-down menu in the item section of an invoice or estimate.

Then if you export your data you can quickly do a chart or other reporting from the raw data until the official reporting GUI has been altered.

Any news on this feature yet? As mentioned above, it is a basic and essential tool offered by many accounting applications! Well said, that man...

Here here I concur! Probably one of the main reasons I'm not using FreeAgent maybe as much as I should be

This is really high up on my wish list for FreeAgent.

All business owners need to see what parts of their business are working best and what parts need attention, etc. Without the actual data, we're all just guessing unless we manually trawl through every invoice.

The critical parts would be:

* User-defined categories
* Category set per invoice line-item (not per entire invoice)
* Reflection of sales in each category on the various reports (e.g. profit and loss)

Also it would be nice to have graphical charts (pie, bar) to represent this data. There's also a lot of other data that would be much more useful presented as charts but that's another request!

Any idea on a time-scale since you last looked at this?

Matthew

Hi Roan,

I've been considering this for a few days and I think that with care, this can actually produce some very useful information for FreeAgent users.

Firstly, let's consider a common scenario: A freelancer sells various services, some of which have direct costs associated with with (i.e. cost of sales).

A typical situation would be a web developer that resells hosting space as well as using sub-contractors to bring in additional services, while adding a small management fee.

An invoice might look like this:

Item 1: Web Hosting, £100
Item 2: Web Coding: £2,000
Item 3: Graphic Design: £500

Let's say the freelancer has to pay hosting rental fees, and they also have to pay a designer to complete the design elements. So there might be these Bills:

Bill 1:

Web Hosting Server Rental (Annual): £2,000

Bill 2:

Graphic Design Sub-Contractor: £400

Everythings accounted for, but the freelancer can't easily see profit and loss accounts in a useful, linked way. They would have to make their own calculations, deducting bills from invoices - time consuming and error prone.

The point I'm trying to make here is that Bills need categorisation as well as Invoices - I know you already provide a set categories for Bills, but these are pre-defined. It needs to be possible to select from the SAME list of categories as would be used against Invoice line-items.

This then enables very useful reports for the business owner. Easily see PROFIT for any of your user-defined categories. Without Bill categorisation in this way, you'd only see TURNOVER, which can be very misleading. The example I gave highlights this - the report would show a figure of £500 in graphic design, but actually only £100 was profit because we hired a £400 contractor to help out.

In terms of categorisation management and assignment, my feeling would be that the user should be able to select from a drop-down list, with an option to add a new category there and then (similar to when you add a new contact when adding an invoice).

This should be optional as there will be some users that just don't want or understand this level of functionality.

Issues I see that pose further challenges would be the changing of categories once an invoice is locked. At the moment, it becomes quite a job to unlock an invoice (as you have to delete any associated bank transactions). Really, the user SHOULD be able to edit at least some details that wouldnt require 'unlocking' of the invoice. For users that want to go back to categorise everything, this is really essential.

Also, should Bills have an additional selection for this new category? I think so. Again, optional for those that dont want it.

Reports.

What I suggest as a minimum would be a report similar to the profit and loss report as it currently stands, just with a break down of the user defined categories. A profit % for each category would be nice (in the graphic design example, this would sit at 25%).

This would clearly show the business owner where exactly they are doing well, and areas that need improvement or even areas of the business that are a waste of time! It's this sort of information that can make the difference between going bust and enjoying continued success.

If the user could show reports based on a specified date range (as well as helpful pre-defined ranges like current financial year, last 6 months, all time, etc). Perhaps even comparisons between two date ranges - great for checking how you did in each category compared to last year, for example.

Graphical versions of this would be nice (pie charts, line graphs, etc).

Hope this helps!

Matthew

We need this too!
When we issue an invoice we need to elect which type of sale it was - for us we have 4 categories, and in the P&L we need to be able to see these separated so we can track each sector - automatic graphs for this would be great too.
At the moment I can only split into 2 - sales (automatically from any freeagent invoice we issue) and other sales (by not issuing a freeagent invoice and attaching the document to the bank.)
It would be brilliant if you could implement this in the next 3 months as it means we can start our next financial year with all the info we need in freeagent.
Many thanks.

I see the status of this has moved to 'In Progress' - this is excellent news!

Does this mean we'll be seeing this appearing anytime soon?

Matthew

I've just had a look at Xero which is a competitor to FreeAgent - they seem to have got this feature wrapped up in their system.

You can quite easily go in and customise the chart of accounts. Their demo system is available if it helps give you guys an idea of one way it's been done on another system.

This sort of information really is essential for any business providing more than one type of service if they want to find out what's profitable and what's not.

Screenshots attached.

How to annoy Ed and Roan ......make comparisons to Xero!