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Should Approved Estimates appear under Unbilled Items on the home screen?
Just wondering as it appears that they don't... presumably if an estimate is approved then it should be almost due for invoicing??
Also... when creating an invoice - why does it pick up all Open and Approved estimates? I would have thought there should be an option to include just Approved ones - otherwise every month on a number of projects the invoicing will automatically pick up all the estimates I've sent to a client and haven't heard back from yet...
Or have I missed something?
Thanks!
Also... when creating an invoice - why does it pick up all Open and Approved estimates? I would have thought there should be an option to include just Approved ones - otherwise every month on a number of projects the invoicing will automatically pick up all the estimates I've sent to a client and haven't heard back from yet...
Or have I missed something?
Thanks!
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Inappropriate?Or maybe there should be an interim status between Approved and Convert to Invoice e.g. "Ready for Billing"... the reason being that I'm not always ready to create an invoice straight away when an estimate is complete - I'll normally wait until the end of the month and then batch all estimates for that project up into one invoice.
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Inappropriate?Bump ;)
Just wondering if you'd given any thought to this? -
Inappropriate?Have just rejected an estimate, and it's still showing up on this dashboard on the home screen... can kind of understand this if the idea is that it's showing recent estimates too, but it does mean that the Total section at the bottom doesn't mean anything really?
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Inappropriate?hey,
Sorry for taking so long to get back to you.
Just wondering as it appears that they don't... presumably if an estimate is approved then it should be almost due for invoicing
What panel are you referring to here? The Projects with Unbilled time one? At the minute this is strictly related to Timeslips which doesn't relate with estimates at all.
Also... when creating an invoice - why does it pick up all Open and Approved estimates? I would have thought there should be an option to include just Approved ones - otherwise every month on a number of projects the invoicing will automatically pick up all the estimates I've sent to a client and haven't heard back from yet...
What we don't want to do is enforce a workflow on people. Experience has taught us that's it's better to give people the freedom to work the way they want, so I'm not sure making people Approve an Estimate before converting to Invoice is a good idea.
Or maybe there should be an interim status between Approved and Convert to Invoice e.g. "Ready for Billing"...
I'm not sure I quite understand why you'd need to make the distinction? Is it really just a case of needing to identify which estimates are "ready to invoice" in your mind as opposed to those which are simply Approved?
I can see how Estimates might be approved at the beginning of a project (you'd hope) but converting to Invoice might only happen near the end. Is it an issue due to the amount of estimates making it difficult to separate the two?
Have just rejected an estimate, and it's still showing up on this dashboard on the home screen.
You're right we should remove this from the home page. I'll add it on to our to-do list
Sorry for the lots of questions, but the better we can understand your circumstances the more informed we'll be about any future changes. I can't promise anything though. -
Inappropriate?Hi Roan,
Thanks for getting back to me...
What panel are you referring to here? The Projects with Unbilled time one? At the minute this is strictly related to Timeslips which doesn't relate with estimates at all.
Yep this was what I was referring to - maybe it should be called "Unbilled time" rather than "Unbilled Items" and you could maybe filter down the Estimates dashboard item into different statuses?
What we don't want to do is enforce a workflow on people.
Totall agree - but it may be an idea that when creating an invoice you can select from the statuses - at present you can only select "All Open or Approved", it would be nice to select "All Open" or "All Approved", or "Ready for Billing" :), as people are most likely using the different statuses to mean different things...
I'm not sure I quite understand why you'd need to make the distinction? Is it really just a case of needing to identify which estimates are "ready to invoice" in your mind as opposed to those which are simply Approved?
Yep - spot on! My workflow is something like this:
- Estimate Created -> (Draft status)
- Estimate Sent to Client -> (Sent to Client)
- Client comes back and approves the estimate, this means that I can now start working on it -> (Approved)
- Work finished, client happy and we can all go down the pub -> (Ready for Billing, or Completed might be a better description).
- End of month, do my invoicing and all Completed estimates for that client get combined onto one invoice. (don't want to include "Open" or "Approved" estimates as they won't be either approved by the client or finished yet). Likewise I don't want to convert an estimate into invoice straight once i've finished as there would be far too many invoices being chucked at my clients which they wouldn't like (they ideally want one per project per month)
Hope that helps!
Thanks
James
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Inappropriate?Thanks for the details. I can see where you're coming from now.
We'll have a bit more of a chat about this, but we're really busy in the coming weeks with some important new features so any enhancements to estimates won't be happening quickly.
We'll put these ideas on the back burner though, because they do make sense.
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