|
|
|
|
|
In This Chapter |
BigTime gives your staff a way to track reimbursable expenses as well as time. This chapter will take a quick look at how to enter and submit expenses using the Expense Entry menu items in the Daily Routine. Then, we'll cover some more advanced settings for firms that need to track per-unit items, service fees, GST or VAT taxes, multi-currency entries and more.
If you aren't going to use BigTime to manage expenses, then you can turn this section of the Daily Routine menu off from within the Tools... System Settings... General Settings page. There's a check box on that screen to turn off the Expense Entry menu items on the Daily Routine.
When we talk about expenses in BigTime, we may be referring to several different types of expenses. In addition to employee reimbursable expenses, BigTime can be used to track and/or bill three other common types of expenses.
Employee Reimbursable Expenses. These expenses are items that an employee purchases and for which they need to be reimbursed. Those may include travel expenses, mileage, educational expenses, etc. And, reimbursable expenses may or may not need to be billed through to a client.
Reimbursable expenses are entered within the Daily Routine section of the program, optionally reviewed and approved by managers and then posted into QuickBooks as a "bill" that is payable to the employee in question.
Corporate Card Expenses. These expenses are similar to employee expenses, but they are not reimbursable. When a staff member charges something on a corporate credit card (e.g. - one which the corporation pays), then BigTime allows them to enter that expense just like they would enter a regular reimbursable expense with one key difference. They can flag these expenses as corporate card charges so that they are not fed into QuickBooks as a "payable" to the employee.
Since the need to distinguish between reimbursable "employee" expenses and these credit card charges is driven by the need to post them differently to the QuickBooks file, you'll find a section on setting up, entering and posting credit card charges in the QuickBooks Integration chapter.
Vendor "Pass Through" Expenses. There is no facility for entering vendor bills into BigTime. Instead, we simply pull any pass through expenses directly from QuickBooks for review and/or invoicing. That process is automatic (with most versions of QuickBooks) and will typically pull any bills, checks, item receipts or credit card transactions which have been linked to an active BigTime project. You can adjust these settings as a part of your nightly sync settings (take a look at the System Guide or online help for more details).
Service Fees. Service fees are items that have no corresponding "payable" but which will be billed to a customer. They include a wide range of items and depend, typically, on your industry (e.g. - IT service firms may charge a monthly hosting fee, law firms may charge an office fee, engineering firms may have lab fees or equipment rental fees, etc.).
Service fees can be entered into BigTime just like employee reimbursable fees, but they aren't ever converted into a bill. Instead, they are typically entered in order to make unified billing possible.