Archive for the 'Invoices' Category

Invoices!!

Published
by
Albert
on January 31, 2008
in Invoices, PBooks, PBooks News and Pbooks Development
. 0 Comments

I’m am utterly thrilled that today I sent out my company invoices entirely using PBooks! I only had to load up Quickbooks to find an address that was missing from my CRM database.

Invoice functionality still has a long way to go, but now that I’m able to use PBooks, I’ll be able to save a lot of time, time that I can dedicate to extending and improving PBooks!

Dogfooding

Published
by
Albert
on December 20, 2007
in Accounting Software, Bookkeeping Notes, Invoices, PBooks, PBooks Data Model, PBooks Testing and Pbooks Development
. 0 Comments

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of “dogfooding”, see here.

It makes a big difference in the start of a project to have a ready use case, and thanks to my own personal use of PBooks, I just added a terrific new feature. Well, I think its terrific. :-)

The feature is similar to the matching process, which is used to match transactions to additional accounts. For example, if you have a CSV file containing credit card transactions, in bookkeeping terms, those only represent half the journal entry. You can import those transactions into the ledger, and the matching page will show ledger transactions without a corresponding entry.

On the flip side, the posting page will display only the journal entries which need to have entries posted to the ledger.

If your more of a business process user as opposed to a accounting / bookkeeping user, this might not sound too exciting, but I think its pretty cool. I was able to implement this feature fairly easily thanks to the relatively new journal entry status field, which is a tiny int so it shouldn’t have too much of an increase on the database size.

Also, in my personal use of pbooks, I’ve ironed out several bugs which were hiding from general view. Since most of the bookkeeping work I’m doing is prior, I haven’t worked too much with the new business process models, but I will next week when my company sends out invoices, as well as whenever we receive a payment and / or make a deposit.

Invoices




Published
by
Albert
on September 27, 2007
in Accounting Software, Bookkeeping Notes, Invoices and PBooks
. 0 Comments

Here’s my current, incredibly inefficient, invoicing process:

  1. Tally up work times for each client (we use a client specific time tracker - this is easy)
  2. Create a spreadsheet for each client, sum up the rates, discounts and totals (could easily be done using our time tracking software, except for rates and discounts)
  3. Create invoices in Quickbooks using Parallels - definitely need to take this step out of the loop!
  4. Export Quickbooks invoices to PDF
  5. Mark the work tallied in step one as invoiced, noting the invoice number on each (super easy)
  6. Enter the invoices into PBooks

Each month it takes me about four hours, when it could be done in about 1 hour. With regards to bookkeeping and invoicing, its a good time to dedicate to bookkeeping, paperwork, and bank reconciliation. That stuff isn’t as pressing as invoices (if you don’t send invoices, you don’t get paid), but is a similar process to go through (tally, categorize, data entry, etc.) you might as well do them at the same time. I’ll do it that way next month! :-)

I did make some really nice progress on the invoice form though, here’s a quick screen shot:

PBooks Invoices Form Screenshot

Before you ask, PDF invoices are in the works too!