Additional expenses for time tracking

News posted by Chris Storey 9 years ago

In the first batch of monthly feature releases in Clear Books Preview, we’ve made some changes to Clear Books’ time tracking tool that will help you save time when billing a customer for work done on a project.

What is it and what does it do?

Our time tracking tool currently allows you to specify how much time you’ve spent on a particular project, and from this you can generate an invoice to bill your customer for your work.

We’ve now added the ability to also include additional expenses when using the time tracking tool, such as food or travel costs. This means that when you generate the invoice, all the costs associated with a project that are to be billed directly to the customer will be on one single invoice, rather than raising several separate ones.

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How do I start using it?

Visit preview.clearbooks.co.uk - you will be asked to sign in to your Clear Books account. Enable Additional expenses for time tracking in the 'Configure company wide features' tab (you must be the admin of your account to enable this.)

Once you’ve enabled this new feature within Clear Books Preview, ensure ‘Time tracking’ itself is enabled by going to Settings > Toggle Features on your Clear Books dashboard.

You can then go to Tools > Time tracking. Create a new time sheet and click add new expense at the bottom of the page. Click the green 'plus' icon and type in your expense type.

3 Replies

I'd be worried that there's no link between the expense being charged on the invoice with the expense being paid for by the business.

It would make more sense to have a picker list of costs & expenses already applied to that project in the accounting to recharge.

Hi Paul

Good point, if I understand correctly it is something we would need to improve to make this more powerful for larger organisations

Currently this is targeting one-man-bands (sole-traders) who are on top of their expenses, and perhaps are directly charging the expenses. The values charged to their customer will usually be prearranged. E.g. we agree that we'll pay you 10p per mile, and £20 every time you need to buy lunch.

The actual expenses added in for reclaiming money back from your company are then considered a separate ordeal, but it would be good to see a comparison between "Expenses" charged to clients by Employees in time-tracking and the expenses entered by employees in expenses. To really gel the two concepts together.

It would be great to be able to log mileage on the app so I can do this quickly after each journey.

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