Consultant Costs in WorkflowMax
As a WorkflowMax consultant, I often encounter situations where businesses need to keep track of progressive billing from external consultants as part of a Fixed Price Quote. Here is an example where an external consultant is not billing based on an hourly rate, so it’s not an option to include them as a user within WorkflowMax and log their hours.
This is important to many businesses because they are billing their clients according to a quote, but need to keep track of where they are at with external consultants to prevent overruns. Because the consultant is external it’s not possible to view estimated v actual hours on the job – which would be a normal trigger to keep an eye on how progress is tracking.
In this situation it’s not possible to just load a cost with a quantity and progressively bill it. This is because the fixed price mode will write off any remaining cost after the first progress invoice.
Often this is managed by loading a cost in the job every time a contractor invoice is received, and then invoicing that cost. But this method doesn’t show what the total quote/estimate was from the consultant in the first place, and how much of that quote they have invoiced at any time.
Here is how I do it.
Keeping Track of How Much Has Been Billed to the Client
Start by adding a Task on your Fixed Price Quote for the value of the Contractor to be invoiced. Use a task that has a Nil cost rate, but billable. You will not be recording the cost of the contractor through this task.
When the quote is accepted and a Job is Created you will have a Job with a Fixed Price Quote on it. You can then progressively invoice the Task and WorkflowMax will record and show you the balance left to invoice each time a progress invoice is generated.
Keeping Track on How Much the External Contractor Has Billed You
Once the job has been created from the Fixed Price Quote you can create a Purchase Order with a quantity of the $ value and then process a partial receipt every time a bill is received from the consultant. This method will progressively record the cost you are paying for the consultant, showing how much has been spent over time and how much of the original quote is left to be billed.
Start by adding a Consultant cost to the quote for the total amount you expect to be billed from them.
- This cost should have a Nil chargeable amount and be marked as non-billable as you will not be invoicing this cost.
- In the Quantity, write the dollar value of the Contractor expectedtotal cost. eg. If the quote from the consultant is $22,560 then the quantity in the Purchase Order will be 22,560
- In the unit price, write 1 ($1)
Once the quote has been accepted and a job created, Issue a Purchase Order for the total quantity of the contractor cost.
Then, every time you receive a bill from the contractor, process it by partially receipting the purchase order. Put the amount being billed as the Quantity and leave the unit cost as 1.
The cumulative cost will show on the financial summary.
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