monthly projection table creation
Hi, I'm wondering the best approach to having entries in a table called "Billing Projections" created when a project is created under our project management (Projects have many Billing Projections)...
Forum Discussion
Good morning, I have something similar in my app. We made a billing feature so I have table labeled invoices. My project coordinators enter the dates of invoices to go out and amount and it shows what is left to bill. Each Monday my Project Accountant gets a list of what to invoice. The benefit of that is the billing is automated as long as amounts and dates are kept up to date.
i can use that for a monthly projection and I color code it via formula for invoices that were submitted so I know what went out.
i also enter paid information etc so my sales team can monitor without needing access to the accounting software.
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Ivan Weiss
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Ivan,
Do you automatically create placeholders for future invoices by month when a project is created? That's what I'm trying to do. I'd like to placeholder six months out, even though every project might be different.
The projections are purely that. What we bill for is another thing and quite complex, due to the range of contracts (AIA for example). The intent of where this is going is to match these up in a report for KPI purposes and budgetary. Currently, this is all done in a spreadsheet during the project management process.
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Andrew Ryder
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Do you automatically create placeholders for future invoices by month when a project is created? That's what I'm trying to do. I'd like to placeholder six months out, even though every project might be different.
The projections are purely that. What we bill for is another thing and quite complex, due to the range of contracts (AIA for example). The intent of where this is going is to match these up in a report for KPI purposes and budgetary. Currently, this is all done in a spreadsheet during the project management process.
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Andrew Ryder
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- Andrew,
Yes we do create placeholders. We have a few tables and here is the structure:
Projects has Many Opportunities
Opportunities has many orders
Orders has many Invoices
By doing this (since it sounds like we are both in the construction world based on your AIA comment) I can capture change orders etc as trackable opportunities and separate orders. I can pass all that data up to the root project.
Our Project Coordinators create the "expected" billing schedule and update as we go. That allows us to have somewhat accurate projections. A bit too early to test though as we joined Quick Base 4 months ago and just launched the app last week. It was in development up to this point.
I thought about going with a target opening date and dividing the amount over several months leading up to that via formula. But since it is schedule of values that would never be accurate.
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Ivan Weiss
------------------------------- Ivan,
We are a custom fabricator, so often we have AIAs that come from GCs. Other projects are directly with the client, which is a lot easier when it comes to legal and billing. I'm sure we've both had fun trying to deal with the complexities that AIAs can have. My job at the company is my first exposure to them and when I work with our head of billing on structure, I get popsicle headaches. However, our more experienced PMs are aware of this and should be able to semi-accurately project out for budgeting.
We're also new to QB. I've been designing for the past few months around our existing system w/many, many improvements and needed features, which QB has allowed. I'm not sure if I'll be able to tackle all the AIA complexities. It sounds like we're in similar boats on all of this.
Do you have plans to integrate one of the QuickBooks plugins? We use desktop QB, so my intent was to design Billing around the needed structure after looking at the few plugins out there.
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Andrew Ryder
------------------------------- I would love to integrate with Quick Books. However, I have heard it is not the best vs the online version. We sync our travel expense software to Quick Books and it is a nightmare. It goes down every other day etc.
I am actually hoping I can build enough functionality over time into the Quick Base app where perhaps we can just go to the online version of Quick Books and eliminate the desktop version. If we get the reporting and data into Quick Base I really just need the pure accounting functions.
But that is prob Phase 3 or 4 of this project lol. It has been a beast to build it. This was a self created position on top of all of my daily duties. But as a labor of love it is really exciting how it is comng together.
And since it launched last week I have not seen my picture on a dart board so that is good :)
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Ivan Weiss
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