Billing Overview

Good billing gets done in a timely fashion and gives you the most accurate picture of your financial status. Some companies actually miss billing for some jobs or activities altogether and don't have any clear way to identify what's been missed. Other companies bill all of their jobs, but they bill them later than they should, which hurts cash flow and also gives an inaccurate financial picture. The goal is to bill for activities during the same month that you incur expenses for those activities; this is the only way to get accurate picture of the relationship between your expenses and the resulting income.

The real keys are timeliness, consistency, and an ability to monitor the process. Here is the most common way to do this with Chronicle:

1. Attach your estimate(s) to the job with the documents feature.
   The estimate is your basis for billing; having it attached to the job, aside from being a critical part of the job file, lets you forward it to your billing department so they know how much to bill.
2. As soon as a billable activity is completed, create a task for the appropriate person to bill for that part of the job.
3. Forward the estimates to the person who does the billing so that person knows how much to bill.
4. Regularly generate a list of jobs that haven't been billed.
   This helps you make sure that all jobs get billed.
5. Regularly generate a list of completed activities.
   Compare this list to the billing summary from your estimating software. This helps you make sure all activities have been billed.
6. Periodically monitor billing to make sure that all figures look correct.

Once jobs have been billed, use Chronicle to make sure the money is collected in a timely fashion.