Easy Books

A rate card is defined for each combination of worker and customer. This allows you to define different billing rates for each.

The following settings are available on the rate card:

• Worker
• Customer
• Active
• Billing Rate
• Rate Name
• Hourly Rate
• Income Account
• VAT Account
• Sales Invoices
• Group Time Entries
• Include Descriptions
• Billing Multiple
• Carry Rule

You can easily pick a worker and customer combination, and you can set whether the rate card is active or inactive. Making the rate card inactive hides it from the list. The main app setting "Show Inactive Items" is used to show all items, or hide the inactive ones. You can delete an inactive rate card, which removes all time logged against it, but does not affect the sales in your financial data.

Billing Rates

You can set any number of billing rates. The first entry should be your standard rate, as the app uses this as a default when you are entering time. When a new rate card is created, the app tries to use the same settings from another rate card to try to speed up the setup for you. It favours a rate card for the same customer (different worker), but will use a recently added card for the same worker. To make use of this feature, think of the first rate card as a template for the others.

The first rate card creates a "Standard" billing rate. Tap on the entry to bring up the settings for the billing rate. You can change the name, set the hourly rate and pick an income and VAT account. These accounts are used when the app creates sales for the time entered against this rate.

Adding more billable rates is easy, the app defaults to T+Q (time plus quarter), then T+H (time plus half) because these are good guesses. Simply edit the name and the rate as needed. For example, you might bill customers at a higher rate for "emergency call-outs".

Sales Invoices

The Sales Invoices section contains settings that tell Easy Books how to create sales invoices from the time worked.

The app keeps track of all hours worked, and uses some simple rules to generate the sales invoices. Each billable rate is linked with a particular income account and sales tax account as described above. These settings were placed at this level so you can track income from your standard hours as separate from income that came from premium rates such as overtime, or call-outs. It isn't necessary to do this of course, but the option might be useful to some businesses.

The following settings are used to control how the sales invoices are produced.

Group Time Entries

You can choose to show each time entry on its own line in the invoice if you like. Or you can let the app group the hours together, either daily, weekly or all together on one line.

When time is grouped, only the hours in the same billable rate are grouped together. Each billable rate is treated separately, but grouped using the same method. Each line added to the sale contains the number of hours worked, the hourly rate and the overall value (plus any sales tax).

Include Descriptions

Every time entry contains an optional description line. Typically this would be used to describe the work completed, such as "Normal Hours", "Server Rebuild", or "Out of hours work". These descriptions can be helpful reminders about what you were doing at the time, and can be kept hidden from customer's invoices or added to each line as required.

If time is being grouped, the descriptions are sorted into unique entries and added to the sales line.

Billing Multiple

Some customers have rules about how hours can be invoiced. Typically they might allow hours to be invoiced as daily amounts, rather than small fractions of hours. The rule can be such that you can only bill for multiples of 15 minutes, or for half a day. This setting is used to define the multiple, and you can of course pick "None", in which case the hours are billed as they are.

If you pick a multiple such as "15 minutes", the sales invoices will be generated using this multiple. You can then decide how to handle your extra hours worked above the multiple using the carry rule.

Carry Rule

This option is available if a billing multiple is set. It defines how the app will process any surplus time worked that does not fall into the multiple.

As an example, suppose you have entered time that adds up to 12 hours and 40 minutes. The billing multiple is set to 15 minutes, or 0:15. The multiple means 12h 30m can be billed directly, with another 10m worked.

You can choose not to bill for this time, carry it forward for billing next time, or round the time up to the next multiple.

If the carry rule is set to carry forward, the app keeps track of un-invoiced hours and brings previous hours into a sale, marking the invoice with the hours "b/f" (brought forward). It also marks the number of hours being carried forward to a future invoice with "c/f".