Hi #C30TUASAX, I have another issue I am trying resolve... How do I include on sales order, an expense item(s) for sale, that we can tie project expense reports back to an item on the SO. The idea is, the customer pays a fixed bid price for all estimated labor expenses. The technicians then track their expenses to the project and to the item on the SO. Then on the project P&L we will have Revenue and Costs associated to expenses.

This is a tricky one (in my experience anyway, maybe someone else has another idea). 2 ways I’ve considered - either have the line on the SO but then close the line (manually or via script or something) so it isn’t invoiced, and mark the expense report lines as billable to pass through to the invoice. Or have the line on the SO and don’t close it, and when the expense reports come through don’t make them billable (but still tag them to the project). And then when you invoice the SO, adjust the estimated expense item amount to be the actual total based on a report of expenses or whatever (or you could update it on the SO over time, if you don’t need to keep track of the original estimated amount). Basically you don’t want to double-invoice if you have it on both the SO and the expense report, so you need to make one of them not billable (by closing the SO line, or making the expense lines not billable). The first option usually makes more sense if you need to show the customer line level expense details or receipts or something, since it draws a direct line to the invoice from the expenses. Project P&L reporting also can be different depending on your various settings, so I’d probably recommend doing a mockup of both scenarios in a SB and seeing how they look in your reporting/revenue calculation/etc, to determine if one or the other makes more sense for your needs.

The customer will never need to see the actual expenses, the expense reports are only to track the costs to the project for reporting

Happy Monday! yup, on the invoice you can potentially use the markup item at the top of the expense sublist, if you mark them up all the same amount or percent; or you can just edit the amount on each billable expense line to mark it up as needed, and that will impact the revenue (or whatever account your billable expenses go to) but not the expense

Thanks Amy, I was hoping thats how it would work. I will test for that scenario.

too late for the party? 🙂 you can also omit including expenses into invoices, uncheck the box, that’s all. They will be on your projects as costs but not on your invoices.

@Karina, yes we are doing that exactly. The project expenses are being recorded as costs but not billed to the customer, on fixed bid projects. The trick for us, is how do we get revenue recorded on the SO item and invoice, that fall under the same row as expense costs.