Time & Billing

Nobody types a rate

The rate resolves itself from your overrides — most specific wins, newest breaks a tie — and the order is written down where the overrides are made. So when a bill looks wrong, the answer is a rule somebody can read, not an argument about what someone typed in November.

• Client plus person
• Client
• Service line plus person
• Service line
• Role plus person, then role
• Falling back to the person’s standard staff rate

The timer you left running on the last client

It happens most days. Move the entry to the right client and the rate re-resolves in the same breath, so it never goes out carrying the old client’s price. Once it has been billed it refuses and tells you why, and time attached to a task names the work rather than failing at you.

The invoice is already written

Lines come from the time that is sitting there unbilled and from your service catalog, with terms pulled from your defaults rather than retyped hopefully. What you were shown is what prints.

Paid from the portal, chased from the board

Clients pay by card or bank without calling you. Part payments and refunds sit against the invoice rather than being netted into a number nobody can explain, and the ageing tells you who is thirty days out and who is ninety.

• Autopay, enrolled and scoped by the client — recurring invoices only, or everything
• Recurring invoices that check delivery eligibility before a run, and say which of email, portal or mail a client is missing
• Statements, and ACH returns surfaced back to the firm

QuickBooks stays right without anyone reconciling it

Invoices and payments go out, edits come back, and customers get matched instead of duplicated. Anything it genuinely cannot work out — an unlinked payment, an overpayment, something deleted at the other end — is listed as an exception with a decision waiting, rather than silently skipped for you to find at year end.