One Place

Billing

• Introduction
• Setting up Billing
• Tracking Billable Tasks
• Generating Billing Reports
• Exporting Billing Information

Introduction

OnePlace gives you the ability to tracking billing information for the tasks you work on, and then later on to generate reports of this information, as well as to export this information to a file for use within external accounting software.

Setting up Billing

Before you can enter billing information on your tasks, you first have to turn on this feature within the workplace that contains these tasks. When creating a new workplace, one of the choices you have is whether or not you want the tasks added to the workplace to be billable or not. To turn on billing for a workplace, click on the 'Allow tasks in this workplace to be billable' check box on the 'Choose your preferences for this workplace' screen of the 'Add Workplace' dialog.

Note that this capability is turned off by default for a workplace (not everyone tracks billable tasks), however you can easily turn it on for any workplace by following these steps:

1. Edit a workplace
2. Click on the Preferences tab
3. Check the 'Allow tasks in this workplace to be billable' check box
4. Click the Save button

Tracking Billable Tasks

Once you specify that tasks in a workplace can be billable, a 'Billing' task will appear on the Add/Edit Task dialogs for tasks in that workplace. Use this tab to enter whether or not the task is billable, and if it is billable, what is the quoted amount, invoiced amount, and date the work was invoiced.

Generating Billing Reports

The Reports section of OnePlace provides a Billing report that you can use to report on the billing information that's been entered on the tasks in a workplace. When you click on Billing Report option, a step-by-step approach walks you though the process of setting up this report:

1. Select a workplace that contains tasks with billing information - Choose one of the workplaces that you designated as containing billable tasks.
2. Select the projects you would like to include in this report - Choose all or a subset of the projects in that workplace.
3. Specify a time frame - Choose all tasks, or, narrow down the tasks by entering a time frame based on a specific date attribute on a task. For example, include only those tasks that were worked on between 7/1/201 and 7/31/2010.
4. Select additional options - Further define/filter the tasks included in the report. For example, only include tasks that have been invoiced. Or, only include tasks that have been completed. You can also specify your sorting and grouping preference on this screen.

Once you click the 'Show Report' button, a report similar to the one shown below appears in a separate window/tab of your browser.

Exporting Billing Information

Once you've captured billing information for the work you are doing, you're going to want to do something with it, possibly to use it within the accounting software you use. The Billing Report described above offers the ability to export the information in the report to a CSV file. Just click the 'Export' button next to the 'Show Report' button to export the Billing report to a file.

The information written to this file is detailed below:

Another reason you might want to export this information, is that you can modify the file in a spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel, and bulk import the updated task/billing information back into OnePlace. This makes bulk updating this data very easy to do.

To bulk update tasks in this way, perform these steps:

1. Click on the Reports icon in the toolbar at the top of the page
2. Choose the Billing Report
3. Follow the steps provided for setting up this report
4. On the last setup page, click the Export button at the bottom of the page
5. Download/Save the export file to your computer
6. Open up the file in a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel
7. Modify any of the values in the file. For example, you may choose to enter the date that you invoiced this work on multiple tasks
8. Save the modified file to your computer
9. In OnePlace, navigate to the workplace that you want to import the tasks into
10. Click on the Tasks tab for that workplace
11. Click on the Import button in the tasks toolbar
12. Select the file you modified from the location where you saved it on your computer
13. Click the Import button at the bottom of the Import Tasks dialog

OnePlace will import your changes, and apply them to the correct tasks.