In case you bill your tax clients on per form basis instead of hourly basis, this can be handled in BQE CORE. The best approach to handle time, expenses and billing of tax engagements (projects) in CORE is to do the following:
- Record time and expenses in CORE as you normally do. Charge these to the appropriate tax engagement (project) for your client.
- Prepare the tax returns and invoices in your tax preparation software, as usual.
- Print an invoice list from your tax preparation software.
- In the Invoices > Invoice Batch screen in CORE, select the relevant tax engagements using a filter. You can also use the group feature to create a list of tax engagements and then use it to filter the billing records displayed on the Invoices screen. (The groups can also be used to filter reports and on-screen invoice lists.)
- Using the invoice list from your tax software, enter the amount of the invoice in the Net Bill field. This overrides the default bill value (e.g., total of billable time and expenses).
- Move to the Net Bill amount in the next row and repeat the above process. When done, process the bill and create an invoice.
CORE creates the invoices and writes up/down each person’s time entries for the difference between the manually entered Net Bill and the default bill value (prorated based on the value of their time). You now have your invoices in CORE; track and apply payments to them.
Note: If all time entries are not recorded promptly by staff and managers, you can still use this procedure. CORE offers a progress billing option that allows you to assign completed time entries to an existing invoice. Write-up/down in such cases is computed automatically.