Making sure you bill appropriately for services rendered is a significant part of any business. Whether you send out invoices by the job, bill hourly, or have a mixed setup where certain things are billed a certain way at a certain time; it’s essential to have a system in place to handle invoicing to get paid quickly.
Unfortunately, if you’re still handling your invoicing manually, then you’re missing out on a better way of doing things. Not only is using an online employee time clock a better option, but it also has several features and integrations that make invoicing faster, easier, and more accurate.
By using an online employee time clock, your invoices will be much more accurate. They’ll also come out faster and better structured so that getting paid by those you’re sending the invoice to happens in a much smoother manner than when doing things the old-fashioned way.
Manage Labor Costs
Trying to calculate labor costs when putting together an invoice can not only be time-consuming, as manual data entry is very labor-intensive in itself, but it is also much more prone to errors. Errors take even more time and resources away from your business to fix and lead to delayed payments or, worse yet, disgruntled clients.
Online time clock software can track and manage labor costs automatically, no matter the size or scope of your workforce. This means you’ll always have accurate numbers when it comes time to invoice for labor completed. Even if you don’t bill it separately, labor is often a large portion of the budget for any job or project.
For businesses that bid out jobs, it’s crucial to have an accurate representation of the cost of labor to avoid overages that take away from profitability. An online timecard system is excellent for tracking labor costs because it automates the process, but it also allows you to use historical job data to better estimate costs and expenses.
Keep Projects and Clients Organized
When you’re running multiple objectives simultaneously, it can be easy for relevant information to get lost in the shuffle. Who worked on what and for how long, as well as what the cost was, can be challenging to determine if you don’t have a timesheet management system in place to keep all your projects, clients, and invoices in order.
Online employee time clock software allows you to separate out projects and log hours and costs effectively, even across departments and with many moving pieces like changing personnel and multiple assignees. This way, the information stays tied to the specific task it is done for, and when it’s time to create an invoice, all you must do is correlate that particular job to the right client’s invoice.
Itemizing and Cost Tracking
Beyond team time tracking, labor costs, and making sure that jobs get properly attributed to the correct invoice, there is also the task of creating the invoice based on expenses and costs incurred while doing the job. There’s a lot more than just labor that goes into most jobs, particularly if you’re in a business where you must count costs for materials, changes, and overages.
With online timesheet software, you can track and generate itemized lists for expenditures related to each job and even integrate accounting software so that you can quickly put together expense reports for clients and tax purposes.
The more detailed you can make your invoices, the better they will be for your records and your clients in the long run. When it comes time to pay taxes, or you find yourself audited, detailed records of every job and every expense can save you a lot of headaches.
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