Tracking Income & Expense per Service, Client, Project

[Katie Eldridge]

On 12/07/16 13:05, Lou wrote:
>
>> I want to track income & expenses per service, per client & per project
>>> for my business.  I'd like to know how you all have done this.
>>> Currently, to track income per service I have created:
>>>
>>> Income:Sales:Service 1
>>> Income:Sales:Service 2
>>> Income:Sales:Service 3
>>>
>>> Is this the best route?
>>>
>>> My understanding is that I can use the jobs function to track income 
>>> per
>>> client.  This works fine for tracking income per service & I once I
>>> start using jobs, then I can track income per client.
>>>
>>> Now, the problem is that I want to track profit per client, per 
>>> service,
>>> per project.  However, I don't see a way to track expenses per client,
>>> per service, per project.
>>>
>>> Can anyone help with this?
>> Using chargebacks on the purchases side might do it.
>>
> From my understanding chargebacks only allows you to make "notes" 
> about the charge, but there is no calculation aspect to the charge 
> back.  Does anyone know of another way?
> _______________________________________________
>
If you are using the business functions, and itemise your invoices 
according to the service categories...

The 'customers' section lets you keep track of clients, and the 'jobs' 
let you keep track of individual projects for each client. For what you 
want you will need appropriate expense categories to match your income 
categories.  Then, when you have an expense, you enter this as a bill or 
expense voucher.  The dialog asks for the 'default chargeback 
[project/owner - forgotten wording]' with a selection for the 'job' this 
is for.  Then for each item you can check 'bi' (billable item) on the 
bill/voucher.  When you next write an invoice for this project these 
items will appear automatically, and I think you can modify to add your 
markup if applicable at this point (I've only ever used this function 
when we've bought things for a client on an 'at cost' basis).

I suspect that if you use this consistently the 'customer summary' 
report starts to make sense, and it would be possible to modify this for 
a 'job summary' report along the same lines.  Not sure how you deal with 
general overheads for this - it may be possible to use splits to achieve 
appropriate 'per project' allocations?

Hope that helps,

Katie