Prior to starting with EnterYourHours.com, a web-based hourly billing software solution, I had a client pay me before their first official invoice. At the time i wasn’t using QuickBooks, but needed a way to apply a credit to show them in one form or another (on paper) that i had received payment. I looked around on various screens, but nothing was jumping out at me. Being a programmer myself, I started to think: A credit could be defined as a negative price or negative fixed-price item, so I looked under the Fixed-Price Items tab on the Enter Hours screen. And, just for the heck of it, I tried entering a negative number. And there it went.
I was able to apply a credit to a client, without having any prior invoices or hours tracked in the system. I ran bill batch to see how it would lok to the customer. By default, EnterYourHours.com adds these fixed-price items to your invoice as such:
[FIXED-PRICE ITEM] – Descriptive Text Here
All I did for the “Fixed-Price/Expense Summary” was:
[CREDIT] – Descriptive Text Here
So when I actually generated the invoice, the line item looked like:
[FIXED-PRICE ITEM] – [CREDIT] – Descriptive Text Here
To my surprise, the invoice read out looked great and even showed the numbers in parentheses, standard designation for negative numbers in accounting. So after worrying EnterYourHours.com had missed a simple need, I realized it had inadvertently provided a solution that just took a little creative thinking to find.
I was asked by a friend and respected colleague to integrate a graphical user interface into some heavy database architecture and scripting for a new peice of software. After integegrating the interface, I saw the enormous potential it had to help me run my own consulting business. I have been using EnterYoursHours.com as beta-tester since April 2008. It has saved me countless hours of billing and tracking project hours. I don’t even think about billing until the day i need to email the invoices. It truly is that simple.
