djwhisky's dashboard

djwhisky replied on March 05, 2009 11:32 to the idea "How estimates will work" in FreeAgent Central:

@Tim - yep i would like that too... wondering if it just needs another status against the estimate i.e. "Lost" ?
If it moves into Mark as Approved it is assumed it's won?

djwhisky replied on March 04, 2009 21:29 to the question "Can I add markup to expenses?" in FreeAgent Central:

Hi guys...
Any update on this one? Just seem to have hit this problem too - just bought a few domain names for a client and wanted to record against the expense how much I was going to charge the client...

djwhisky replied on March 04, 2009 18:40 to the idea "How estimates will work" in FreeAgent Central:

@Roan - yep spot on! My client will email me with little tweaks and things needed as they get them for their clients and I'll quote for each individual item as they come up.

djwhisky replied on March 04, 2009 18:26 to the idea "How estimates will work" in FreeAgent Central:

@Roan - wow! Thanks for the updates...
Understand you won't be able to roll estimated into one invoice at the outset, but for me it would really be an essential bit of functionality to get away from having to track everything on spreadsheets and then creating an invoice at month end:

For a number of my clients I am working on a number of different projects (with one, for example, I probably have 20+ different projects on the go at any one time - they're an advertising agency and they outsource all their web work to me so each one of their clients websites are a project under that client). Over the course of a month I may do many small changes to each website quoting each change on a case-by-case basis (i.e. £80 here, £20 there, £400 over there) and then, at month end, roll all of these up into an itemised invoice for work done on each project. If each quote ended up as a separate invoice it would mean hundreds of invoices going out, not to mention the waste of paper and my client's admin time to collate it all back together. I'd then have to also split the one cheque (for all projects!) when I get paid back between all the little tiddly invoices rather than just the ten or so that would apply otherwise.

I don't feel I can really have a draft invoice for each project over the course of a month as it would mean that I would be assigning invoice numbers, invoice dates etc way too early. I would end up with invoices numbers and dates out of sequence if, as happens, I raise an invoice for another client mid-way through the month!

Sorry if i'm a pain!

djwhisky replied on March 04, 2009 15:41 to the idea "How estimates will work" in FreeAgent Central:

"Estimates differ slightly from invoices in that they can be resent multiple times. "
Will it be possible to have a revision number against the resent estimates and maybe even go back and view the history of each one that's been sent?

djwhisky replied on March 04, 2009 15:19 to the idea "How estimates will work" in FreeAgent Central:

@Pamela - yep I agree... I think what's needed is some kind of combination showing estimates, value of timeslips etc...maybe some kind of expansion of the invoice timeline...

djwhisky replied on March 04, 2009 11:00 to the idea "How estimates will work" in FreeAgent Central:

@toby - yep that would work nicely for me. I have a mix of hourly rate work and fixed price work often on the same project (clients - don't ask!)... so need to be able to merge both of these into a single invoice

djwhisky replied on March 04, 2009 09:40 to the idea "How estimates will work" in FreeAgent Central:

Just one thing I've thought about...
It would be nice to be able to merge all completed estimates/quotes into one invoice at month end for each project - otherwise I can see that it would chuck out an invoice for each estimate which would be a pain... I think for this though you would need an extra status:
Work in Progress/Mark as approved -> Completed Pending Invoice -> Invoiced

djwhisky replied on March 03, 2009 19:15 to the question "What user access levels would you like in FreeAgent?" in FreeAgent Central:

It would be nice to be able to give clients permissions to come on and see their invoices... as well as maybe even seeing their estimates/quotes and approve them all online :)

djwhisky replied on March 03, 2009 16:41 to the idea "How estimates will work" in FreeAgent Central:

That all sounds pretty spot on for me and I think will cover almost all the situations I want...will have a think to see if there's anything I think may be missing and get back to you :)

djwhisky started following the idea "How estimates will work" in FreeAgent Central.

djwhisky replied on March 03, 2009 15:41 to the question "Expanding tasks" in FreeAgent Central:

Hi Olly - sounds good, so long as there would be the functionality to optionally associate it with a project (think it would become unmanageable in terms of number of requests otherwise), and also so long as there would be separate "Pending/Approved/(maybe Completed)/Invoiced" statuses...?

djwhisky replied on March 03, 2009 14:05 to the question "Expanding tasks" in FreeAgent Central:

Just starting to use FreeAgent in earnest (decided to start from beginning of March), and in order for me to get away from spreadsheets to track my work I really need to be able to allocate fixed prices against tasks as well as being able to mark them as unbilled/billed.

My initial workflow was as follows: I've completed some work for Client A on an hourly rate so I'll enter the time under timeslips, and now I've completed some work for Client B but I quoted him £100 to do it, where do I enter that? Must be tasks... but that doesn't give me space to link it to the value, mark it as billable and then import it into an invoice at month end. Maybe I can record the actual time I spent in a timeslip but override the value to the agreed amount (would be interesting to see my average hourly rate for a client in this case... so long as the client didn't see the time spent on invoices etc)...

I could create a new invoice and add it in there... but then I'm not ready to bill the client yet (that comes at month end) and my invoice number sequences would end up all over the place...

djwhisky replied on February 25, 2009 18:13 to the problem "Doesn't work when i select 'send me a copy' when invoicing via email" in FreeAgent Central:

Have you got some kind of server side spam filter that's blocking bcc emails to you? Try sending an email to yourself from another email account with your address in the BCC field rather than to the To field and see if it comes to you.

djwhisky replied on February 19, 2009 09:22 to the question "Multiple contacts to a client?" in FreeAgent Central:

Yep - that would do me nicely. Would you still be able to report on sales to the company as a whole or would it always be split down on client level?

djwhisky replied on February 19, 2009 00:47 to the question "How should I categorise materials such as typeface purchases?" in FreeAgent Central:

It would still be great if we could customize these categories a bit,however.
I'd like to be able to get an easy breakdown of how much I spend each year on, for example:
* Domain Names
* Web Hosting
* Computer Hardware
* Software
* Services (i.e. FreeAgent)
* Email Newsletter sending (i.e. Campaignmonitor)
I don't think there's any easy way of doing this at present is there?!?
etc etc

djwhisky asked a question in FreeAgent Central on February 19, 2009 00:44:

Expanding tasks

I'm hoping that these requests may be part of the new estimations functionality coming soon, but I would ideally like to expand tasks to include fixed price items.

At the moment, if I have completed an element of certain projects I'll record it as being completed in my spreadsheet. I'll then collate all these items together at the end of the month and itemise them on one invoice. I can't seem to do this in FreeAgent, unless I started building the invoice at that point which doesn't seem quite right to me for some reason.

As mentioned above, ideally, I'd like to expand tasks to include fixed price items so I could record:
* My unique ID for task
* Task Description
* Amount to charge client
* Client's P/O number
* My time spent on it
* Status (i.e. Active/Completed).

Then, at the end of the month I could import both completed tasks and time spent on particular client projects.

This needs to be at a task level rather than a project level as I often end up doing lots of small tweaks/changes to separate projects...

Here's hoping something like this is coming with the estimations functionality.

djwhisky replied on February 18, 2009 23:59 to the question "Multiple contacts to a client?" in FreeAgent Central:

Just noticed that you can override a default contact for a particular project, so presumably the idea is to put the MD's name or primary contact at a client on the 'Contact' record?
Shame, as it would still be nice to be able to record my other contact's telephone numbers, email addresses etc ... especially with the email invoice facility which at the moment looks like it would be fairly unusable...

djwhisky asked a question in FreeAgent Central on February 18, 2009 23:52:

Multiple contacts to a client?

I've just subscribed and started to put all my clients into the system. You can't seem to have more than one contact at a particular client/organisation, however. Is this correct?

I have a number of clients with whom I deal with different account managers on different projects. Each need an invoice to go to directly to them, but my sales are with the company as a whole.

Is it possible to set this up in the system, or is it on your roadmap?

Thanks

James

djwhisky replied on February 17, 2009 22:39 to the question "How do I create new Expense categories" in FreeAgent Central:

Any ETA on the custom expenses categories?? I know it's something that some of us here have been asking very very nicely for a while for :)