If you need billing, you know it. In fact, you may already be billing your jobs and looking for a way to do it faster, more easily, and with added features.
The Tracker billing system lets like you act like a rental yard for your own jobs and employees, renting and selling equipment, tools and supplies. You might use
the results internally, for job costing. Or externally, invoicing customers for time-and-materials jobs. Or both.
You can bill with a spreadsheet, but your options are limited and the process is generally cumbersome. A common approach among spreadsheet users is to bill
just for sale items. That's pretty easy. Rentals are more difficult. People often bill monthly. If an item's out for just part of a month, they need to figure
out what they're going to do. You could bill a fraction of the month rate, or only bill if the item's out more than half the month. Spreadsheet users rarely
attempt to upgrade from day to week to month rates.
One of the advantages of the Tracker’s more sophisticated billing system is: just by tracking stuff – just by moving it from job ABC to job DEF - you're
entering the data needed for billing. When you're ready to bill, you don't need to run a set of spreadsheet calculations. You just print a bill. The Tracker
calculates the results using the options you've selected.
The Tracker’s billing options fall into two main categories: LOGIC and PRE-SETS.
LOGIC refers to the arithmetic used to calculate a bill. You might think this is cut-and-dried. But after working with billing systems for 30 years, we continue
to discover variations. For example, if an item’s out from the first to the last day of February (28 days in most years) do you charge for a full month or
for a portion of a month (the average month is, after all, 30.42 days)? What if you don't work weekends? Do you subtract a day for President's Day? The Tracker
offers several different forms of billing logic (see our help system or tutorials or call us for details).
PRE-SETS are values you set up in advance. In a sophisticated billing system, you can modify those for a specific transaction, allowing you to deal with
exceptions. But normally, you just accept the PRE-SETS. What PRE-SETS does the Tracker offer?
- Rates. What's the standard charge for a day, week, and month?
- Rate periods. Do you want to sell or rent an item? If rent, do you want it to start with the day, week or month rate? Items that are expensive to move
often go out on the month rate, which means: you charge for a month, minimum, even if the item comes back a week later.
- Rate structures. If an item goes out on the day rate, do you want it to stay on that rate or upgrade to the week rate? If you want it to upgrade, when
(on what day) to do you want that to occur?
- Discounts. Do you want to give one job a standard 10% discount, another 5%? Or do you want to set up entirely different rate structures for different jobs
or groups of jobs, so you charge job ABC 90% of the standard for one group of items and 85% for another?
- Rental caps. Do you want items to stop renting when they items 90% of their cost? 110%? Do you want to set the cap by item or by job?
- Return credits. If an item is sold then returned, what percentage of the price do you want to credit back?
- Transaction codes. Do you want to automatically assign transaction codes based on an item's ID? The job you're assigning it to?