Accelo enables you to easily charge clients for work done, materials, and expenses accrued, which are critical in making sure you get paid. While time is often the main cost to service-based businesses like digital agencies, IT consulting and engineering firms, as well as managed service providers, we knew we were missing the other side of the profit equation: purchases.
Purchases are similar to invoices except, rather than sending an invoice to a client, you’re sending a purchase to a vendor. After speaking with so many clients, the logic was clear: tracking materials and expenses isn’t good enough - you need to have a mirror image of your invoices, and that’s where purchases come in.
Today, we’re excited to launch the new Purchases Module - to give you a more flexible way to track the costs you incur for client work, so that you can have orders fulfilled quickly, get paid faster and simplify your workflow even more.
Accelo has supported Materials (products) and Expenses like taxi fares, hotels, and flights that often occur in service businesses, since launching our new Invoicing module last year. Material and Expense costs are less volatile than your team’s time, like five minutes on a task for one project and then ten minutes on something else. Still, after our Invoicing upgrade, it was clear that Purchases were the right next step in financials to make your billing more seamless than ever before.
The Purchases module allows you to record the purchases you’ll be making from a vendor for the Materials and/or Expenses needed in order to complete a project, ticket/issue, or retainer/contract you’re working on for a client.
You can create a Purchase from a Project, Ticket/Issue, or Retainer/Contract. When you create a purchase, you’ll be able to choose:
If you look at the Project Overview screen, you can see all of your requirements, service installations, and so on there. Then, if you go over to your Materials, you can see all of the things you need for that project (like mice or keyboards if you help businesses implement technology systems or AdWords for SEM campaigns). Once it’s time to buy those materials from the vendor, you can flip over the Purchases screen and create a ‘purchase’ for those items.
Quick tip: if you buy some materials from one vendor, and others from another, you can remove those line items in your purchase and have the amount, ledger, and tax codes reflect those details automatically. You can also have those items, their delivery info, internal notes to the vendors, and more all visible with the terms of when payment will be made.
The Purchases module has three primary objectives:
Our logic: let’s get the costs in your business today related back to the work you’re doing in Accelo with an actual purchase - so that it can automatically flow into your accounting system and allow you the option of creating a purchase document.
Purchases are often complicated (and intimidating) for team members because they’re so customizable, with lots of information that changes depending on the client in question. That’s why we created Purchase Templates. With Purchase Templates, you can preset formats with defaults for things like payment terms, titles, and notes - so everything is ready for someone to come in and quickly fire off.
Templates make Purchases easy to use, and you can create different templates for different vendors.
You can customize the PDF and choose what you want to show.
Think: template and purchase title, purchase owner, default vendor and item codes, custom fields, optional shipping info, vendor notes (i.e. hey, if this can’t be delivered by Wednesday, we can’t use it), the email itself where the purchase is attached, and the purchase item descriptions in PDF like quantity, rate, amount, and more.
Once you create a purchase, you’ll be able to see it under a consolidated list of purchase and invoices called ‘Billing’. To keep things simple, Purchases will have a red outgoing icon, and invoices will have a green one. Plus, you’ll be able to see if there’s an outstanding balance on the purchase. Only care to see Purchases or Invoices on their own? No problem - the Billing tab lets you filter for that.
While Accelo isn’t an accounting system in its own right, it is the source of truth for a lot of information that you need to see in your accounting system! That’s why syncing your Purchases with Xero and QuickBooks Online is central to this new module.
Have your Purchases sync with your accounting system automatically, just like with Invoicing. Tip: Remember to re-import your Account & Tax Codes from your Integrations page in Accelo to use the right Cost/Expense account codes and taxes!
Accelo will automatically push new vendors across when a purchase is made, and when you pay vendors in Xero or QuickBooks, your payment will be imported into Accelo automatically, for data that’s updated and synchronized across your business.
We’d love to hear what you think - let us know in the comments below! If your business has a specific use case or is really benefiting from this new module, please let us know so that we can feature you on our blog and across our social channels. Of course, if you have any questions or issues, visit our Help Pages, or let our Support team know - they’re here to make sure you’re successful.
