Having run a professional services business in the past, we know how ad-hoc client work can be distracting, tedious and often not very profitable. To combat this, we ensured these little jobs were always set-up as issues (aka tickets) in Accelo and had a billable rate set. If someone worked on an issue and resolved it, at the end of the month it would be picked up via the Bulk Issue Invoice process - now labelled Invoice Issues - ensuring that we got paid for these as they were resolved.
While this feature helped with processing lots of issues into invoices from time to time, now Accelo has thousands of users we needed something more robust. With many clients working on fixed cycle (like monthly billing) and different clients using different rules (only bill resolved issues, only bill for approved time, or bill all at once for everything that happened in a month), we've learnt that it could be even more powerful (and more beneficial to your cashflow) by giving you more control in your regular billing processes.
Our approach has been to implement a series of filters to give you lots of control over your invoicing process for issues, and at the same time we've also optimized the our algorithms to bring up the client/issue list much more quickly.
Now, when you click on the Invoice Issues item under the Issues heading (yours might say Invoice Tickets), you'll be presented with a screen that shows a bunch of options in the left hand side, and when you run the filter, you'll see the matching client/issue list is displayed on the right.
The filters themselves are pretty straight forward, but here's the details of how to use them:
When you're ready to start, you'll find a Start Reviewing button underneath your results. Alternatively, you can click on a client name to jump straight to reviewing and invoicing their matching issues; ideal for situations where you've only got a little bit of time and want to bill your biggest support users and bring in some revenue, fast.
For users familar with the old "Invoice for Multiple Issues" screen, the next screen - where you create the invoices for a client - hasn't changed on the surface, but behind the scenes it is now a lot smarter as it automatically handles the splitting of blocks of time based on the status, date and approval state of the work you've chosen to filter by.
We hope this makes your end of the month invoicing processes easier than ever! If you've got questions or comments, we'd love to hear them below!
