Our goal has always been to help make running your business easier, and that means enabling you to easily streamline all of your business processes, including reporting. While Projects is robust, there were areas to make improvements, namely with logging and reporting time across non-billable projects and tickets.
We know how important it is to be able to manage everything in your business in one simple place, with streamlined processes that enable you to get more done faster. That’s why we set out to make configuring your non-billable items in Accelo, like support tickets or internal tasks, simpler. While setting up a project or ticket as “non-billable” has always been possible, our implementation of it in terms of how it fed into the rest of the system for reporting wasn’t really doing what we wanted it to do, or what users expected it to do.
Here’s a quick bit for those of you who want to understand the technical details as to why:
Fundamentally, this was because a non-billable work item (think: a ticket, milestone, task or even an entire project) that didn’t have a dollar value budget yet ($0), could still have an hourly budget. That meant that the only way to ensure that the time logged there would be accounted for in the hourly budget was to keep time entries flagged as billable (even if they were $0)! So while the system disabled the billable rates, meaning any time logged didn’t have a rate or billable value, the time was still categorized as billable.
While at first glance this situation wasn’t a big deal, it proved to be confusing in other parts of the platform (think: Timesheet Reporting, Approvals, and Invoicing). That’s because when work was flagged as “billable”, but with a $0 rate/value, it would often need to be double-checked and toggled over to non-billable.
In short: it was confusing and slowed you down.
Our engineering team has made this a lot clearer now with the new Non-Billable Time upgrade. Now, time logged on non billable jobs, milestones, issues, and tasks on those objects will go in as true non-billable time - and will appear consistently as such throughout the platform - so no more confusion! All the places where your team can log time have been handled, and we’ve improved the Time Usage/Progress graphs to ensure non-billable time entries will eat-up the hourly budget.
We’re hopeful this update will make interpreting data easier, streamline your reporting even more, and make getting things done simpler. As always, if you have any questions, our Support Team is here to help. Or, if you happened to stumble across this post and would like to see how Accelo can streamline your entire business, sign-up for a trial - it's free!
