Invoicing for our work | Pain points

[iteles]

Up until January 2017, I kept a spreadsheet which was filled out with the agreed number of days to be worked, who was on the team, the invoice number and date to the client, whether the team members had invoiced us and whether they had been paid already.

In moving to Xero for invoicing, a lot of this information was lost as this spreadsheet stopped being filled in.

7 moths on, I can conclude this has caused several pain points. These are the things sorely missing from our new system:

1. At a glance, we could see which invoices were still overdue from dwylers and quickly have a better idea of what our financial situation was (as opposed to having a bank balance and no way to see what our existing liabilities are)
2. We could quickly see which clients had not yet been invoiced for a sprint (sometimes things are a little crazy with deadlines towards the end of a sprint given how many hats we all wear #startuplife). At the moment, we're relying exclusively on my memory to remember to invoice our clients and thinking about it, this is pretty ridiculous. We need a system where we keep a record of this again.
3. We no longer have a way of relatively quickly piecing together the expenses (in the form of dwyler rates) for each project Profit & Loss Fixed Costs per Project #373 Epic: Accounts, P&L, Utilisation, Estimates vs Actual #321 as now we would have to go through each email with the invoice and pull out the rates from the invoices. Create Automated Invoicing MVP #302 goes some way towards helping this but still relies heavily on dwylers invoicing us rather than us having a proactive view of things.

It has been nice to have all our invoices in one pretty system (as opposed to PDFs in a google drive) and it's fractionally faster to send them, but until we are using Xero to more of its potentially, the cons outweigh the pros. This needs to be reviewed in our Xero spike.

(And yes, this came out of a September realisation that we hadn't invoiced for a small piece of work in July - an extension of a project - because I was on holiday just as it finished and we didn't have a central way of communicating this needed to be done (see point 1 above). We didn't notice until the dwyler in question invoiced us in September).

[ghost]

@iteles

In moving to Xero for invoicing, a lot of this information was lost as this spreadsheet stopped being filled in.

Filling the spreadsheet in is still an open task behind other tasks #272

At a glance, we could see which invoices were still overdue from dwylers and quickly have a better idea of what our financial situation was (as opposed to having a bank balance and no way to see what our existing liabilities are)

If we don't want to rely on this we can now use the invoicing system to generate the invoices ourselves

We could quickly see which clients had not yet been invoiced for a sprint (sometimes things are a little crazy with deadlines towards the end of a sprint given how many hats we all wear #startuplife). At the moment, we're relying exclusively on my memory to remember to invoice our clients and thinking about it, this is pretty ridiculous. We need a system where we keep a record of this again.

We could create repeating calendar events to solve this

We no longer have a way of relatively quickly piecing together the expenses (in the form of dwyler rates) for each project #373 #321 as now we would have to go through each email with the invoice and pull out the rates from the invoices. #302 goes some way towards helping this but still relies heavily on dwylers invoicing us rather than us having a proactive view of things.

This is the same as before, the issue here is that #272 keeps getting pushed back

[iteles]

Is there an action here for me @markwilliamfirth ?
It seems that until #272 (comment) is completed, we're not getting any further with this?

[rub1e]

Just adding some thoughts on the above mainly because I'd like to close #383 off and this is the last topic that's not been addressed.

I kept a spreadsheet which was filled out with the agreed number of days to be worked, who was on the team, the invoice number and date to the client, whether the team members had invoiced us and whether they had been paid already.

Using the Company Calendar (very manual) lets us see the agreed days to be worked for each freelancer, but we still don't have an automatic way of linking this to the client invoice or the freelancer invoice, or whether either has been settled.

We could begin to address this by adopting the Xero Projects system, but we've agreed that it doesn't really answer our wider needs (#383 (comment)). So this is not something we're going to solve within Xero.

At a glance, we could see which invoices were still overdue from dwylers and quickly have a better idea of what our financial situation was (as opposed to having a bank balance and no way to see what our existing liabilities are)

As above - within Xero we simply don't have a way to stay aware of the freelancer bills that are about to be submitted

We could quickly see which clients had not yet been invoiced for a sprint (sometimes things are a little crazy with deadlines towards the end of a sprint given how many hats we all wear #startuplife). At the moment, we're relying exclusively on my memory to remember to invoice our clients and thinking about it, this is pretty ridiculous. We need a system where we keep a record of this again.

While we don't have an automatic system for this, @iteles and I have a semi robust process for client invoicing. The awaiting payment tab in the Xero invoicing section means you can easily see the last invoice you sent a client, and checking the sprint number against the company calendar tells you if there's any work that needs to be invoiced.

We no longer have a way of relatively quickly piecing together the expenses (in the form of dwyler rates) for each project #373 #321 as now we would have to go through each email with the invoice and pull out the rates from the invoices. #302 goes some way towards helping this but still relies heavily on dwylers invoicing us rather than us having a proactive view of things.

As above

It has been nice to have all our invoices in one pretty system (as opposed to PDFs in a google drive) and it's fractionally faster to send them, but until we are using Xero to more of its potentially, the cons outweigh the pros. This needs to be reviewed in our Xero spike.

Whatever gaps there may be in desired functionality, I can safely say that Xero's pros outweigh its cons 😀

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Keeping this issue open but ticking it off #383

[iteles]

We can close this issue. There are a number of things that can't currently be addressed in Xero, so closing and archiving for review if needed.