Bill a service call

A time-and-materials service call bills what the technicians punched and what they used. Florio turns that into a QuickBooks invoice from the QuickBooks billing card on the call, and it can do so more than once: an interim invoice for what is billable so far, and another when the call closes for whatever is left. Nothing is billed twice, because every part line and every labor minute remembers which invoice took it.

Before anything posts, Bill now opens a review. You see exactly what will go on the invoice, you can bill fewer hours than were punched, and you can add one adjustment line the customer reads. The invoice is dated the day the call was completed.

Before you start

Florio Service must be turned on, QuickBooks must be connected with writing switched on, and you need the permission to manage QuickBooks. Two settings feed the invoice:

The labor bill rate, under Admin, then Service. A call with punched hours and no rate is refused rather than billed with the hours left off.
The service items under Admin, then QuickBooks: labor, parts, trip charge, freight, and Adjustment. The adjustment item is what an adjustment line posts through, on its own income account, so credits and surcharges are reportable instead of vanishing into reduced revenue. Until it is mapped, billing without an adjustment works as before, and billing with one tells you what is missing.

Calls covered by a plan or a warranty never bill. Their cost still shows on the call’s profit and loss, which is the point of tracking it.

The completion date

The header of a closed call shows Completed. Florio stamps it the moment the status changes, which is not always the day the work finished. Someone who can manage QuickBooks can change it, because the invoice takes that day as its date:

It can be any day from the day the call was opened up to today.
On a call Florio can bill, it cannot be earlier than the day Florio started billing service calls for your workspace. Work completed before that was invoiced from your previous system and must not be billed again.
The change goes on the activity log with the old and new dates.

Change the date before you bill. Once an invoice has posted, its date is set.

Steps

Open the call and scroll to QuickBooks billing. The card lists the invoices already cut for this call, the labor punched and billed so far, and what the next invoice would take.
Choose Bill now. The review opens, with the invoice date on its first line.
Check the labor. The review shows the hours punched, the hours billed before, the hours not yet billed, and, when the call runs across a month end, how many of those hours fall in each month.
Set Hours on this invoice. Florio proposes everything not yet billed. Type fewer to bill part of it; the punched time itself is never changed, so payroll and job cost stay as they were.
If you billed fewer hours, say what happens to the rest. Bill later keeps them unbilled, and they come onto the next invoice for this call. Write off settles them: they never come onto an invoice, and the call’s profit and loss shows them as written off.
Check the parts, trip charge, and freight. Only used lines appear. A group with several lines can print Itemized, one line per part, or as One line, which changes only how the invoice reads, never the money or the tax.
Add an adjustment if you need one. Choose Add an adjustment, write what the customer will read, and enter the amount. A credit is negative; a surcharge is positive. Hours and amounts take a period for decimals, such as -25.50; a comma is not typed into the box, and a note under it says so.
Read the totals. The subtotal, the adjustment, and the invoice total are shown, with an estimate of the sales tax QuickBooks will add.
Choose Post to QuickBooks. The card updates with the new invoice, its date, and what is still to bill. If time was added to the call while the review was open, Florio refreshes the figures and asks you to look again before posting.

How the adjustment is taxed

An adjustment is spread across the invoice in proportion to what is on it. If a third of the invoice is taxable parts and the rest is non-taxable labor, a third of the adjustment reduces the taxable amount and the rest reduces the non-taxable amount. The review shows both figures as you type.

On the QuickBooks invoice this prints as one line when everything on the invoice has the same tax position, and as two lines, one taxable and one not, when the invoice has both. The taxable line says so in its description. QuickBooks computes the tax on the taxable portion.

Good to know

An adjustment cannot take the invoice to zero or below. To bill nothing for the hours, write them off; to bill nothing at all, change the call’s billing class.
Hours you hold back are still on the call. They appear on the card as hours to bill later, and the next Bill now proposes them.
Written-off hours are recorded on the call, not deleted. The technician’s time, the labor cost, and the job cost are exactly what was punched.
The call’s profit and loss reads what the customer is actually charged: written-off hours leave the revenue side and stay on the cost side, and adjustments show on their own row.
A call that closed before Florio started billing service calls shows why it cannot be billed, on the card and in the review, and posts nothing.