A project contains one or more items that specify what is billed to the client. There are three types of items in Fanurio: services, products and expenses.
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Service: A service bills work performed for the client and it usually contains one or more time entries to account for the time spent working on it. Services can be billed in units or hours. Even if the service is not billed in hours, it may still be useful to track time to know how much it took to complete.
A service could be three hours of programming or ten pages of Greek text translated to Latin.
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Product: A product bills materials, equipment or anything else that doesn't involve actual work. Use products when you want to sell or resell goods.
A product could be a computer or a set of icons.
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Expense: An expense is something that you don't do for a profit and is usually reimbursed by the client. You can record travel expenses, CDs, printing and anything else that you don't mark-up. If you want to apply a mark-up, use a product instead.
Items can also be marked as billable or non-billable but only billable ones can be invoiced to your clients. Non-billable services are useful if you want to track non-chargeable activities.
Tip
Although you can create as many services items as you want, you shouldn't create one for each task that you do. Instead, create services only for the major activities of the project. Then add one or more time entries to each service to keep track when you've done that kind of work.
Let's say that you need to keep track of how much time you spend on the phone with the client for a certain project. Instead of creating a service item each time you talk to him or her, you should create a single service item and then add time to that item for each call. By doing this, your project will contain several manageable items that have complete time logs.
If you want to add an item to a project, here's what you need to do:
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Open a project,
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Click the New button under the items table to choose the type of item you want to create,
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From the New popup menu select:
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New Service Item to create a service (with the default project settings) or
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New Product Item to create a product or
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New Expense Item to create an expense (with the default project settings) or
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A price list item if you defined any in .
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The items of a project are displayed in a table that is visible when you click the project in the projects tree.
Above the table there are a few filters that can help you narrow the list of visible items. Below the table, Fanurio displays totals for some of the columns. For instance, you could use the filters to see all items that haven't been invoiced yet and how much they are worth.
Please note that you can only edit or delete items that haven't been invoiced. Once they are invoiced, they cannot be changed as that would alter existing invoices.
Unlike the items billed in units where the quantity must be entered by the user, the quantity of hourly-rated services is determined from the total recorded time by converting it to decimal format.
If a service has 4:12 hours of recorded time, the billable quantity is 4.20 hours. However, if you round time for an hourly-rated service item, the quantity may be different. Let's suppose that you round time up to 15 minutes. In this case, 4:12 hours of recorded time are converted to a quantity of 4.25 hours (4:12 -> 4:15 -> 4.25).
Note: Fanurio uses the hour format (4:12) when dealing with time and the decimal format (4.20) when dealing with billable quantities.
The easiest way to round time for a service item is to edit it and click the link next to the Quantity field. However, if you use the same rounding rule for all the service items of a project, you should set that as a default billing setting for that project.
Tracking costs is very useful especially if you subcontract or resell some of your services. By recording the cost, you can get accurate reports of your profits.
Since not all services have a cost, this field is optional. You have to check the cost box to display the Cost field.
The total invoice discount makes sense when you need to discount the entire invoice but not if you want to discount only certain items. You may want to lower your rate or you may want to bill less work (hours or units). Discounts are optional so in order to discount a service item, you first need to check the discount box.
Let's see a few service discount examples and how they can help you.
Example 3.1. Bill using a lower rate
You may want to offer introductory rates to first time clients. Let's say that you charge $100 for a service but this time you want to charge $80. When you create an item to record work for that service, just discount its rate using a fixed discount of $20. You could also use a percentage discount of 20% to get the same result.
Example 3.2. Bill less work
If you agreed to 10 hours for a service but it took you 12.5 hours then you can discount them to match the initial agreement. Just apply a fixed discount of 2.5 hours and you'll only bill 10 hours. On the invoice, you can show that it took you 12.5 hours but you only billed 10 hours.
Example 3.3. Don't bill work
Another situation is when you are offering a service that should be included on the invoice but should not be charged. In this case, create an item and discount its units (hours) by 100%. The total invoiced value for such an item will be zero.
Once you have one or more discounted items, you can easily see in the application which ones are discounted. Discounted items have a red corner in the items table. Just move the mouse over them (don't click, just keep it over) to see more details.
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