3.2. Lesson 1 - Describing Your Business

When you start Fanurio for the first time, you can immediately add clients or projects. But before that, we recommend you to take the time to describe your business. Go to Business » My Business Details to specify all those settings that are specific to your business.

Contact details

This is the place where you enter your contact details like address, phone, email, etc. You need this kind of information for invoices. If you don't export invoices from Fanurio, you don't have to fill in these details.

Note: On Mac OS X you can import your contact details from Address Book.

Currency

Usually, you don't need to define any currency since Fanurio automatically detects your currency from your computer settings. But if it doesn't detect it right or if your business uses (or invoices in) multiple currencies, then this is the place where you can define them.

Billing

This section lets you specify various billing settings like time rounding, automatic invoice numbering and the number of days when an invoice is due.

Having to type a number for each invoice you create can be a very annoying experience not only because you have to type it but because you have to look for the number of the previous invoice. Fanurio automates this task by offering automatic invoice numbering. Invoices can be numbered globally or per each client.

If you use global numbering, the invoice counter will be incremented with each invoice you create. But you can also number invoices for each client separately. If this option is enabled, the invoice counter of each client is incremented only when an invoice is created for them. You can also define a format for the invoice number that can include besides the counter, the client code, the client name the year or the date.

For instance, if you have to create five invoices for two clients ABC and XYZ and the invoice number format is client code+counter, here's how they would be numbered:

  1. global numbering: ABC001, ABC002, XYZ003, ABC004, XYZ005

  2. per client numbering: ABC001, ABC002, XYZ001, ABC003, XYZ002

Services and rates

In this section you define categories of services and expenses that you are selling. For instance, if you are a web-designer you could define:

  • A service category called Ongoing Maintenance that is charged $40/hour,

  • A service category called Site Design and Setup that is charged $200/unit and

  • An expense category called Printing that is charged $15/unit.

Such categories can help you manage your projects better. More details on that later in this tutorial when we get to projects and items.

Taxes

If you want to create invoices using Fanurio, it is most likely that you'll need to include taxes too.

To deal with a whole range of possible taxes and tax combinations, Fanurio uses two concepts: the Tax and the Tax Group. A Tax has a name and a default rate while a Tax Group contains one or more taxes. In order to apply taxes to an invoice, you need to group taxes in a tax group. Even if you have just one tax.

Note: To quickly define your taxes, we recommend you to use the Tax Wizard. Only if the wizard doesn't do what you want, you should try to build a tax group by hand.

If you enable taxes, you will also be able to specify for each client if they are exempt from taxes.