 Zero Accounting Software 2023. Enter billable time to projects and invoice. Get ready to become an accountant hero with Zero 2023. Here we are in our custom Zero homepage going into the support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. The new company file we set up in a prior presentation that being get great guitars. We're going to duplicate some tabs to put reports in by right-clicking the tab up top so we can duplicate it right-clicking the tab again so we can duplicate it again going back to the tab to the left accounting drop-down opening up the balance sheet then we're going to tab to the right and we're going to go to the accounting drop-down opening the profit and loss or income statement back to the left tab changing the date range to 2023 with a custom range change 2023 end of the year December 31st bring it up to date por favor tab and to the right we've got the correct date range here so we're good to go. Let's go to the first tab and now we want to think about entering billable time that we can then turn around and invoice a client with now note whenever we think about tracking time of say staff we usually think of payroll processing the payroll but for this purpose we're kind of thinking of us billing or tracking the time so that we can build it which is often done in a job cost kind of system so in our project we're imagining in essence the payrolls being done by a third-party payroll processor clearly if we pay someone hourly we would still need to track the time to be processing the payroll on an hourly rate but oftentimes if you're in a situation where you have a job cost system you might be paying people people on a salaried basis yet still need to track their time so that you can bill the client so if you ever seen the office I think the movie the office where the guys like I don't care if you're just thinking about a client or whatever you you need to bill them you need to tell us what their billable rate is right that's what we're trying to track the time here for and typically we'll have a projects kind of set up to do that in a job cost system so when you think about a job cost system you're looking at longer term projects oftentimes construction companies of course have a job cost system but so do many service companies such as law firms CPA firms bookkeeping companies where you have a partnership set up and you have a lot of staff and the staff is going to be working like crazy for all of the different partners on different projects for different clients and you might be paying all of those staff members salary but you still need them to track what they are doing per client per job so that we can then to gather their information possibly with an excel sheet or something like that or just even write it down or some other kind of software and then put it into our system so that we can bill or invoice the client based on the work that was done so if I go into my projects here we can go into say all projects if you don't have projects turned on you can go to the drop down here and there's usually a project on the left once you turn it on you'll have the projects drop down we have in progress these two projects open at this point in time we're going to think about entering time into the system that we can then use to invoice the client so you have your timer up top so if I hit the timer this actually runs a timer which is kind of nice if you're actually working real time within zero and you want to track your time as you're going you've got your stopwatch so you can be very specific about it but often times if you have staff you you're going to have them track their own time and possibly provide it to you and you might use other software to kind of track the time in a similar kind of fashion so that they have the clock in and out or you might you might just trust them to give you the time and what they were working on and then and then populate that into the zero system so then if I hit the projects drop down up top you've got all projects you've got the time entries you've got the staff time overview you've got the staff permission you got the staff cost rates so let's go into the staff cost rates here because this is one of the components that we're going to need these are the rates that we can put into the system estimating the cost the other side that we need is an actual task that they are working on so let's go up top and just say if I hit the projects up top and I look at a time entry just to understand the data input and then we'll set up the foundation by going to a time entry and I say I add a new time entry what do we need to do that we need the project we've got our two projects that we're setting up those are the customers we're working on we need the task we don't have any tasks yet the task is similar to like items service items and inventory items that help us to populate an invoice because that will give us the rate that we're actually going to charge that will pull over to the invoice and then the description the duration noting that if you have a system where your staff members are just giving you the time that they worked on a weekly basis you might say take their excel worksheet or whatever they give it to you on and just manually input the the total time for that week on a weekly basis or whatever or you might then enter the start and stop on a on a period by period basis here's the time that you would enter which would calculate the duration for a particular date and then you need to apply out the staff member note that the staff member may be an employee but they don't have to be they might be a contractor or something like that so in order to have the staff members in there you have to add them as a user so how do you add people as a user you hit the drop down and you go into the settings and within the settings you go into your users and then you can invite new users here one of the great things about zero is I don't believe they have any cap to the number of users that you can have so you can add more users and then make sure that in the permissions if I go into the permissions I have checked off that they're on projects so that they will show up and I can I can have their time entry on the projects which is neat all right so now I'm going to hit so then I'm going to go back let's go back to the dashboard or let's go back to the projects here so that means that we need a task that we're going to assign and then we can also assign the the cost uh by by by given entering that on a per person item here so let's add the task so if I hit the projects drop down and I say that we're going to say we've got the the uh time let's go to the time entries and now hold on I'm going to go into an individual project and then I'm going to this particular project and then I have the ad and I have my task that I can add now within your task when you when you're actually going to invoice the client based on time that is worked there's two ways you can basically add the time you could just say I'm just going to bill people based on an hourly rate that I have determined on who is working on the task so in that in that case you might call it whatever the person who worked on its name uh like in our case uh Adam Smith or or or uh our two employees for example or you might bill them based on what they actually did such as they did you know an hours worth of bookkeeping or something like that and so that way you would you would charge them by the task that they worked on so if you have a type of business where everybody does the same thing like guitar lessons then you might just charge by the guitar instructor because they might have a different rate per instructor or if they do a bunch of different stuff as they might do in a law firm you might just charge by the thing that they did and that would be the name of the task bookkeeping or work on this project or that project or something like that so I'm going to say here that this is going to be just I'll just say staff one rate so we'll say that and notice what's happening here I'm basically entering like an item here so it's going to be like a service item so I could use like the hourly rates but I'm just going to call it staff one rate boom and then I'm going to say it's an hourly rate that we're charging $100 that doesn't mean that we are that we are paying them $100 that's the rate that we're going to pull over to the invoice charging the client for the $100 so charge hourly rate estimated actually estimated hours I'm just going to say estimated hours hourly rate I'm going to say 100 on the hourly rate okay so then I'm going to say save it and so there we have it so now if I was to enter a time entry follows to add a time entry now now we have a task that we can add which is that staff hourly rate and if I say the duration is you know one hour then that should pull over to something that we can bill or invoice for that 100 now there's another component that Xero has the ability to do which is to put the cost for the users which would but you have to be careful of that because that's only going to be tracking internally in terms of the cost on this form and won't be reflected on the financial statement so for example if I hit the projects drop down and I want to look at the staff cost rates then I can if these are my two staff members I can say let's edit the rate here and I can put in the cost rate this cost rate isn't what's going to go on the invoice and it's also not what we actually paid to the staff member even if they were an employee because it's just the rate that we're imagining is part of the payroll so in other words if I processed payroll right over here we already have the expense in the payroll expense over here and what I can do is say okay I'm going to try to determine whoever worked on them the rate the amount that of this payroll expense that is going to be basically allocated to a particular project so I would determine that by trying to figure out what their hourly rate is generally as well as possibly including overhead into the cost over here so it'll show up on my projects but really it's it's not going to show up as an expense line item so you got to be you know careful of that and so let's just imagine it was it was $60 right it's $60 here we're going to charge you know a hundred dollars so let's put that here and then I can do the same for this one let's say this one was you know 70 dollars 70 dollars okay so now if I go into my projects and look at my all projects and I go into this when I add a time it's going to bill it out at a hundred dollars but it's going to make a cost of uh 60 dollars in my project overview over here which the 60 dollars will not be reflected on the financial statements and the hundred dollars won't be reflected until we invoice it over here on the income statement all right let's just do it and we can check that out for ourselves so let's add let's add a task am I in the right job so I'm in job 3005 I'm going to add a time entry so I'm in job 3005 the task is going to be staff rate one which is basically the billable amount the the description I'll just keep their duration I'm just going to manually put in the duration of uh let's say I'm just going to say 16 hours so say 16 hours I'm imagining I got a timesheet from a staff member showing showing what they worked for this particular job and I'm just going to data input it into the system you could do it over here with a start and end date but if you have the timesheet externally it would be fast it's just a data input that in from the excel worksheet or whatever you've received we're going to say this happened on january let's go to the end of january uh 31st let's say and the staff member is going to be this one we'll use that for the staff member and say uh let's do let's do another one too let's do save in another and this one actually I'm in the wrong job so I can't do another in here I'm going to do the other one for another job so let's close this out and so there we have it so now if I go back to the projects all projects jones there's nothing in here but if I go into my time we have this amount that needs to be billed out of the 16 and then you can see up top the time and expenses 1600 because it's going to be that 16 hours that we're going to bill out at the rate that we charged or we're going to charge which is the $100 nothing has yet pulled over to the income statement however because we haven't pulled it over to the invoice yet at this point in time quotes and invoices again we got the time up top and the profitability we have a negative notice it's actually pulling in the cost the cost side it pulled in because it's imagining the cost that we put in which was like the $60 that we assigned had already been happened because because that happens before we do the invoice the the imagine process would be the work that was already done but remember that cost really is reflecting this wages that is already in place in essence right so it's not actually recording something to the financial statement on the cost side as the revenue will when we make the actual invoice all right let's go to the other job and do the do a similar process i'm going to go to uh let's go to all projects again and then i'm going to go to the projects again and say that we have time entries so let's go into a time entry and we're going to say new time entry and this is going to be for same the guitar man project and the task uh we don't have notice i have to add the task for sam if we're going to use that same task in multiple projects we might want to go to the business dropdown and see if we can add it to the products and services so if i go into the products and services then we can we can add basically an item these are the items typically that populate on an invoice and let's see if we can add it here i'm going to say a new item up top and then i'm going to say the code is going to i'm just going to say uh employee or staff work one and that's going to be the code the name and then purchase we don't have any purchase we're not tracking inventory i'm just going to say the price is 100 and the account that we're going to hit is when we have the income side is going to be service income so we'll say service income it's going to be tax exempt and so that looks good let's go ahead and save that and so then if i go back into my projects hitting the project dropdown and say all projects going to the 4002 project for sam the guitar man and if i wanted to add a task then i could choose the task which is going to be the staff staff work which now populates down here it's because and now i can set that one up across all the projects and it should populate properly giving us the hourly rate of the $100 i'm going to go ahead and say okay and then if i go into my time and we say okay we're going to enter the time now so i'm going to imagine that we've got our time sheet from our worker that we're going to enter into the system and add a time entry it's going to be for 4002 the task is going to be the staff work one and then i'm just going to imagine that from their time sheet i'm going to be putting in the amount allocated to this job 4002 which we're going to say is eight hours eight hours and the date here is going to be back in january of january 31st to 31st let's say okay so same thing let's save it and so there it is so now we've got the time and expenses now for the two jobs i'm going to go back to my projects and look at all the projects and let's go to the jones project and now i've got 800 here on the jones project and 800 on the other project so now let's go ahead and invoice them now note this is kind of similar to using the billable items as well and i was going to put these two things together to having expenses that are billable and pulled over to the invoice but i'm going to break this out into two separate presentations if you're following along with like an excel presentation i might have combined these two journal entries together but i'm just going to track the time here and then we'll look at the billable expenses they can pull into an invoice in a future presentation so let's say i'm in i'm in jones guitars here and now let's say i'm going to make an invoice so i'm going to say all right let's do uh an invoice we're going to say project amount i'll say open a draft invoice and so within the invoice we should have this amount that we can pull in from the hours and there it is so it pulled it in automatically so now i've got jones guitars let's put the date of this on let's make it on january 30th so i'll bring that back to january 30th let's say uh due date we'll say is is uh february let's say february 28th let's say and then there's the invoice populating reference standard and then it automatically populates the amount down here given what we put in which is one for eight hundred dollars and the description is pulling in so what's this going to do it's going to increase the uh invoice uh therefore accounts receivable will go up the other side's going to be driven and go into a revenue account driven by this item that has been set up so let's save and approve it and check that out complete these fields it doesn't have a tax or an account field notice that this one would i set up for jones guitars i didn't set up as an actual item and therefore it pulled in but it didn't populate the actual income account it's going to go to on the second one these should populate properly because we actually recorded them as an item and and and then pulled them in to be a billable item uh for the time entries so for example on this one i'm going to say this should go to the service revenue account so service revenue and then tax exempt so now let's save and approve it and then i'm going to go to the bank account or the balance sheet update and then in the accounts receivable we should see this populating in the accounts receivable because we've made just a normal invoice not dealing with inventory this time which should make it easier so now we've got our invoice down below going back to the balance sheet and then on the income statement updating the income statement and in the service revenue we should see the line item in service revenue if we go into that and scroll down so there's the 800 there okay let's go back on up and let's do the same thing for the second one which should be a little bit easier because we set it up as an item so i'm going to go back to the first tab before we do let's go back into the projects all projects and look at jones guitars now and see what has populated we've got the invoice that has now populated up top the time and expenses to be invoiced we've got the time tracking populated the quotes and the profitability what i wanted to note on the profitability is we have the 800 that is now populated that 800 having been reflected on the income statement we have the 480 which was populated from that number that we put in uh that we're estimating is the what we actually pay our employee or this person as a contractor or an employee this number is not pulling in or posting to the income statement but we can kind of assume that it's part of possibly the payroll line item right we're kind of pulling in the expenses to estimate per job so be careful of that when you're trying to tie out these reports to say the income statement all right let's go back to the projects up top all projects and let's go to sam the guitar man so now we have the time that we're going to be applying out here the eight hours for the uninvoiced time let's go ahead and and make an invoice let's go back up top and do it i'll just say project invoice amount 800 so i'm gonna open a draft and say all right it's going to go to sam the guitar man let's say this happens at the end of january again january 30th due date let's say it's feb feb 28 or whatever and then now it's pulling in the item and it still didn't pull in even though i used uh an actual item here it still didn't pull in the the uh the account which is interesting so we're going to populate the account over here which is going to be an income account and i'm going to say it's a non-taxable item also notice it didn't even populate an item over here it just used uh it's just used the description that it's populating out so so we could add the item on the left-hand side and that would pop that would possibly populate it because we added the item of staff work so now if i populate staff work then it'll populate over here in the description will pull in and then that'll properly allocate the account and the tax tax status in this case we're saying it's exempt from sales tax which is like a usage tax and there it goes and that should do the same thing so that's one little adjustment you could make when that when you're billing out the invoice time you could just select the item related to the to the time and that will pull that'll pull in the item information if you have it set up as a service item but we'll save i'll approve it and go back to the balance sheet and see this should update again so if we go back on over here then accounts receivable should be going up again ultra base because it's an invoice and so there uh those two went up sam the guitar man but now i i hold on go back to sam the guitar man i'm going into that account when i adjusted it it made a change i'm going to edit it so be careful of that because i i changed it to staff and then it changed the quantity back down to one so that's not something we want to do i'm going to put it back up to eight because it should be 800 let's update it all right and then i'm going to go down to the accounting reports or i don't have to go to reports i can just go straight to the balance sheet opening the balance sheet back up and then we're going to say this is going to be the range at the end of 2023 end of it update okay so now if i go into to not my checking account but my accounts receivable and scroll down we should have it properly populated 800 and 800 for sam and jones going back up top income statement let's go and update it and then we've got the service items for those to have been populated now so we have our two income items that looks good and then we have our reports our internal reports in our projects so if i want to track by project we have the data in each of these if i go to sam the guitar man our profitability uh over here gives us like our summary property bill profitability and then we can run our reports per project so for example we have our go to project financial reports here and that gets us our project report so we have our project report here for 4002 and so we've got the staff work and the invoice so i'm going to close that well let's pull that over here i can also go to my uh accounting drop down and into reports and look at the project reports this way so let's go to project reports and we've got the project detail project details the old version the time and expenses uh project summary and so on let's open up a project detailed report and take a look at it project detail report and let's january to december we can select the status drop down we're looking at the in progress items and update the report and so we have our information down below so columns 11 columns selected so we adjust your columns over here group write project name and then you've got your filtering options and so here's our project detail for 3005 where we have the cost uh charge amount so this cost is what we put on the time entry remember that that's like an internal kind of number and then we've got the amount that we charge for 402 and 400 file let's add another one duplicate and let's take a look at another report for the fun of it let's go back up top and say accounting reports we'll type in projects again so we've got the let's take a look at the uh project summary reports and so we're going to say the status let's say in progress status and january so that looks good group by contact so here's the summary report so we have i'm going to make this a little smaller so we've got the costs the charge the invoice the unenvoiced amount and uh the profit so that gives us a summary it's not really breaking out you know the line items for the amounts of the cost and remember that this cost isn't exactly a line item on the uh income statements you have to kind of be careful of that when you tide this out to the income statement let's do it again i'm going to right click on this again and duplicate and take a look at another one and let's go to the accounting drop down up top and reports and let's take a look at project summary project financials take a look at the project financials and once again in progress is what we want to check out and so that looks good and so this gives us once again our cost the charge amount and the invoice amount for project 4003 and 4002 so that looks good i'm going to go back up top and let's take a look at our trial balance accounting drop down and take a look at our reports and i'm going to type in trial balance and this is where we stand as of this point in time i was changed the range up top to a custom range 2023 end of it update so this is where we stand at this point so if your numbers tie out great if not then try changing the date range it's also a date range issue what we changed this time from last time so if your numbers tied out last time and something is off it's probably the accounts receivable or and or the service sales line items and make a double check on those in particular