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Advice on Billing Steps
We are about to begin our first full cycle using Clients and Profits and I was hoping to hear from users as to how they handle their billing...specifically progressive monthly billing. What steps are followed? How much time is allowed? Do you continue to enter time and expenses against the jobs even after a snapshot is taken of the costs being reviewed for billing?

Billable Hours
n regards to staff time, what percentage of total hours per day/month do you expect to be billable to client work, especially for creative staff?

Billable Percenage for Staff
What is a good billable % of total hours vs. unbillable hours to use as a goal for a new agency. We are less than 2 years old and have come from another agency that was without concern for profit?

Billing Management Time
What % of a job should be allowed for account management/client consultation when creating an estimate?

Billing for Printing and Copies
We have created a task for this do you record the costs as PO1s? Do the designer1s do it? I wouldn1t want to ask designers to use Accounts Payable!

Billing Question
When you pull down a WIP-billing hot sheet, is there any way to specify a time frame? We bill the last day of the month, however, if I wait until the 2nd or 3rd of the following month before I begin, I have hours that have been added on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. Is there any thing that you can pull down that will allow you to bill only the hours for a single month?

Billing Rate Increase
Looking for information regarding raising billing rates. Do you raise rates every year...what do you base it on? How many of you have a fixed flat rate with your clients...Do you lower the rate once you reach various levels of billings??

Billing Rates
Curious as to what type of a formula is used to compute billing rates. What are some of you doing? How frequently do you adjust?

Billing Rates for Design
We are trying to determine whether our hourly billing rates are in alignment with the rest of the design world. Your input would be greatly appreciated.

Billing Reports
C&P is new to our agency this year. Each account executive is in charge of their own billing (invoices are created by accounting). Which report doyour AE's review to do billing from?

Billing Steps / Work Flow
How do you determine when a client should be billed? What department generates the billing? Who makes this decision? Who writes the description for services? When is the description written? (When billed or when job is opened) What and/or who determines the amount (all marked up job cost vs. what the market will bare)

Billing Workflow
We have just installed C&P and are working through the kinks in terms of workflow. When our bookkeeper bills a project, the billing status changes to "billed" automatically. However, the billing may only be partial or incremental (i.e. one insertion of a media schedule; first half of a fee). We don't want to drop or miss any billing, but also want to have our reports (like job hot sheet) reflect reality.

Charging Clients
I was wondering if any of you C&P users can help me with something not C&P related. We are trying to come up with a price to charge clients for color prints.

Control of Domain Account
A question of legality: We have several clients that we have done web design work for. We use a vendor to post the design work to their site. Through our vendor we also host these sites and he has control on the domain accounts. Two of these clients owe us for the design work that has been done. They pay the hosting fee on time. Can we legally withhold "control" of the domain account until they have paid us in full? Can we legally shut down the site for non-payment on the design?

Creative Fees Report
Do any of you know how to pull up a report that will tell you how much in creative fees you billed for a particular time frame for a particular client?

Credit Card Payments
Does anyone have a definitive system for handling tracking of costs/invoices paid by American Express or other credit cards?

Currency Exchange
Have any of you had to deal with a foreign client? We've just acquired our first and are in the process of setting up systems in place for them. My main concern is billing and payments and how the currency exchange rate plays a part in this.

Designer / AE Billing Rates
I would love your input on a quick and dirty formula for the billable rate for your designers and AE's. Do you use 4x the cost rate?

Do You Use the Markdown Report
Please let me know if anyone is using the report for Markdown and explain how and why you use.

Electronic Pickup Sheets
I have concerns about how this will work similarly to the paper trail we are keeping for each client. Are any of you using such an electronic pick up sheet and do you have suggestions as to how we can implement such a procedure?

Engagement Fee Policies
What I mean by that is, do you have an established policy that requires a percentage of the estimated job to be paid in advance before starting work? And to carry it one step further, before the "Final" is delivered to the client, is the balance collected or is a small percentage retainage left to be paid after delivery?

Gross Margin Report
We are trying to run a Gross Margin by AE or Gross Margin by Client report for a specific billing period. I spoke with the C&P Helpdesk & they informed me the report can not be run by billing date or billing period. I can't believe we're the only agency that would want a report like this. Has anyone found a way to run a report like we're trying to run?

Image Requests
We receive a significant number of image and file requests from our clients and other vendors that our clients use on a daily basis. We developed a system/formula to charge for these requests to recoup some of the costs for time/supplies/etc. After a rough analysis of these kinds of jobs to date, we discovered that this system isn't really working for us and we're not recouping as much as we think we should.

Invoicing
I was just wondering how other firms are handling/clarifying "usage" issues. Is the client signing contracts, is it included in the estimate, and is it ever included on the actual invoice when the final billing goes out?

Job Profitability Reports
Does anyone else pull job profitability reports which includes all billings, costs and time so that you get an accurate gross margin?

Kill Fees
We are currently considering a policy regarding "Kill Fees". If a client starts a project, pays an upfront engagement invoice, and then cancels the project before it is completed.

Markup Percentages
We are a small town agency that does about 1.5mm in billings. We are considering increasing our mark-up for hard costs. If you don't mind, what are your percentages?

Markups
I would like to survey the user group on markups. What markup percentages do you use on outside production costs? What markup do you use on media costs?

Month End
Does anyone have any suggestion on how you do month end that might make it easier? I am the only accounting person and can't get the close done monthly only quarterly. I am not an expert either and I am trying to get tips on how to make it go smoother. We do a lot of prebilling and a lot of it is media prebilling months in advice.

Monthly Billing
Does any one have a recommended method of billing out each month. We have "retainers" that are a flat fee each month. The total of the hours we have worked for the month apply to this retainer amount.

Overhead Billing Rate
Anyone have any opinions on calculating a Billing Rate? Do you include overhead or not? Do you rate the person, the tasks, or the task by person?

Payment Terms
Our payment terms are currently "payable upon receipt". I am considering changing them and wanted to find out what terms other agencies use.

Pre-Billing Clients for Estimates
As a small ad agency, we sometimes require our clients to pay a percentage of the estimate prior to beginning the job. We do not want to pick the job up as revenue (i.e. bill it), though, as it is unearned revenue until we actually produce that percentage of the job. Does anyone pre-bill clients, and if so, how do you use Clients and Profits to accomplish it?

Production and Design Time
We have one client who is arguing that we should differentiate between Production and Design time - that the amount of time we spend on DESIGN should be lower cost than the time we spend on PRODUCTION - collecting images etc etc. Do you agree?

Progress Billing / Accruals
We will receive the income from the client but not have the vendor expense for up to 2 months. How do you track these expenses against that income that has already been received? Does Clients and Profits allow an easy way to track this or is it more of a manual entry?

Remove Sales Tax From Estimate
Does anyone know of any way to block the sales tax off of estimates without blocking it off of the billing? According to the C&P Help Desk the only way is to take the sales tax off of the tasks, complete the estimate and then put it back before billing.

Retainer Billing
I have accounts that are on retainer with the same billing every month. Is there a way in C&P to clone this information from month to month without retyping all the data?

Retainers
Our company is trying to work out a retainer with one of our clients and I was wondering what experiences others have had with this. Has it worked or not worked? What should we watch out for or expect?

Sales Tax
We ship product to multiple counties in CA and WA. Including counties with different sales tax rates. Often, on the same invoice we have 4-5 different county rates. C&P only allows for 2 sales tax rates. Is there anybody who has the same problem? And how did you solve it?

Sales Tax Reports
We are on a cash basis bookkeeping system and not on an accrual basis. We have to report NYS and county sales tax every three months. We are looking for an easy system to recap based on the tax collected (not billed). C&P does not offer such a report .

Setting Up Trade Accounts
Does anyone have a good way to track Trade Accounts, both generally and within C&P?

Staff Billing Rates
We use staff rates to do our billing, and although I have calculated our direct cost for each employee and triple it to get to the billing rate, some of the rates seem really low to me.

Standardized Billing Rates
Does anyone use standardized rates based on the task being performed (ie: Production artist $110/hr) regardless of cost (salary, benefits, etc) to the studio?

Survey on Billing, Payments, etc.
What billing rate do you bill the Account Coordinators ? Are your traffic people billable? If so what rate do you bill them? How many hours billable are required of AC's per year? How many hours billable are required of traffic per year?

Track Down Unbilled Job Costs
We need to track down on a daily basis "unbilled job costs" for over $8,000.

Unbillable Jobs & Tasks
How does anyone handle unbillable jobs (example: marketing materials, etc for the company, or RFP's) or unbillable tasks (ex: tasks that are not marked up for a particular client due to contract) - yet the when reviewing "time" for staff they are penalized for working on unbillable jobs & tasks.

Unbilled vs. Unbillable Time
Has anyone found a method whereby they can track billable vs billed time (or unbilled time) by staff? I would like to show our senior management where we are leaving money on the table - often caused by staffers entering time late (after the job is billed) or individual staff members going way over estimated hours etc.

Variable sales tax for clients
Can anyone tell me how they handle variable sales tax for clients who take shipment of finished material in several different states? When do you determine the tax rate for the job, and how do you change the rate on the invoice?

Vendor Markups - To Do Or Not To Do?
We had a question come up here regarding the appropriateness of marking up vendor production invoices to clients who pay in advance. More specifically when the client has approved an overall "program" budget that would be billed in equal payments over the term of the program.

Web Maintenance Fees
We are struggling with how to charge existing web clients for the endless calls to make small revisions to web sites. Does anyone set up web maintenance retainers, and if so, what fee structure is acceptable?

What to bill...
We have recently been asked to design and produce a new print ad campaign for a national brand. It is a retail client - 36 stores across the US, with billings of $75 - $100 MM. (Private company, no figures available)