Clients & Profits X | Spring 2006

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BEST OF DAILY Q&As

GREAT TIPS FOR GETTING
BETTER ORGANIZED

• Get with the system Everyone in your shop needs their hands on Clients & Profits as often as possible. “Since C&P serves as a central respository for all projects, workflow, costs, and billings,” says Donna Lynn Johnson, a long-time C&P consultant, “you’ll make information readily available to everyone in the agency. Nothing slips through the cracks because C&P manages the communication at each step. It’ll decrease the number of handoffs during the revision process, for example, as well as reduce the duplication of effort that happens when people juggle different systems to manage the same business.”

• Prune your lists Over the years unused vendors, tasks, G/L accounts, and more clutter up your database with useless information. By making old accounts inactive, they won’t clog up lookup lists — but they’ll still show up on reports where they were used.

• It’s all about status Many shops start C&P with a standard handful of production and billing status codes. But as their shops grow, few people realize that you can track jobs more precisely during the production process by expanding status codes to their own work flow. “Status codes categorize your jobs into phases,” says Robert Roll, a long-time C&P consultant and custom report programmer. “One client I work with created sets of production status codes for each department in the agency. The 100 series was for advertising, the 200 series was for interactive, the 300 series for trade shows, etc. This allowed the staff to print daily status reports by department, which made the reports much more meaningful.”

Q. Our billing is too slow! It seems to take forever to get the invoices approved. How can I improve our billing review process?

A. The typical billing process involves choosing which jobs to bill, deciding billing amounts, adding invoices, getting approvals, then posting and printing. Clients & Profits can automate the process so that everyone’s working off the same workf low. You can define up to eight different steps in your billing process in Preferences > Jobs. Then when you’re ready to bill, use the Billing Hot Sheet (see Snapshots > Work in Progress) as a road map. It summarizes each client’s unbilled jobs and includes a checklist of your billing steps. By tracking each job through the billing process, you’ll see the bottlenecks that slow billing down.

Q. We have a client who questions every charge on estimates. Is there any way to show them less detail?

A. Yes. It’s best to show as little as necessary to get an estimate approved; the more the client can see, the more likely you are to have a dispute. Use estimate options to try different combinations to find one that works best.

Q. We closed our year but need to make an adjustment. How?

A. Any adjustment made to the prior year would have to be made to the new year’s retained earnings beginning balance. Why? Because the prior year’s income and expenses have been rolled into the Retained Earnings account. So the adjustments go where the balance is — retained earnings.

Q. We’re trying to organize our bank accounts. What’s a quick way to see our expected cash coming out and what we expect to pay out?

A. The Snapshots > Cash Flash report will compare today’s payments, checks, and current cash balances as clients and vendor balances.

Q. How can I stop the production department from starting a job before the estimate has been signed?

A. Use a status alert. Jobs with unapproved estimates should have a status something like “pending estimate approval.” That status can have an alert that will prevent staff members from adding time, costs, or expenses. It’s not foolproof, since it can’t prevent someone from working on a job. But it does prevent their time from being entered into Clients & Profits until the estimate is ok’d.

Q. Is there any way to force AEs to get signed change orders before making changes to jobs?

A. Not really. But status alerts can at least slow them down.

Q. Why would I ever use the “show invoice detail” option when printing invoices?

A. It depends on your agreement with the client. Many government contracts specifically demand an item-by-item listing of job costs before paying an invoice. In these cases, use the invoice as a cover sheet for the Invoice Detail report.