Hello all,

I am looking for a bit of advice, if you're willing to give it. I do website consulting and development work and after using Blinksale for a couple of years I have made the jump to Billings as I needed more sophisticated reporting.

70% of the work I do is maintenance related where I invoice clients on a monthly basis for work performed in the previous month. The other 30% is project wor where I would invoice the project in phases, usually attached to milestones.

Where I am struggling is how to set these services up for each client and manage them on a monthly basis. Should I set up a 'Maintenance' project for each client, each month, and then create a slip for each service performed underneath it? Or, should I just create a maintenance slip each month and invoice? I guess my confusion is when to organize by project or not.

I realize that what I am asking is probably clear as mud. Is there anyone who organizes their client work in a similar fashion who can share how they're doing it? Any tips appreciated.

Cheers,
Brandon

Just a note regarding the Maintenance - I am a new user too, but think this might be what you're looking at.

1. Maintenance project
2. Slips in here would be based on the month
3. Create Blueprints for each type of work
4. When adding new slip, just append the name to the month.

This would allow multiple slips if needed, for the month.

EX:
Project: Maintenance
Slips: Email.12.2007, Updates.01.2008, Email.01.2008

Again, these slips are based on the blueprints - they are your basic setup so each monthly slip is setup and used with consistency.

Hope this is clearer than mud!

Create one Project and then separate slips for each instance.

EX: Create a "Maintenance" Project. Then create slips for each thing you do that falls under Maintenance. At the end of the month select the slips and invoice them. Then create new slips as new tasks come along.

At the end of the year you'll be much happier with one "Maintenance" project than 12 of them filling up the window. The other nice feature is that under the Account Status tab you will see all the invoices pertaining to that project in one place.

HTH

Mark