Accounting Contact issues
We find the accounting contact to be in important part of managing our invoices, however there are also many limitations. I wanted to know of others' thoughts. Here's some of what I've found.
1) Accounting contact at the Client and Invoice level, but not the project level.
In most cases, a company will have a single accounting contact, and having a client level accounting contact works fine. However, we have many clients with whom we have multiple project contacts, but they all have different invoice contacts. This makes it a challenge to manage the invoices. We could set up "branches" for each, and manage them as separate branches with separate accounting contacts. But that seems like a work around.
We'd like to be able to determine an accounting contact at the project level so the PM can update or manage this information... Putting this information on the "People" card in the project would be very helpful.
2) No API connection to the accounting contact. You can't add/update the accounting contact through the API. So our work around is to create/update the main client contact information. Again, not ideal, because we will either have inconsistent data or we need to manually add accounting contacts for each new client.
I guess that's my list for the accounting contact so far. Any other thoughts or experiences?
Customer support service by UserEcho
I remember my third issue...
3) We realize that once we start a project, if we update the main client contact or the client accounting contact, it doesn't update the contact in the existing project. So, we'd still have to manually update the accounting contact on the invoice. We came across an issue where we had a number of projects with a single company, but we had the wrong accounting contact. We updated the contact but was later told that the wrong person continued to get the invoices.
Hi Mark
Regarding point no.1) if the project contact person is the same contact who should get the invoice you could use the automatic client invoicing periodic job. If you configure the periodic job to create invoices per contract ( not per client) the project contact is automatically set to be the invoicing contact.
Regarding point no.3) the invoicing contact should be updated also for ongoing projects. If you've experienced such issue please report it to our Support.
Best regards,
Marek
Hi there, I'm just following up on this to make sure I understand what you're saying, Marek:
If we have some customers where we want the invoice to go to the accounting contact and we have some customers where we want the invoice to go to the project contact, that means we need to have at least two periodic jobs, right? One for accounting contact invoice customers and one for project contact invoice cusmters?
Hi Ted
That's correct. One periodic job should be set to create invoices per Client, while the second should be set to create the invoices per Contact.
Wouldn't it make more sense to set who gets the invoice at the project/client level rather than at the periodic job level? This seems unintuitive to me. Or am I thinking about this wrong?
I agree with you 100%. We had raised the same issue when we first started using XTRF. The default invoice recipient should be set at customer level (e.g. central accounting department or main project contact), allowing for the PM to overwrite the invoice recipient suggested by default on a project level (e.g. intern is project contact but invoice goes to department head).
Agreed 100%. I hope this can be updated in an upcoming version. This is would make the invoicing run so much smoother.