Overview
When you're billing an hourly phase - especially one with a Not-to-Exceed (NTE) budget - your logged time doesn't always add up to a clean dollar amount. Rates and minutes don't always divide evenly, which can leave you a little over an NTE limit or a little short of the exact amount you want to invoice. This article covers how to write off time to get under an NTE amount, how to bill a project to the exact penny, and what happens to time you write off along the way.
Why This Happens
An hourly phase can be set to Not to Exceed, which puts a hard cap on how much can be invoiced against it - Factor will not let you bill past that amount. An hourly phase can also be left open with no cap at all. Either way, if you bill all the remaining logged time on the phase, the total rarely lands on a perfectly round number, since individual time entries are logged in different amounts at different rates.
Resolving an Over-Budget Error
On the Hourly tab of the invoice preparer, if billing all the remaining time entries would put an NTE phase over its budget, Factor shows an error telling you the dollar amount you need to write off or skip before you can proceed - for example, needing to reduce the invoice by $450 to get under a $3,500 limit.
Each time entry on the Hourly tab can be set to one of three actions:
What you can do:
Bill Now - invoice this entry's full logged time.
Bill Later - leave it unbilled for now, to invoice on a future invoice.
Write Off - remove it from what's billed. Factor still tracks its full value and cost for profitability reporting.
You can also bill a partial amount of a single time entry rather than writing off the whole thing - for example, on a 4-hour entry, bill 3 hours 30 minutes and write off the remaining 30 minutes. This only changes what's billed.
Working example: with a $3,500 Not-to-Exceed budget and $3,950 in logged time ready to bill, writing off one full entry and then partially billing a second (billing 3.5 of its 4 hours, writing off the last 30 minutes) can bring the invoice exactly under the $3,500 limit, clearing the error so you can finalize.
Hitting an Exact Budget Amount
Sometimes you want to bill a precise dollar figure - the full amount of an open hourly phase, or right up to an NTE limit - and no combination of logged hours at your existing rates adds up to that exact number. In that case:
What you can do:
Create a new Project Role for this purpose (for example, "Invoice Adjustment") under SETTINGS > Lists > Project Roles.
Add that role to the project's team, on the project's Team > Project Roles tab, and set its rate on the project specifically to whatever number makes the math work for the amount you still need to bill.
Log a time entry against that role - often just one hour at the custom rate - to land exactly on the dollar figure you need.
A role's rate set this way applies to this project only.
Showing Written-Off Time to the Client
By default, an invoice only shows the hours and amounts you actually billed - time that's written off or left for later is not included on the printed invoice, even though Factor keeps a full record of it internally. If you want written-off hours to appear on the invoice itself, that requires a custom invoice template built for your firm - this isn't a toggle you can turn on yourself, so contact your Factor product specialist if you want this set up.