Recording and invoicing hours with Vtiger CRM

There are a number of modules that are interesting for keeping time records and then reporting or invoicing. Together they form a complete timesheet administration.

Please note this only works in version 5 of Vtiger CRM. See our Vtiger manual for a solution in Vtiger CRM versions 6 and 7.

The solution proposed by Vicus in Vtiger CRM works as follows:

Step 1: Creating and sending an offer

A quote will be prepared as services with hours x rate. If desired, a fixed price is quoted. A template can be used to determine which data from the quotation is presented to the prospect (all details, or just the final amount). The underlying data is in the database.

Step 2: Create sales order, after quotation approval

The Sales Orders is created in 1 step from the quote. This is the representation of the agreement with the customer.

Step 3: Creating a project

After the Sales Orders, a Project is created. The project contains all the data relevant to this section such as hour budget. If required, Project Tasks are added to the project to make it more specific.

Step 4: Work and record hours

Employees do their work and write their hours on the project or on specific tasks. In addition, hours can be written on various administrative codes (configurable). The fields on the timesheet can be turned off as desired to simplify the screen.

Step 5: Reviewing hours and making them billable

In this step, hours are presented according to desired selection and optionally sent to a sales order or invoice. In given cases, the sales order can be used with the appropriate template as a timesheet to send to the customer for approval before invoicing.

After all, a sales order becomes an invoice with 1 click.

From these, select 3 time lines to bill

and send them to bill

Step 6: Finalize and send invoice

Two invoices were created, because 2 different customers (will be NL version).

Clicking on the first invoice gives the result. The corresponding invoice can then be edited further.

For example, to still update the rate or round up the hours commercially.
The final appearance of the invoice towards the customer depends on the desired design of the template.

Step 7 : Reports

Via the reporting module of Vtiger CRM all kinds of reports can be compiled and viewed.

For example:

Hours billed this month/quarter/year

What do you need?

• Basic installation Vtiger CRM
• Time recording module
• Hourly Invoicing Module
• Invoice payment module (plug-in)
• Record hours spent per project in the project map
• Generate project from Sales Order
• PDF creator module to make invoices and sales order/hour slips templates more attractive
• Vtiger Workshop (given by Vicus) to get a good handle on things.