Time tracking and project invoicing in Uniconta

A project usually begins with a quotation or an agreement on a fixed amount or an hourly rate. From then on, employees work hours, drive kilometres and spend money for the project. Recording all that is time tracking. In a small firm it often happens on paper, in a spreadsheet or from memory at the end of the week. That produces inaccurate hours, and therefore inaccurate invoices.

To invoice, someone has to gather the hours, materials and costs and check that they have been approved. Some projects are invoiced in one go, others in stages as the work progresses, and sometimes a zero invoice is needed to close work off administratively. Anyone who bills hours by hand regularly forgets something, and that is revenue you never collect. Good project administration means you can see, per project, what was budgeted, what has been spent and what is still outstanding.

Between doing the work and invoicing it sits a step that is often underestimated, namely work in progress. Work that has been done but not yet invoiced has a value that must be visible in the books. A post-calculation at the end shows whether the project delivered what you expected. If you also want to analyse costs beyond the project itself, a split by cost centre or cost carrier helps.

A practical example. An installation firm works on ten projects at once, with fitters on changing sites. If every fitter enters hours and kilometres on a phone straight away, the office can invoice at the end of the week without any hunting around. If hours are written down from memory on Friday afternoon, some are always missing. The difference between the two ways of working is often not the software but the agreement that hours are recorded the same day. A good set-up makes that agreement easy to keep, and ensures the data only has to be entered once.

Uniconta is cloud-based ERP and accounting software. You register hours, kilometres and expenses and follow the financial progress and results per project. You can invoice directly from the project on the basis of registered hours, materials and costs. Progress invoicing and zero invoicing are possible.

You can set a budget per project and a price per employee or per project. There is an approval flow, in which hours are marked as ready for invoicing or as pending. Work in progress can be booked or not per project group and is eliminated when you invoice. With the Assistant app, also called the Work app, employees can register hours, including offline.

We make no statements on a few things. We do not claim that customers can approve hours online, and leave, absence or resource planning are not covered here. If you need those, we discuss up front what does and does not fit within the standard.