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How does Professional Investigator handle invoicing?
In the DOS days we used to write accounting packages. We could have gone down the road of re-creating a whole accounts package, such as QuickBooks Pro, but that would take a very
long time and maintaining it would be a nightmare. We'd rather spend the time on creating a better and better PI program and let Intuit and the rest spend their time creating better and better accounting
packages. And even if Professional Investigator is not a fully-fledged accounting program, you still shouldn't have to do things twice.
In other PI packages, you create and print a 'limited' invoice and then you still have to input all that stuff again into your accounting package. Not good.
Furthermore, we wanted to enable Professional Investigator to be used with any accounting or book-keeping package, such as QuickBooks Pro, PeachTree, Sage
and so on. So, we thought long and hard, worked with our existing users and their accountants, and came up with this:
- You can input an unlimited amount of Work Done (or Work Product) records for each Case that you have on the system.
Not only can these Work Done records hold a load of text about what was done on this particular occasion for this particular case, they can also keep full costing information.
- You can record straight fees and/or hourly work at an hourly rate and/or mileage expended at a mileage rate and/or expenses & disbursements that have to be charged to the case -
all of which can have tax amounts calculated if required and can be marked as billable to the client or not.
- There is a 'QuickBooks-like' date calculator and a timer for those long phone calls.
- Each case has a Case Budget/Results page which shows you your original budgets for the case and the current total of the 'actuals' so far accrued. This is automatically updated as
you insert Work Done records.
- At any time, you can print out either a 'Work Done' report that prints out all the text info or a Cost report that prints out all these costs. The records contained on any
particular report are marked so that they are not repeated in the next one.
- You print out these reports, create a one-line invoice
in your accounting package that says something like "Work done as per enclosed report" and put in the total amount on the report, print it out, pin the reports to the back of the invoice
and send it to your client.
Our existing users tell us that their clients are delighted
because the invoice goes to the client's accounts department while the client him/herself can keep the work done reports. And they, the users, are delighted because all the PI stuff is in
Professional Investigator and all the accounting stuff is in their accounting package and they only had to do it ONCE!
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