Two-Level Activity and Expense Codes

Question: We are an architecture and design firm. We want to track the category of activity and the activity or task itself. For example, one category is ‘Architecture’ and an activity in it could be ‘Schematic Design’. For ‘Interior Design’ one activity might be ‘Design Development’. Most architecture and interior design tasks are different, using ‘Schematic Design’ as the category and ‘Drawing’ and ‘Correspondence’ as the tasks. Can BillQuick handle my situation?

BillQuick supports these two situations with two-level Activity Codes (and Expense Codes). A two-level activity or expense code is represented by the two fields: Code and Sub-Code.

The Code field (also called the ‘Main Code’) is 15 characters in length. BillQuick also supports up to 15 characters for the Sub-Code. Between the main and sub code fields, BillQuick automatically inserts a colon (:) as a separator.

For the Code you might use ‘AR’, ‘ARCH’, ‘Arch’, ‘Architecture’, ‘ID’, ‘IntDes’ or ‘Interior Design’ as a category. Then for the Sub-Code, you might use ‘SD’, ‘SchDes’ or ‘Schem Design’ for the Architecture category, and ‘DD’, ‘DesDev’ or ‘Design Dev’ for the Interior Design category.

As indicated, your team thinks of their work in a couple of ways. You could use “Schematic Design” and “Design Development” as the category, and then define ‘Drawing’, ‘Correspondence’ and other items as tasks. The above example works in this case too.

As your question implies, the two most important elements of an activity or expense ID are:

Intuitive – everyone recalls what an ID is or knows what it is just by looking at it

Consistent – the structure of the ID is consistent across all activity and expense IDs.

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