5 Powerful Year-End Tips

It's the time of the year when  everyone is in a cheerful and generous mood. What better time to collect the money your clients owe you? BillQuick requires no year-end operational procedures; however, we recommend that you take advantage of its powerful reports to help optimize your business for the New Year. Here are 5 powerful year-end tips to consider:

1.  Minimize Clients' Taxes

As the year ends, many of us want to pay bills to minimize our taxes. Keeping that in mind, you can run Aging Report from the BillQuick Reports menu and start calling your clients. Collect what they owe you and minimize their taxes. You will be surprised how effective it is.

2.  Revenues, Receipts and Margins

Managers and principals need clear information about how much revenue is yet to be billed for active jobs. The Work-in-Hand report shows your future work load and is very helpful if you entered actual (or estimated) contract amount for projects in the Project screen. Run the report from the Reports menu > Company.

How much did your company bill its clients this year? From the Reports menu > Billing, run the Invoice Register report. Be sure to define the date filters to include only year 2013.

Now that you know how much you billed for the year, you need to know the receipts. You can run the Cash Receipts Journal or the Cash Receipts by Client report from the Reports menu > Payments.

Are your gross margins going up or down? Are margins sufficient for each client to cover the administrative costs you did not include in employee cost rates? You can find out quickly by running Billing and Cost Summary (Yearly) or Gross Margins report from the Reports menu > Analysis. Run the reports with date filters for year 2012 and 2013, then perhaps quarterly for both years to check out trends.

3.  Staff Performance

Time to give out bonus! Find out how your staff performed—who has the maximum billable hours (Employee of the Year?). How much of their time went toward overhead activities? To check staff performance, run Staff Performance report from the Reports menu > Company. Else run Staff Performance by Project report if you are a project manager interested in knowing how a team performed on a certain project.

Want to know your staff's true bill rate? Check the Staff Billing report from the Reports menu > Analysis.

What about write-ups/downs for projects and employees? Print the Write-Up/Down Report by Project and by Employee from the Reports menu > Billing.

4.  Update for New Year

Check your bill rates. Run Employee Default Bill Rates from the Reports menu > Billing to list current rates for your employees. Next, print Service Fee Schedule and Expense Fee Schedule reports from the Reports menu > Company. With increasing cost of doing business, it is important to review this information, and then raise employee default bill rates and cost rates as needed for 2014. Also, some fee schedules may need to be updated to reflect the new special rates.

5.  Staff Review 

Review staff vacation and sick time using the Employee Vac, Sick and Holiday Hours report (filtered for 2013) from the Reports menu > Employee. Determine whether permissible hours for any employees need to be raised.

About the Author: Bob Wolff is an accountant-turned-Channel Manager at BQE who helps to offer consulting and software solutions for BQE customers. He likes to share his business expertise here on the blog whenever he can.