Using Auto Bills for Fixed-Fee Monthly/Quarterly Retainer Bills.

If you have 10 or more clients where you have agreed to charge them the same amount each month or quartr, whether you do work for them or not, Auto Bills can be a huge time saver.  With a few clicks of your mouse you can generate all the Auto Bill Invoices in the system and email them out to those clients.  

Auto Bills creates a progress bill on the client - thereby deferring any markup/down each month until you do a Final Bill at year end (bill all chargeable wip and negative progress wip) and see how you did for the year.  Did you realize a markup? Then your monthly fee was adequate.  Did you realize a markdown? Then you may need to increase your monthly fee for next year.

Auto Bills are set up in the Client Properties - Billing Tab under the Automatic Billing Sub-tab.  You need to select the:

• Template
• Amount
• Engagement (if any)
• Frequency (monthly, quarterly)
• Paragraph(s) you want to appear on each Auto Bill Invoice.  

Once Auto Bills have been set up in your various clients' properties, you can generate auto bills via Tools; Auto Bills.  There you simply need to select the:

• Frequency Tab
• Invoice Date
• Generate your list of clients
• Delete any that may need to be skipped this time only
• Create the invoices.  

Clicking Create Auto Bills will create the invoice transactions on the client's account and a corresponding line of negative Progress WIP in their unbilled WIP.  You would then need to go to Print/Send to email or print out and mail your invoices.

Eventually (generally at the end of the year) you must choose to final bill a client that has been Auto Billed each month or quarter so you can clear all the WIP off to History, and determine if the fixed-fee retainer was an adequate amount to cover the work done.  Sometimes these final bills are for the remaining monthly retainer bill (e.g. December's bill), or sometimes they are for Zero $ and are for internal purposes only (i.e., you need to relieve the WIP to see what markup/down you took on the year as a whole).

Once you final bill the entire year's Auto Bill/Progress WIP with the employees' chargeable WIP - you will be able to see the full markup/down taken on the client for that year and decide if the monthly/quarterly amount is adequate or if you need to raise the client's fix-fee retainer for the next year.

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