Tag Archives: ProjectBased
4 Ways to Avoid Making a Bad Impression With Project-Based Invoicing

As a consulting company, your job is to help your clients to be more efficient. But if your own team does not appear to be efficient, why would anyone hire you?
The invoices you send to your customers are a reflection of your company’s internal efficiencies. Your invoicing process can leave either a positive or negative impression. After all, no one likes paying bills, so let’s eliminate as many pain points as possible.
Here are some invoicing tips that will greatly add to your bottom line.
1) Late “catch-up” billing
When project consultants do not complete their time sheets promptly and accurately, customer billing is delayed. A big wave of “catch-up” time entry results in the customer being invoiced for a large amount all at once. This can raise some red flags. Not only is the customer more likely to question the charges, it can erode the trust you have established with them, jeopardizing your relationship and future work.
Time entry should be done daily and invoiced on a consistent schedule.
2) Incomplete or generalized descriptions
If an employee has to go back several weeks, or even a month, to enter time for a project, it will be hard to remember the fine points of the work performed. Likely they’ll settle for a general description. For instance, instead of recording “Onsite meeting to discuss development standards,” they may just enter, “Meeting.”
When the customer sees the invoice line item, they may ask, “What meeting was this?” Then the project manager has to talk to the employee, and the employee has to refer back to their Outlook calendar or their sent emails and try to come up with the answer. This is a waste of time not only for the project team, but also for the customer, and moreover, it looks bad.
3) Project overruns
The project manager never wants to be “the timesheet police,” but as project manager, they are tasked with keeping projects on time and on budget while making sure resources are properly utilized. And most importantly – no surprises! If time isn’t entered, there is no way to measure the services performed against the project budget.
Companies that run over budget due to inefficiencies in their project cost accounting processes are not likely to be hired back for future work.
Project Managers need to have full visibility into project status, budget, and milestones, so they are able to keep the project on track and keep the customer informed.
4) Rounded up hours
Clients are paying for your time and expertise. And while your time is valuable, if they feel that they are paying for time that has been inflated, this breaks the trust and opens up future invoices to closer scrutiny
Many consulting firms typically have minimum billing increments. This means that if your customer calls you for a status update that takes 55-minutes, you would bill them for 1-hour, since your bill in 1-hour time increments. If billing always shows a consistent eight hours a day, five days a week, this can raise suspicion. A client could start to question if time was being billed while the consultant might have been eating lunch, checking email, or taking unrelated phone calls from other customers.
Clients will notice and appreciate billing that shows it has been reviewed for accuracy and shows only the actual time worked with supporting details.
Make a good impression
Employees need to account for their time, prove the value of that time, and then bill time appropriately to the customer. That’s the nature of most services companies.
You never want a client to look at an invoice and say in the back of their mind, “Wow, why would they have done that? Maybe they don’t have their act together. So why am I hiring them to help me get my act together?”
A key to making a good impression with your project billing is to make time entry simple for your busy employees. This will make for more accurate and timely invoice creation. The sooner the invoice is in the mail, the sooner you get paid.
A tool to simplify time entry
Crowe Timesheets is an easy-to-use time tracking solution integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365.
- Crowe Timesheets will reduce the amount of time it takes employees to enter their working hours and will ensure more accurate and timely timesheet submissions.
- Managers can review dashboards and reports to confirm that detailed and accurate descriptions are available to the customer.
- Charts and graphs are presented as visual reminders of the status of your projects, helping project managers to keep them on time and on
Learn more about
The CRM functionality in Microsoft Dynamics 365 gives you the tools you need to improve the efficiency of your project team and leave a great impression with your customers.
If you are interested in evaluating Microsoft Dynamics 365,
By Ryan Plourde, Crowe Horwath, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner
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The Future Of Work In A Project-Based, Consultant-Driven World
The September issue of the Harvard Business Review features a cover story on design thinking’s coming of age. We have been applying design thinking within SAP for the past 10 years, and I’ve witnessed the growth of this human-centered approach to innovation first hand.
Design thinking is, as the HBR piece points out, “the best tool we have for … developing a responsive, flexible organizational culture.”
This means businesses are doing more to learn about their customers by interacting directly with them. We’re seeing this change in our work on d.forum — a community of design thinking champions and “disruptors” from across industries.
Meanwhile, technology is making it possible to know exponentially more about a customer. Businesses can now make increasingly accurate predictions about customers’ needs well into the future. The businesses best able to access and pull insights from this growing volume of data will win. That requires a fundamental change for our own industry; it necessitates a digital transformation.
So, how do we design this digital transformation?
It starts with the customer and an application of design thinking throughout an organization – blending business, technology and human values to generate innovation. Business is already incorporating design thinking, as the HBR cover story shows. We in technology need to do the same.
Design thinking plays an important role because it helps articulate what the end customer’s experience is going to be like. It helps focus all aspects of the business on understanding and articulating that future experience.
Once an organization is able to do that, the insights from that consumer experience need to be drawn down into the business, with the central question becoming: What does this future customer experience mean for us as an organization? What barriers do we need to remove? Do we need to organize ourselves differently? Does our process need to change – if it does, how? What kind of new technology do we need?
Then an organization must look carefully at roles within itself. What does this knowledge of the end customer’s future experience mean for an individual in human resources, for example, or finance? Those roles can then be viewed as end experiences unto themselves, with organizations applying design thinking to learn about the needs inherent to those roles. They can then change roles to better meet the end customer’s future needs. This end customer-centered approach is what drives change.
This also means design thinking is more important than ever for IT organizations.
We, in the IT industry, have been charged with being responsive to business, using technology to solve the problems business presents. Unfortunately, business sometimes views IT as the organization keeping the lights on. If we make the analogy of a store: business is responsible for the front office, focused on growing the business where consumers directly interact with products and marketing; while the perception is that IT focuses on the back office, keeping servers running and the distribution system humming. The key is to have business and IT align to meet the needs of the front office together.
Remember what I said about the growing availability of consumer data? The business best able to access and learn from that data will win. Those of us in IT organizations have the technology to make that win possible, but the way we are seen and our very nature needs to change if we want to remain relevant to business and participate in crafting the winning strategy.
We need to become more front office and less back office, proving to business that we are innovation partners in technology.
This means, in order to communicate with businesses today, we need to take a design thinking approach. We in IT need to show we have an understanding of the end consumer’s needs and experience, and we must align that knowledge and understanding with technological solutions. When this works — when the front office and back office come together in this way — it can lead to solutions that a company could otherwise never have realized.
There’s different qualities, of course, between front office and back office requirements. The back office is the foundation of a company and requires robustness, stability, and reliability. The front office, on the other hand, moves much more quickly. It is always changing with new product offerings and marketing campaigns. Technology must also show agility, flexibility, and speed. The business needs both functions to survive. This is a challenge for IT organizations, but it is not an impossible shift for us to make.
Here’s the breakdown of our challenge.
1. We need to better understand the real needs of the business.
This means learning more about the experience and needs of the end customer and then translating that information into technological solutions.
2. We need to be involved in more of the strategic discussions of the business.
Use the regular invitations to meetings with business as an opportunity to surface the deeper learning about the end consumer and the technology solutions that business may otherwise not know to ask for or how to implement.
The IT industry overall may not have a track record of operating in this way, but if we are not involved in the strategic direction of companies and shedding light on the future path, we risk not being considered innovation partners for the business.
We must collaborate with business, understand the strategic direction and highlight the technical challenges and opportunities. When we do, IT will become a hybrid organization – able to maintain the back office while capitalizing on the front office’s growing technical needs. We will highlight solutions that business could otherwise have missed, ushering in a digital transformation.
Digital transformation goes beyond just technology; it requires a mindset. See What It Really Means To Be A Digital Organization.
This story originally appeared on SAP Business Trends.
Top image via Shutterstock