We’re a managed service provider in our region, providing IT services to companies that don’t have IT departments. We’ve made the “switch” to ERPNext for full production effective the beginning of this year.
At the moment our technicians start a Timesheet when they arrive on-site at a customer. They put in their start time and select a project. So, for example, “2018 Regular Maintenance, [CustomerName]”. Then they create a task where they document everything they do on-site. Usually this task gets called “[MM/DD] Regular Maintenance, [TechName]”.
At the end of the day they submit their tasks for the day.
Our accounting department picks up those tasks and converts them into a Sales Invoice, usually one per business week or one every two weeks, depending on the customer’s request.
In the old ERP system we used (which was far from perfect!) each Task would end up as a line item on the invoice. Time was derived from the Timesheets. Under each Task Name was the Tech that did the work as well as their notes from the Task.
Is there a way to replicate this inside ERPNext? I ask because now that our customers are getting Sales Invoices without details, they are asking for them.
Hi, that is not really possible, to work with erpnext in this kind of business.
The timesheet is the base of time-logging - and at the end thelogged time is base of the invoice. It is not possible to include the text “what is done” for everey line in the timesheet - the timesheet itself only has a infotext-field.
OK, it is possible to customize and to make an extra field for everey line inside timesheet, but following there are some more customisations to do, that you can fetch this text for the invoice and also on screen inside the timesheets, to know, what your employee has done in this time.
Example: if your employe is making today this (and makes a new line in the imesheet, and needs to write what he has done … ) and tomorrow he has made something different (e.g. also another activity-type with another price for an hour) you dont have a chance to use timesheet.
But if you do (of course you can fill in another activity-type in everey line of timesheet) , and you have 2 or more rows in timesheet - with different activity-types with different price per hour, you are not able to make an invoce.
Because in Invoice you need to make all manually. If you make a invoice out of timesheet, you have no infotext of timesheet, there are (like my example) not 2 lines with the different prices - it is only one.
And if you have a sales order before, and you press the button to get items from there, you are invoicing only the sales-order - not what was really done. Because in realitiy, sometimes the quote and the work is not the same.
And then you cannot see, what is the plan (you told the customer about 2h this and 1h that, in timesheet your employee worked less or more — you dont have a clear overview of planned hours against in reality worked hours.
You all need to make manualy.
But be clear, i like erpnext, i aasked many times, some more threats are full of this functiuonality - also last year and the year before. But nobody has a functional solution for this kind of classical projectmanagement.
In Version 7 there was time-logging - that was great.
But today there are only timesheets.
Please check out, if i am right - i would be very happy, if there is a solution - e.g. time-logging (from V7) and Timesheet. But it is not wanted.
Best regards