One of the ways to track project time and billing against it budget is in Contracts, associated with Account. Microsoft CRM has pretty simple Contract management business logic, and this logic could work as is or could be advanced with Microsoft CRM ISV add-ons.
In this small publication we would like to recommend procedures for project management: time cards entry,
approving time for invoicing and project billing as final step:
1. Customer Contract. Contract is initial object for project management and you can associate as many contract as required with one customer (or account as it is referred in MS CRM). In order to log time against Contact - you should create Contract Template with allotment type Time (Go to -> Settings -> Templates and create new Contract Template)
2. Budgeting for the Contract. The way in MS CRM to assign the budget for the Contract is to create one or several Contract Lines, where you can set the budget for the line in minutes. If you would like to pick billable hourly rate directly from the Contract line, you can set Total Price (here you would need to set budget in Minutes an specify Total Price in Dollars, obviously by calculation appropriate Hourly rate, as technician or consultant rate is typically specified per hour)
3. Case. Consider Case as being close in its meaning to Sales Order or Work Order. In CRM you the mechanism to close the case, where you may specify number of billable minutes, versus summary minutes from all the activities with time duration. We recommend you to open the case for time logging on the level of the Contract Line (as if you do so - you will consume Contract Line budget within native MS CRM business logic)
4. Opening Contract for Time Logging and Billing. In Contract (assuming that you already have one or several budget bearing Contract Lines) go to Action -> Invoice Contract. There is known bug in MS CRM 4.0 and 3.0, if you do not specify addresses in Contract maintenance screen, you may get error message in trying to invoice contract - so be sure all the addresses are specified
5. Timesheet entry. We tried several different types, and found that the most natural and flexible is Task. Open Case, switch Activities tab and click on New Activity icon. In the Activity dialog screen have your technician to write something in Subject and Description (optional), Due Date (where timesheet record was actually performed), Duration
6. Time Cards approval by manager. In MS CRM managerial position ID should have access to all of his or her employees Cases and Tasks. If task is not completed, manager should be able to edit its content
7. Closing Case. When manager resolves the Case - there is the option to alter billable time (to decrease it, assuming that some time will be written off, or increase if your consultants were extremely efficient and you would like to charge up the work order)
8. Submitting Timecards for Billing. In MS CRM you should not expect advanced billing and accounting features, the best way is to export timecards into text file and import it into your Corporate ERP or Accounting application. You can design timecard export report (with exporting to Excel option) in MS CRM report wizard or you can do it directly via SQL Select statement (not trivial, requires some exposure to SQL Server coding and MS CRM tables structure). Typically you import timelogs to your accounting application in the form of Sales Invoice, where each timesheet line becomes the invoice line
9. Microsoft CRM Timecard Management Add-on. We are recommending simple improvement to timesheet entry, where each of your consultants will have single screen, where all the open tasks will be depicted and from where he or she will have to option to select all the Cases (for new Task creation), associated with MS CRM user ID (where ID is the owner of the Case or is the Case is shared with the ID or the Team, where the ID has the association). We also have timelog approval logic and export to CSV files
10. Additional possible improvements. We also have proven scripts, exporting timesheets from MS CRM Contracts to Dynamics GP via eConnect programming or to SAP Business One via SB1 SDK programming
11. MS CRM Project tracking and billing support internationally. We have MS CRM timesheets module translations to some of the popular languages, such as Russian. However translation to the foreign language is not a big concern for the international customer, as it is all done in exported string resources and could be imported back to CRM
12. How to get additional help? Feel free to call us 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918 or email us help@albaspectrum.com
