by Hrayr Galoyan

Some companies incur expenses on their customers’ behalf, and need to get reimbursed. For example, a real estate management company may need to hire a plumber to fix a leak in one of the properties they manage. Since they don’t own the property, they need to be able to bill the owner for the expense they incurred. Intacct supports this functionality, but only through the Project Accounting module, which includes a lot of other features, and is relatively, and appropriately, expensive. However, for those customers that only need the ability to bill the customers for their expenses, Project Accounting is not cost efficient, because they would only be using a small fraction of the available functionality.

We recently built a module to address this need. It works with AP Bills, Employee Expenses, and Journal Entries, and allows converting all of these transactions into AR Invoices. Here is an example of how a customized AP Bill looks.

A new field is added on the detail level called “Bill to Customer.” If this checkbox is selected, then the customer dimension needs to be populated as well. The application uses these two fields to determine which bills need to be converted into AR Invoices, and which customer needs to be billed. Employee Expenses and Journal Entries are customized similarly.

Once expenses are entered, the user gets a chance to review them before billing customers. The figure below shows an example of the review process.

The application shows the expenses grouped by customer, and the user can pick and choose which ones are to be billed. Hitting the Bill button generates the AR invoices and produces a report of what was done.

The AR invoices are distributed to the same GL accounts as the expense transactions, thus clearing them. Now it is only a matter of collecting the respective amounts from the customers. This customization is easy to use and minimizes human errors, while ensuring that no billable expenses go unprocessed.

Contact us for more information about this solution.