My business is predominantly on a billable time basis with clients on (e.g 3 months) contracts. As such my invoices are always for time and I use the Weekly Timesheet functionality in QuickBooks to track this.
However, I've noticed an inconsistency in the way that QuickBooks tracks hourly rates and the number of decimal places you can use. This is then causing me problems with my invoices with rounding errors.
To help explain. In QuickBooks these are the differences when it comes to decimal places:
- Invoices - 3 decimal places (maybe more, I haven't tested)
- Service - 3 (or more) decimal places
- Time - 2 decimal places
- Employee Billing information - 2 decimal places
Problem
If I first record my time, let's say 8 hours a day, for 5 days a week. I would create a weekly timesheet that has a total of 40 hours on it. Let's also say I earn (random number) £125 a day. If I record the billable time at this point I would therefore book (£125 / 8) 8 hours at £15.625 an hour. However, the timesheet functionality rounds £15.625 up to £15.63, therefore instead of £125, the weekly timesheet shows £125.04 per day. And for the week this rounds up to £625.20. It's not much, but it is inaccurate and my client would not accept this.
Current workaround
When I import the time into the invoice, I can change the hourly bill rate at this point. However, this is an additional step I would like to avoid.
Second workaround
I have created a "Service" and inserted the bill rate there and it does support 3 decimal places. When I create the Timesheet, if I select this service the bill-rate is copied across. And as long as I don't put the cursor in the billable / hr field, the calculation is done correctly for me. But this does not always work and is a bit buggy. So I still find I need to correct a lot of the billable time when it comes to creating invoices.
Question: Can we change the way that billable hours are recorded in Timesheets and for Employees to support more than 2 decimal places? These rounding errors are adding extra work.
