QBO Billable Expenses – Loveable Improvements

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General Ledger

Yes, it’s that great. The New QBO Billable Expenses features are fantastic. A little change can go a long way, and that's exactly how I feel about this latest improvement, which was rolled out during the QBO redesign.

At first glance, you don’t see the new features, but then it’s like BAM.

So, what are the improvements that I’m so wonder struck by?

The ability to sort billable expenses. For me, this is big. No more messy invoices. I’m stoked.

As long as you have billable expenses turned on inside, QBO PLUS you will be able to use the new sorting features.

You can check to make sure Billable Expenses are turned on by going to Company Gear icon > Account and Settings > Expenses > Bills and Expenses > On

Now you need to create billable expenses, which are defined by Intuit as any work expense you can bill a customer for. For example, travel, materials and time, so you can bill them to that customer on their next invoice.

By selecting Billable and choosing a customer you have created a billable expense:

After all expenses have been added, it’s time to create the Invoice:

Sorting the transactions is the next step in the process, and there are three sorting options:

Sort Option 1: By Date

Sort Option 2: By Type - Time or Expenses

Sort Option 3: Group Time by Service

This sort option needs some explanation. Only Activity Time can be sorted this way:

If you have several types of activities for a client, this sorting option may come in handy.

For example, Tax Preparation, Monthly Bookkeeping or QBO Training might be three types of time activity (shown in this illustration).

Remember, time activities are sorted by the item.

Here’s a closer look at the individual billable expense and billable time activity so you can see why expenses are not grouped, but time activity is.

Hopefully grouping billable expenses willed be rolled out later. I know… I want it all.

Expenses even if you use items are sorted by account and cannot be grouped. Maybe we will get this later.

By the way, it's still possible to use sub-totals on invoices to group expenses.

So let's examine what an invoice with multiple billable expenses looks like:

What's "most excellent" is the fact that you can use all three on the same invoice. For example, you can invoice for only December billable expenses, sorted by Time and Group Time by Type of Service:

It makes for a jaw-dropping super clean and easy to read invoice as you can see below:

"So winner, winner chicken dinner." I'm a happy camper with three new sorting features for invoicing billable expenses. And you will be too – just give them a try.