Managing Third Party Costs and People in Streamtime? This article, inspired by a webinar led by Brooke, with her vast agency management experience, and Michael, our product team's Streamtime expert, is here to guide you. While another article covers Costs and Expenses in general, this one goes deeper, offering real-world examples for agency tasks.
🤷♂️What is an Expense?
An expense in Streamtime can encompass anything paid for, such as parking, or any third-party cost on a job, including flyers, freelance designers, subcontractors, accommodation, or allowances for illustrations or printing. It's essential to distinguish between Items and Expenses: Items are costs sold to the client where the cost to the business is the team's time. In contrast, Expenses are costs sold to the client where the cost to the business is money (e.g., receiving an invoice for it). Examples of Expenses include flyers, freelance designers, subcontractors, accommodation, parking, purchase orders, and budget allowances.
🤨 Purchase Orders vs Expenses
An expense is a cost that the business has already paid for. It could be for things like materials or services. Sometimes the business charges the client for these costs, but sometimes it doesn't.
A purchase order is different. It's a document that a business sends to a supplier when it wants to buy something. The document tells the supplier what the business wants to buy, how much it will pay, and when it will pay. The supplier uses the purchase order to know what to send and when to start working on the order.
⚙️ Setting Expenses In Master Settings
You can set up common expenses in the master settings, like printing costs or hosting. These can be matched with your rate cards, and you can set them as a unit rate or with a standard markup rate.
For more details about setting up expenses in the master settings, check out this article
📝 Reporting
Just like anything in Streamtime, you can create custom reports on expenses. In this section, we briefly discuss expenses and reporting, as well as how expenses can be sent to your accounting package.
For more details on custom reports, check out this article.
For more information about integrating your accounting package with Streamtime, check out these articles
📐 Expenses and Templates
If you've ever been on a webinar with Brooke before, you'll know that she loves a good template. In this quick section, we show you how expenses can be included in templates.
If you'd like to hear more about Brooke's passion for templates, check out our in-depth guide on templates here.
➕ Including Expenses On Quotes
When you send a quote to a client, you usually want to include your expenses on that quote. But sometimes, you might want those expenses labeled differently or placed in a separate section on the quote. In this section, we show you how to do just that.
If you want more information about quoting in Streamtime, check out this article
✅ Logging Expenses
You've got to keep your finance team happy, right? In this section, we show you how to log an expense against your expense budget
🔄 Converting An Expense To Purchase Order
So you've included an expense for an illustrator in your quote, and it's been approved. Now you need to convert it to a purchase order. This section will show you how to do that.
🧾 Job Cost Reports
If you want to see your overall customer job, including all expenses and time, the quickest way to do that is to run a job cost report.
For more information on the Job Cost Report (JCR), check out this article
👨🏽🎨 Freelancers
We briefly touch on how to manage freelancers in this section. For a more in-depth look at how to manage freelancers, have a look at this article.
💸 Reconciling A Single Invoice For Multiple Clients
Often you will get an invoice from a supplier such as your hosting provider that covers multiple clients, this section will show you how to manage this.