Your Billing, Simplified: Introducing the New Purchases Module

Accelo enables you to easily charge clients for work done, materials, and expenses accrued, which are critical in making sure you get paid. While time is often the main cost to service-based businesses like digital agencies, IT consulting and engineering firms, as well as managed service providers, we knew we were missing the other side of the profit equation: purchases.

Purchases are similar to invoices except, rather than sending an invoice to a client, you’re sending a purchase to a vendor. After speaking with so many clients, the logic was clear: tracking materials and expenses isn’t good enough - you need to have a mirror image of your invoices, and that’s where purchases come in.

The next step in your financials

Today, we’re excited to launch the new Purchases Module - to give you a more flexible way to track the costs you incur for client work, so that you can have orders fulfilled quickly, get paid faster and simplify your workflow even more.

Accelo has supported Materials (products) and Expenses like taxi fares, hotels, and flights that often occur in service businesses, since launching our new Invoicing module last year. Material and Expense costs are less volatile than your team’s time, like five minutes on a task for one project and then ten minutes on something else. Still, after our Invoicing upgrade, it was clear that Purchases were the right next step in financials to make your billing more seamless than ever before.

Here’s how it works:

The Purchases module allows you to record the purchases you’ll be making from a vendor for the Materials and/or Expenses needed in order to complete a project, ticket/issue, or retainer/contract you’re working on for a client.

Creating and sending Purchases

You can create a Purchase from a Project, Ticket/Issue, or Retainer/Contract. When you create a purchase, you’ll be able to choose:

• A template (optional), which can preset most of the details including vendor, PDF format, and more

• Which Materials and Expenses to include as line items

• Shipping and delivery information (optional)

• Payment due date and terms

• Whether to create a PDF purchase or not

• To create a new Material on the fly

If you look at the Project Overview screen, you can see all of your requirements, service installations, and so on there. Then, if you go over to your Materials, you can see all of the things you need for that project (like mice or keyboards if you help businesses implement technology systems or AdWords for SEM campaigns). Once it’s time to buy those materials from the vendor, you can flip over the Purchases screen and create a ‘purchase’ for those items.

Quick tip: if you buy some materials from one vendor, and others from another, you can remove those line items in your purchase and have the amount, ledger, and tax codes reflect those details automatically. You can also have those items, their delivery info, internal notes to the vendors, and more all visible with the terms of when payment will be made.

Your workflow, streamlined

The Purchases module has three primary objectives:

1. Easily bundle the ‘costs’ of materials and expenses that get incurred into a purchase, (which has a ‘vendor’), with each Material and/or Expense as an ‘item’ on that purchase.

2. Automatically push your ‘purchase’ to your accounting system as an accounts payable invoice so that it’ll appear on your income statement as a profit or loss. That way, you can run a report in your accounting system and know that your data is accurate.

3. Gives you the option of creating highly customizable purchase in a PDF file so that you can send it to the vendor in question and benefit from Accelo’s activities, attachments, and email tracking to keep tabs on the acceptance and fulfilment of the purchase.

Our logic: let’s get the costs in your business today related back to the work you’re doing in Accelo with an actual purchase - so that it can automatically flow into your accounting system and allow you the option of creating a purchase document.

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Making the complicated simple, yet flexible

Purchase Templates:

Purchases are often complicated (and intimidating) for team members because they’re so customizable, with lots of information that changes depending on the client in question. That’s why we created Purchase Templates. With Purchase Templates, you can preset formats with defaults for things like payment terms, titles, and notes - so everything is ready for someone to come in and quickly fire off.

Templates make Purchases easy to use, and you can create different templates for different vendors.

You can customize the PDF and choose what you want to show.

Think: template and purchase title, purchase owner, default vendor and item codes, custom fields, optional shipping info, vendor notes (i.e. hey, if this can’t be delivered by Wednesday, we can’t use it), the email itself where the purchase is attached, and the purchase item descriptions in PDF like quantity, rate, amount, and more.

Tying it all together

Once you create a purchase, you’ll be able to see it under a consolidated list of purchase and invoices called ‘Billing’. To keep things simple, Purchases will have a red outgoing icon, and invoices will have a green one. Plus, you’ll be able to see if there’s an outstanding balance on the purchase. Only care to see Purchases or Invoices on their own? No problem - the Billing tab lets you filter for that.

Sync everything with your accounting system

While Accelo isn’t an accounting system in its own right, it is the source of truth for a lot of information that you need to see in your accounting system! That’s why syncing your Purchases with Xero and QuickBooks Online is central to this new module.

Have your Purchases sync with your accounting system automatically, just like with Invoicing. Tip: Remember to re-import your Account & Tax Codes from your Integrations page in Accelo to use the right Cost/Expense account codes and taxes!

Accelo will automatically push new vendors across when a purchase is made, and when you pay vendors in Xero or QuickBooks, your payment will be imported into Accelo automatically, for data that’s updated and synchronized across your business. 

We’d love to hear what you think - let us know in the comments below! If your business has a specific use case or is really benefiting from this new module, please let us know so that we can feature you on our blog and across our social channels. Of course, if you have any questions or issues, visit our Help Pages, or let our Support team know -  they’re here to make sure you’re successful.