Exact Autumn'21 Release
Come see what's new

From idea to solution in Exact Online for Time & Billing. As an Exact Online client, you can share your ideas and vote on product suggestions. Your feedback is valuable for the continuous improvement of time registration, billing, project management, and more. Over 400 customers cast their votes on over 20 product suggestions that have been implemented in this release. By way of example, it’s now possible to link the turnover achieved on subscriptions to a project, and it’s much easier to correct time entered in the system in one go. Together, we make Exact Online even better!

All your employees have reported their hours for the past week or month, so now you can get started with invoicing. However, before you’re able to turn these billable hours into an invoice, you find that one of your colleagues made a mistake by reporting their hours in the wrong project or using the incorrect hour type, or a client calls asking you to transfer work delivered to another project. In the past, making such corrections to timesheets was a time-consuming job, as you had to correct everything one by one. Now, you can quickly adjust time entries in one go to save you lots of time!

You prefer to have the timesheet as complete as possible. You can complete the timesheet by adding a meeting report or photo, for example. Previously, this option was not available for time entry users. However, it’s now also possible for employees authorised to enter the hours worked to link a file attachment to the timesheet.

The report ‘Entered time & costs’ provides a detailed overview of all time entries in a given period. Based on customer feedback, we now added two new columns with details on who and when approved a specific time entry. You can also export these details to Excel to inform external stakeholders.

During a project, your customers may ask for a quote for additional work to be carried out. When such a quote is accepted, you can now increase the existing project budget and add the additional work to the scope (WBS) of the current project to keep all the information you need together in one project! Now available in Exact Online for Project Management.

When you provide services at a fixed, recurring price through subscriptions, it makes sense for you to know what costs you incur to deliver those services. You can now gain this insight with ease by linking a subscription to a project. When invoicing the subscription, the project will automatically be included in the invoice line. The project overview will then show the recurring revenue, as well as the margin based on the revenue and the costs related to time entries and project-related purchases. This is now available if you use Subscription Management in combination with Exact Online for Time & Billing or Project Management.

You want to avoid loose ends when completing and closing a project in Exact Online for Time & Billing, such as submitted time entries that still need to be approved or hours that still need to be invoiced. When closing a project, you’re now alerted to any outstanding issues so you can tidy up any loose ends immediately. You even prevent future issues from arising, as the project is closed to any future purchase or time entries straight away.

As a project manager, you are responsible for delivering your project within budget. One way to control costs and prevent going over budget on a project is to block purchase invoices and orders for a specific project. This feature has been added following large numbers of requests from clients and prevents new expenses being entered on a specific project.

Digital timesheets help you to give your client an overview of the hours worked. You can now also have your invoiceable hours approved by the client online. What’s more, you can also include useful information such as the name of the approver and date of approval on the invoice specification, so you know exactly who from the department approved the invoice for the hours worked. This avoids questions at a later date, while a more transparent invoice speeds up the payment process. With regard to privacy, it’s now also possible to include only their first name and staff number on the specification instead of their full name.

Timesheets provide an insight into the hours worked and those to be invoiced before you send your invoice to your client. It’s now possible to include work done by multiple employees for one project on a single timesheet, whereas previously you had to send several timesheets to your client. Now, you can present your client with a clear overview of all work performed, regardless of whether it was carried out by one or more employees.

Digital timesheets help you to give your client an overview of the hours worked and those still to be invoiced. These hours can now be approved by your client online, and you give your client an insight into the hours worked before sending them the invoice. This avoids questions and lots of hassle at a later date. We’ve added three new fields based on your feedback, so you can now include the project number, project description and client PO number in the header of the timesheet, which is great when your timesheet refers to a single project. You therefore no longer need to duplicate this information in each column, making the timesheet even clearer.

Exact Online for Time & Billing allows you to work with projects, cost centres and cost units. These analytical dimensions offer you additional options when it comes to financial reporting. As an example, you can use a cost centre to track the costs incurred and income generated by each individual department. From now on, it’s possible to add a cost centre or cost unit to a project classification. Based on this classification, the cost centre is automatically completed in the invoice line, which allows you to see exactly which revenue from invoiced hours or periods can be allocated to a specific cost centre or cost unit.

If a company is to thrive, consultants should spend 70% to 80% of their work hours, on average, on billable work. By default, Exact Online calculates billability by dividing the number of billable hours by an employee’s work hours, regardless of whether an employee is on holiday or sick leave. To gain a better insight into the actual availability and billability, we’ve added the ‘Net Billability’ column to the billability report. Net billability calculates the percentage of billable hours based on the net available hours, i.e., the scheduled hours less the leave and absence hours during that period, to give you a better insight into your employees’ actual productivity. Now available in Exact Online for Project Management.

Using Exact Online you can invoice incurred costs to your customers. For example, you can specify a billable rate per kilometre and invoice your travel distance. These kilometres, and other incurred costs, can be entered into the hour entry screen as a billable cost entry. Until now we only kept the original sales invoice rate of that cost entry. We did not keep track of any cost price changes. Project progress reports were based on the actual cost price of a cost-type item. Now it is possible to specify a start date when changing a cost-price. This start date is then used to determine the correct cost rate. Making sure the costs in your project progress reports are based on the correct cost prices.

Gain insights into several projects at once with our latest enhancement to the project summary report. Now, when you select a reporting period without selecting a specific project, the report will show all projects with transactions during that period to give you an overview of all projects and entries in that time.

The ability to turn billable hours or project invoice terms into an invoice is one of the key capabilities of Exact Online Time & Billing. Firms may use different invoice layouts for different service offerings. To prevent errors in selecting the incorrect layout you can now link an invoice layout to a project classification. Also available for invoice specifications.

In Exact Online for Time & Billing the invoice proposal aggregates all billable hours and planned invoice terms per project or per customer. For a time & material project, the invoice proposal shows all approved billable hours that have not yet been invoiced for that project. Before invoicing, you can create a preview. As from now you can also include a detailed specification of all billable hours included in the invoice. By adding the invoice specification to the invoice proposal print preview you’ll see exactly how the final invoice including a detailed specification is sent or printed.

Client PO numbers are used for projects or subscriptions to indicate the reference or PO number under which clients have placed an order. If this isn’t stated on the sales invoice, the invoice often remains unpaid. For electronic invoicing, however, it’s not enough to simply print this number on the template. That’s why the client PO number for a project or subscription is now automatically copied into the ‘Your ref.’ field for each invoice, so you can be sure it won’t be rejected and you’ll get paid on time. The client PO number will also be copied from the ‘Your ref.’ field in the quote when creating a project from a quote, so the reference used by the client when placing the order is clear during every phase.

Clearer invoices prevent questions from clients and ensure faster payment. That’s why it’s now possible to add project managers to the sales invoice, which can either be added to the header or invoice lines.

A transparent invoice with a clear time specification reduces the number of questions you receive and results in faster payment. Not every project invoice requires a specification of the billable hours, however. One such example is you only wish to add a specification for subsequent project costs, giving you the flexibility to decide whether an invoice specification is needed for each project.

Checking whether clients have paid their invoices shouldn’t be hard work. That’s why we’ve made it easier to track the payment status and expected payment date for a project invoice using the project card.