Jobs

A Job is used to track work we are doing for a customer.

How you use a Job is fairly flexible but generally I recommend creating a Job each time a customer books a service. If you are working on a Job and the customer wants to add another task then just add a Task to the existing Job.

A job is associated with a single Customer and Site (a Site is an address associated with a customer) . Quoting and Invoicing is done against a Job.

Within a Job you create Tasks, a Job must have at least one Task, but often has many Tasks.

A task is where we track the time and materials used on the job and where we start when doing job estimates.

As an example you might create a job called:

'Shed and Gates'

Then within the Job you might have the following tasks

• order shed

• build shed

• order gate latch

• install gate latch

How you break down the set of tasks is really up to what you find convenient.Read up on Tasks

Read the section on Tasks for more details

Once you have a Task you can add a checklist to track items that you need to take or purchase to complete the task.

Items in your checklist that are marked as 'buy' can be seen in the shopping list - so next time you go to the hardware store you can access a single shopping list, mark items as completed and track how much you paid for each item.

Items in your checklist that are marked as 'Tools - own' or 'Materials - stock' are added to your packing list.

Creating a Job

You create a Job by clicking the '+' icon on the Job list screen (top right corner).

Enter a Job name and select a customer from the drop list. If it's a new customer then click the '+' icon next to the Customer drop list to add a new customer. Whilst adding the customer you should add a contact and site.

Choose the billing type:

• Time and Materials (T&M) (aka Cost Plus) - you will bill the customer for your time at an agreed hourly rate plus the cost of any materials (possibly with a margin).

• Fixed Price (Fixed) - you will bill the customer an agreed amount possibly using milestone payments.

Billing Rates

The System screen allows you to enter a default Hourly Rate and a default Booking fee. When creating a Customer you can set an alternate Hourly Rate or Booking fee which will then be used for Jobs and Tasks associated with that Customer. When creating a Job you can enter a specific rate for that Job, otherwise it will default to the customer rate or if none, the system rate.

Estimating

Estimates are created using Estimator.

Quoting

Quotes from within HMB are created from a Job and the set of Tasks associated with a Job. To create a quote you first create the Job then build the estimate using the Estimator. From the Estimator you can create a quote.

Invoicing

Invoices are also Job centric, if you are running a Time and Materials (T&M) project then you can create progress Invoices as you record time against a job. If you are running a Fixed Price project then you can create milestone based invoices.