Many firms choose to round their staffer’s time entries on client invoices to simplify their billing and invoicing processes. BigTime users who are set up as system administrators will be able to configure their firm’s timesheets to round billable time entries up or down based on a time frame of their choosing. To view and edit these settings, they can start by going to TIME/EXPENSE…TIMESHEETS from their main navigation bar.
Once in their timesheet window, they’ll click the GEAR icon in the top right corner of their screen to open their timesheet settings.
There are two rounding options available in the timesheet settings window: ENTRY ROUNDING and BILLABLE ENTRY ROUNDING.
The ENTRY ROUNDING field affects the hours that staffers enter and see on their timesheet, whereas the BILLABLE ENTRY ROUNDING field only impacts hours that clients are billed for. You can set different values for each field, or leave only one of them blank.
Let’s say we leave the ENTRY ROUNDING field empty, but we set the BILLABLE ENTRY ROUNDING field to ¼ HOUR (15 MIN).
This means that whatever hours our staffers enter will remain the same on their timesheet, but when those hours are added to a client invoice, they will be rounded to the nearest quarter hour.
In the example below, our staffer Charlie Brown entered 1.23 hours on his timesheet for the week. Since we didn’t fill out the ENTRY ROUNDING field, the hours he sees in the TOTAL HOURS column will also be 1.23.
However, since we set the BILLABLE ENTRY ROUNDING field to ¼ HOUR (15 MIN), the value we’ll see in the HOURS (BILLABLE) column of our WIP invoice will be rounded up to 1.25.
After setting up your billable time entry rounding, remember to click UPDATE TIMESHEET FORMAT to save your changes.