Customers
Customers are who you're tracking time for and billing. Every time and invoice has a customer associated with it. The name 'customer' is arbitrary. It is just a classification to organize your time. Customers, clients, and projects are all the same thing in HoursLogger. You can set the naming preference in your user settings.
Sharing customers allows other users on your account to view and contribute times for those customers. When a customer is created, you must specify which users you want to have access to the customer. If you don't do this, other users won't be able to view or save times to that customer.
Customers also have settings for billing defaults. You can enter a customer's billing rate and this will be set as the default billing rate when you create a time card for that customer. You can also set a customer's address which will be used when creating invoices for that customer. Below is an example of a typical customer.
Creating Customers
Customers can be created by going to the "Customers" page. There is a link to the customers page in the side navigation.
Click the "New Customer" button.
Fill out the customer details and click "Save".
Customers can also be created on the fly when creating time cards.
When you are selecting the customer, click "+ Add New", enter the customer name and billing info, and click "Save."
If you create a customer this way, make sure the customer is shared with all the necessary users.
Sharing customers allows other users to view and save time to those customers. If a customer is not shared with you, you will not be able to see times or bill times for that customer.
You can update which users a customer is shared with from the edit customer page.
You can also update which customers are shared with which users from the user edit page.
Organizing Customers
There is no "right" way to organize your customers. HoursLogger was built to be as flexible as possible, so there are multiple ways you can organize your customers.
The most straight forward way is to create one customer for each one of your clients. When you track time for each customer, it will make it very easy to bill all the associated times because you will only have to select one customer when billing.
Another common way to organize your customers is to create a parent customer for each one of your clients. Then create sub-customers for the individual project you are working on for that client. This allows for more detailed time cards and analytics. Make sure you select all the associated sub-customers in the time sheet page when putting together an invoice for the parent client.
Default Billing Rates
Customers can be marked as billable and have a default billing rate associated with them.
When timers are started or created, the time card's billable rate is defaulted to the billable rate of the customer.
Billing rates can also be set per user. This will override the customers default billing rate when a time is created by that user.
Note: Customer billing rates can be overridden by "Service" default billing rates if the service is set to override the customer billing rate.
Merging Customers
Sometimes customers get duplicated because two different users accidentally create the same customer with a similar name.
If you need to merge duplicated customers, go to the "Customers" page and click "Merge Customers."
In the popup, select the customer you want to keep on the left and select the customer you want to merge on the right.
This will transfer all users, invoices, and time cards from the 'customer you want to merge' and save them to the 'customer you want to keep'. The merged customer will be deleted once all the users, invoices, and time cards are transferred.
Customers, Clients, or Projects
As previously mentioned, the name 'customer' is arbitrary. It is just a classification to organize your time. Customers, clients, and projects are all the same thing in HoursLogger. You can set the naming preference in your user settings.
