Pastel Partner - How to invoice travel kms per customer?

[cagenuts]

I may not have made too much sense in the subject line but essentially I need to invoice my customers for travel.

Is there a way to automatically add the kms when I invoice a call-out for example. At the moment we need to look at a table and this in turn leads to inconsistencies and mistakes.

Should I rather just create inventory items per customer?

Does Pastel have an option to automatically add the travel and call-out charges when I invoke say a labour charge or is everything a manual process?

Thanks.

[Neville Bailey]

If you have created Travel charges as a service inventory item, you will need to manually capture the number of kms to be charged, although you can set up a default rate per km.

[cagenuts]

Thanks Neville

The rate is a fixed price but the actual distances vary of course. Is there a way to pull this figure from say a user-defined field in the customer account? Or even if it's not automatic, could that user-defined field (pre-populated with the customer specific distance) automatically be inserted into a line item? This would then have the effect of displaying the kms for the bookkeeper to punch into the quantity field.

Am I making sense?

[Neville Bailey]

Unfortunately it isn't possible to do exactly what you are asking.

However, there is a work-around, but there is a downside to it.

If you use the Customer Prices option (Edit...Customers...Customer Prices), you could predefine the travel charge for each customer account, with a quantity of 1 and a unit price of whatever the the calculated value of the travel charge is for each customer. The downside is that the invoice will not display the number of kms charged, but only the total travel charge, but it will reduce the risk of human error when charging for travel.

[Mike C]

Unfortunately it isn't possible to do exactly what you are asking.

I know that this might sound a bit unorthodox, but would it not be possible to create the customer's name as an Inventory Item with the distance to their place of work as an entry. So you call up Mike and it "enters" Traveling 120km ? Just a thought ... I haven't tried it at all.

[Dave A]

If you use the Customer Prices option (Edit...Customers...Customer Prices), you could predefine the travel charge for each customer account, with a quantity of 1 and a unit price of whatever the the calculated value of the travel charge is for each customer. The downside is that the invoice will not display the number of kms charged, but only the total travel charge, but it will reduce the risk of human error when charging for travel.

Thinking about that - If you're going to get out of the box like that, rather capture just the kilometers as the rate in the Customer specific pricing line item.

Then use your per kilometer rate as the quantity when you invoice (I'm assuming you can go to decimal places in the quantity field in Pastel). This way when your rate per kilometer changes, you don't need to change scads of customer specific rates.

If you can only use whole numbers for quantity there's still a solution, but explaining it isn't worth it if it's not an issue.

[Neville Bailey]

Now that's "out of the box" thinking Dave!

Excellent suggestion!