It’s been a busy month with several big features to our resource scheduling app walking out the door, but we’ve saved the best to last (well for this year anyway).
Using your Resource Schedule as an Invoicing Tool
The idea to add invoicing features has been on our roadmap from the beginning because we knew it would be extremely useful to our clients. After all FoxOMS is a resource scheduling tool that already has all the booking information for your resources, so it makes sense to complete the chain and offer an end to end workflow for capturing and charging for work completed. The missing piece of the puzzle was creating a ‘rate card’ system to allow hourly and daily rates to be multiplied on booking durations. We’ve called that missing piece of the puzzle Rate Schemes.
What is a Rate Card?
For those who may unfamiliar with the term, a Rate Card is a document that contains the prices and descriptions that you’ll charge for your resources and services. In the media and production industries, rates are usually charged either hourly or daily.
What is a Rate Scheme?
A Rate Scheme is best thought of as a set of instructions that can be applied to 1 or more resources. Rate Schemes contain the really important information of how your resources should be charged at per hour, or per day.
For example, lets assume you are Post Production agency and have 5 Edit Suites that you charge $300/hour, or a flat rate of $1500/day. You’d create a single Rate Scheme that applies those hourly and daily costs to all 5 resources.
With that single Rate Scheme in place, now when you generate a commercial invoice for any of those edit suites, FoxOMS will automatically calculate the amount that should be payable based on the length of the booking, and the information contained about the resources within the Rate Scheme.
FoxOMS Rate Schemes are Rate Cards turned up to 11
Rate Schemes offer far more than traditional rate cards often found in production companies, and they offer many advanced features that allow you to automatically account and charge for the following conditions.
- My resources cost $x, until 6PM, after that time we need to add a surcharge to pay for staff to stay back in the office.
- I want to charge a different rate for resources booked over the weekend.
- We have a quiet time on our resource schedule next month, I want to apply a discount of 10% to all bookings in June.
- I want to apply a special discount for a particular project or client
Anyone confused yet?
FoxOMS Rate Schemes can be configured to watch for these conditions and automatically apply them to quotes and invoices generated from your bookings. Rate schemes make it easier to charge correctly for your projects and bookings.
More improvements to how you invoice for your resources
There are many other features of the quoting and invoicing that we’ll be covering in future documentation soon. The best way to see how the new module can work for you is to sign up for FoxOMS Scheduling trial here and follow this documentation article on configuring the various settings related to the sales module.
