The Business Advisory Blog

The Business Advisory Blog

Insight, news and updates from Alliott NZ Chartered Accountants, Auckland New Zealand. The views expressed here are the views of the author and should be discussed in further detail should an article be relevant to your individual circumstances.

While every effort has been made to provide valuable, useful information in this publication, this firm and any related suppliers or associated companies accept no responsibility or any form of liability from reliance upon or use of its contents. Any suggestions should be considered carefully within your own particular circumstances, as they are intended as general information only.

Sarah Forman
Published on

For many business owners, racking up charges on behalf of a customer is part of doing business.


For many business owners, racking up charges on behalf of a customer (disbursements) is part of doing business. You can, hopefully, pass on all those disbursements to your customers as billable expenses.
 

The key is to keep track of what charges go with which customer.


Xero allows you to assign items you are billed to a customer as billable expenses by clicking on ‘Assign expenses to a customer’ at the bottom of the bill or when you ‘add details’ when reconciling your bank statements. Once you have selected who the expense relates to it will note  below  the description in bill “Billable expense for xxx”.

Xero assign expenses to customer
When you next invoice a customer you can choose to add them into an invoice. When you enter a customer’s name that has had a billable expense applied to them in the ‘To’ box it will pop up that a billable expense can be added, you can click this to select the expenses you wish to include in this invoice.

You can add each expense on a separate line in the invoice or select to merge them together in a single line. A point to note is that when you have brought expenses into the invoice you needed to change the 'invoice amounts are' box to ‘Tax Exclusive’ for the correct amount to be brought in.

Xero one billable expense can be added

Xero has said they will soon be releasing a Billable Expenses outstanding report which will allow you to review what costs you haven’t charged to a client or customers yet. 
If you've got any further questions or would like to know more, please call us on 09 520 9200.

Topics: best practice bill tracking expenses reduce paperwork Xero