Are you in your usual end of year financial flurry of activity? While you’re busy in Xero reconciling payroll, year-end adjustments and group certificates, don’t forget to give WorkflowMax some attention too.

These six things to check and update in WorkflowMax before 30 June will leave you in a great position for the next financial year – your future self will be grateful you took the time.

1. Update your rates

The new financial year often brings staff pay rises and promotions for staff and perhaps an increase in your fees. If this is the case, you should make sure you update the cost and billable rates of your staff, tasks and costs in WorkflowMax.

Update your staff cost rates and charge out rates by going to ‘Business’ > ‘Settings’ > ‘Staff’. Select the staff member, and change their Base Rate (the cost to your business) and their Billable Rate (what you charge your clients).

To update your costs you can navigate to ‘Business’ > ‘Settings’ > ‘Items’ to update your Unit Cost or Unit Price for each item. Alternatively, you can update these in bulk by exporting your list of costs to a CSV file, updating the figures in Excel and Importing the updated file back into WorkflowMax (remember to select ‘Update Existing’!). For more information on exporting and importing costs, refer to these links: Exporting in WorkflowMax and Importing Costs in WorkflowMax

Of course, notify clients of the increase in rates in advance and check that any retainer fees locked in at lower rates remain viable.

2. Clean up your Work In Progress (WIP)

Just as a business that sells inventory would perform a stocktake at the End of Financial Year, your service and time based business should take stock of what recorded time and costs can be invoiced now or in future versus time that cannot be recovered and should therefore be written off.

Review your jobs and WIP using the Work In Progress module in WorkflowMax. Identify any jobs that are carrying WIP that you think should be invoiced or completed and make the call on whether to invoice the time/costs or write it off.

Reviewing your WIP and cleaning up any outstanding amounts is a good business practice, and should be done at the end of every month, not just at the end of the financial year. This can also be a good time to give clients a nudge about outstanding projects by issuing a final invoice.

3. Review job manager

Similarly, reviewing and updating the status of your jobs will help you keep an eye on what’s happening in your business. While you should be constantly updating job statuses as they change it’s particularly important at year end to complete or cancel any jobs that are no longer active or billable.

4. Reconcile outstanding invoices to accounts receivable in Xero

To ensure your annual sales and outstanding debtors figures in Xero are accurate it’s useful to compare the balance of outstanding invoices in WorkflowMax to the Accounts Receivable balance in Xero.

First make sure any payments received in Xero have been taken up in WorkflowMax by going to ‘Business’ > ‘Settings’ > ‘Xero’ and click on the ‘Import Payments’ button in the left hand menu bar.

Once payments are updated go to ‘Business’ > ‘Invoices’ and confirm the balance of outstanding invoices matches the Accounts Receivable balance in Xero. If there are any discrepancies compare the list of outstanding invoices in WorkflowMax and Xero to identify errors. Common culprits are credit notes applied in Xero or invoices updated in WorkflowMax and re-issued without voiding the original invoice.

5. Roll over annual jobs

If you have any annual jobs it’s time to start planning for rolling these over into the new financial year. Annual jobs might include your internal jobs (eg. for Admin or Leave) or jobs for clients that you leave open. By closing these ongoing jobs at year end and creating new jobs you’re better able to compare performance on those jobs against the previous year. For example you may want to review total billings and cost to service a client on a retainer and compare to prior year.

To roll forward an annual job that hasn’t been set up as a recurring job simply navigate to the Job Information screen, click on the Options button and select ‘Copy Job’. You can then choose the start and end date for the job and make any other changes as required. Once the new financial year rolls in mark the old job as ‘Completed’ to archive these jobs.

An alternative method for rolling forward jobs is to export your jobs list to a CSV file. When it’s exported you can update the Job Name, Job Number, Start and Due Dates before importing your new jobs into WorkflowMax. Tasks and Milestones aren’t able to be copied across however you can apply a job template which can specify a pre-determined list of tasks and milestones. See this WorkflowMax article for more on importing jobs.

6. Lock your WIP

This final checklist item should be performed shortly after the end of financial year. Once all timesheets and disbursements have been entered and invoices raised up to 30 June you should set WIP and Period lock dates as at 30 June to prevent any changes to your WIP and Sales for the period.

This can be done via ‘Business’ > ‘Settings’ > ‘Organisation Settings’ and scrolling down to the Lock Dates section. Setting a WIP lock date of 30 June will prevent time or costs to be added, deleted or edited up to 30 June. Similarly setting a period lock date will prevent invoices from being created, deleted or edited up to 30 June.

If you need further advice on how to get your workflow running smoothly for the year ahead, contact the team at Business Continuum to discuss how we can tailor a solution for you.