Not closing jobs in Xero Practice Manager

This article is an extract from the book 'Everything you need to know about Xero Practice Manager'
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Background of this issue

A common mistake is to not close annual jobs and instead have jobs that are open forever. Annual jobs have a defined set of tasks that represent the engagement. Once those tasks are completed, the job should be closed so we can assess its profitability. If jobs are not closed, it creates a wide range of issues with our reporting because we are unable to report on the profitability of our jobs, because write-offs are not recognised and the jobs are always in progress.

If you have a job set up to capture general billable queries, this job can be left open indefinitely. This is because this job does not have a fixed set of deliverables.

How to resolve this issue

To resolve this problem, you will need to create new jobs to represent the current engagements for each client, then migrate all invoices, time sheets and costs that relate to the current year over to the new engagements you have just created. You will therefore have a new job that has the invoices, time sheets and cost that relate to the current year, and the old job that has everything prior to that.

To migrate the current year’s time sheets from the old job to the new job, click into the job, select ‘Options’, then ‘Move Time Sheets’. You will then be asked to select which job to send the time sheets to. Select the new job, then hit ‘Save’. To migrate the costs over, add the relevant costs to the new job then delete them from the old job. To migrate the invoices, if they are time and cost invoices you will need to delete them then recreate them on the new job. If they are fixed-price agreements, read Chapter 10: Invoicing and look at the section on fixed-price agreements for advice on how to move these over.

This can be a very big task because you are required to set up a new job for each client and move the current year’s time, costs and invoices across. The other option is to wait until the end of the financial year. This will greatly reduce the amount of work required because you will see out the current financial year with your current job structure, and get all your engagements prepared to roll over for the next financial year. Read Chapter 7: Setting Up Engagements on how to do this correctly.

Also read Chapter 8: Project Management and look at the job close-out section for a checklist on how to close jobs correctly.

Timeframe to implement solution

The timeframe to fix this varies greatly depending on whether you make the fix during the current financial year, or wait until the end of the financial year. If you make the change during the current financial year, you should budget approximately 20 minutes per client to create a new job and migrate the time, costs and invoices over to the new jobs. If you choose to see out the current financial year, you will only need to set up new engagements for the upcoming year, so there is no need to move invoices, time and costs.

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