Unable to view your Negative WIP balance 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

If job categories do not reflect your engagement types, you will be unable to filter out your fixed-price agreements to view just your billable WIP. This is an important report because your fixed-price agreements usually carry a negative WIP balance, which skews the overall WIP balance. By filtering these out, we can easily see the invoiced time for the practice, and which jobs it is sitting on.

How to resolve this issue

Read Chapter 4: Practice Settings and look at the job settings section. This will explain how to set up your job categories.

It will only take two or three minutes to set up the correct job categories in XPM, but you will then need to run through all your open jobs and update the job categories. The fastest way to update your job categories is by creating a job report in the report builder that has both the job number and the job category. You can then use this report to open up 10 or 20 jobs at a time, edit them, update the job category and save. Once you have updated the 10 or 20 jobs, you can refresh your report and see the job categories update.

Another great tip here is to update the name of your most common job category to represent the most common engagements. By doing this you can cut out a lot of work because the name update might be correct for a large portion of your jobs. For example, if 80% of your jobs have the job category ‘Compliance’, and most of these are time-charge agreements, you may want to update the name of this job category to be ‘Compliance – Billable Fees’. Then you will only need to update a handful of these to be ‘Fixed-price Agreement’.

Timeframe to implement solution

It will take only two or three minutes to update your job categories, but it may take around an hour for every 200 jobs you need to update the job category for. As suggested above, this can be greatly sped up by being clever about how you rename your current job categories.

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