WIP Balance on Internal 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

No WIP should ever be showing on an internal job. However, this can sometimes arise when the tasks on the internal job have not been flagged as non-billable. The problem this creates is your WIP balance will be incorrect, and subsequently your WIP multiple and any other WIP metrics we want to look at.

How to resolve this issue

To resolve this issue, read Chapter 7: Setting Up Engagements and look at internals jobs under the general guidelines section. This will give you an understanding of how to set up internal jobs effectively, and how to avoid accumulating WIP on them.

Once you have set up your new jobs based on the information in Chapter 7: Setting Up Engagements, you will need to remove the WIP from your current internal jobs. There are two approaches to this. You can either update all the time sheet entries to be non-billable, or you can do a WIP write-off. It is best to update the time sheet entries to be non-billable, otherwise all your internal time sheets will be recognised as productive time that has been written off.

To update the time sheets to be non-billable, you will need to move them to your new jobs and update the billable status of them when they are moved. You do this by clicking into the jobs that have the time sheets you wish to update, hit ‘Option’, then select ‘Move Time Sheets’. You will then be asked which job to send the time sheets to. Select your new internal job, and the corresponding tasks. There is a checkbox that says ‘Update billable status to destination tasks’. This will ensure the time sheets are updated to non-billable when they arrive on the new job.

Timeframe to implement solution

The time it takes to update the billable status of the time sheets depends on the number of time sheets you have on the job. As you are only able to select a limited number of time sheets at a time, it may take anywhere from five minutes up to an hour. It is certainly worth doing this rather than writing the time off, to ensure historical reporting is accurate.

There are some extreme circumstances where XPM crashes when moving time sheets due to the volume of time sheet entries. This may happen when there has been an internal job open for many years, and there are a lot of staff in the organisation. If this occurs, first try contacting Xero support to see if they can help. If not, you may need to bite the bullet and do a WIP write-off.

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