Invoice Item Categories and Using ITFlow as a VoIP Reseller

cybershieldms

I'm planning to have as part of my MSP offering, white-labeled VoIP. I've got an interesting problem that I'd love other thoughts on…

With VoIP, I will be having to track fees (just like taxes) but instead of being a percentage they will be flat rate. Probably the most complicated one is I have to change $1.00 per location for E-911 that I send to each individual county. In my state, we have 82 counties, which means I need to easily create a tax report for "County Name - E911" for each month. to easily figure out how much to write the check for.

As it stands right now here's an example of what will be a typical recurring invoice:

VOIP Service Line 1 $25 (sales tax applies)
VOIP Service Line 2 $25 (sales tax applies)
E-911 - County Name $1.00 (no sales tax)
E-911 Training Fee (State) $0.05 (no sales tax)
State Sales Tax for Telecommunications (7% on $50) $3.50

And before someone comments, yes I could just not charge this to the customer, but if I'm ever audited, I need to have records showing exactly how I collected these fees and taxes.

Would creating these standard fees as a product and assigning them to a category with the same name be the way to do this and give me the monthly reports I need?

cybershieldms

So I gave it a test and it looks like the product categories are ignored and the Invoice category is used instead…

wrongecho

Hey @cybershieldms

So Products are not 100% integrated into Invoices.
On the backend, the data is just copied - not properly referenced. Income is grouped by the Invoice category as a whole, not the product category. If you wanted this to show up in the income report, you'd need to invoice the E911 separately.

Invoicing limitations aside, the way to track this for auditing might be with per-client per-county expenses?:

cybershieldms

wrongecho - That works for the expense side. The tricky part is coming up with the totals to send the counties. The counties don't bill me. I'm suppose to come up with the total and turn it in.

I'll have to study the code and see what is happening. If I can figure out a way to do product category income reporting, do you think that would be beneficial to the project? Doing for myself is one thing, but I can figure out to do this in a way that helps everyone, that's I want to do.

wrongecho

cybershieldms - Oh I see.

I'm totally up for you to take a stab at it, but it's not really "reporting" - the data isn't even there in the first place.

An Invoice looks at the tables invoices and invoice_items. The invoice category is tracked in the invoices table. When items are added (either manually or when copied from a product, they get added into invoice_items.

We'd need to add a column in invoice_items to track either the original product, or the product category, or both. Then we could adjust reports to show Invoice by Category and Invoiced Item by Category.

Out of interest, how are you going to be billing usage?

cybershieldms

Another angle but not as flexible… what about charging as a tax? Of course that would mean implementing a flat rate tax option besides percentage.

So in this example, the VoIP - E911 County Name product would actually be price $0.00 but Tax "E911 County Name: Flat Rate$ 1.00"

wrongecho

cybershieldms

I wouldn't wanna do a flat rate tax, it's a percentage everywhere in the app.

Depending on the number of lines, you could bill for SIPS x 0.01 at a 10000% tax rate. You'd be a few pennies over per line but it would show up nicely in invoices.

(Obviously a long term solution would be that we properly add categories for invoice items).

cybershieldms

wrongecho Usage? If you mean like minutes, at least for the US and VoIP, I can offer unlimited flat rate plans. I won't be offering International calling or anything that would require anything more then me billing a flat rate monthly subscription.

I'll take a stab at it and see if I can add product category tracking to Invoices. This could become something very useful for reporting.

johnny

I agree I think we need to add an invoiceitemcategoryfor each line item

Basically another column under the invoice details page to select item category defaulting to the invoice category or if a product is selected defaulting to the product's category.

This is good for invoices where if I sell a computer which requires a 7% sales Tax for where I live and if I also provided service like on-boarding fee which would be considered non taxable so two different categories, and easily trackable via tax report and income categories.

cybershieldms

johnny Yes! "This is the way!"

So for the Income Summary report, does it make sense to add a filter or toggle to display product vs invoice level categories? Doesn't really matter for my use case, but just trying to think this out big picture.

johnny

@cybershieldms You know I'm wondering I don't think Invoices really needs a category just the line items need a cagtegory.

Everything should be calculated by line item categories.

My suggestion would be a small migration to select all invoices get current invoice category copy that category to the line items category of that invoice. Once this has been migrated then delete the category field for invoice as this wont be needed any more, then update all reports.

This will allow for more accurate reporting.

wrongecho

johnny

Devils advocate:-

You may have two distinct products in different categories that you invoice together so you can report on them together.

Like say I invoice monthly fees and SaaS stuff in the same invoice as Managed Services category (and break fix separately), I want to be able to report on what my managed services income was as a whole. It would also be great to see what the income breakdown by the product categories too, but usually we just want it all put together.

Doesn't affect me personally, but conscious some people might be using it like this.

johnny

so yeah makes sense to keep both