Help - How do you manage travelling jobs?

[drpcfix]

This is a new problem for us - we were just local for quite some time.

We are starting to travel more and more for work, installations, etc. It used to be a couple trips a year, no big deal, now it can be a couple per month.

Going back in the online banking to try to figure out what expenses go with what doesn't work any more..

How the heck do you manage this from a process/paperwork/billing standpoint?

This is what I'm thinking of doing for now;

Start a spreadsheet for each job, as I buy big ticket items, enter them immediately, paste the receipt on a secondary worksheet. After the trip, pile of odds-n-ends receipts can be entered in to backfill the spreadsheet.

This still seems under-optimized, and paperwork heavy.. Is there a service for this???

Would love to hear about what others do for any type of similar problem.

 

[thecomputerguy]

This is a new problem for us - we were just local for quite some time.

We are starting to travel more and more for work, installations, etc. It used to be a couple trips a year, no big deal, now it can be a couple per month.

Going back in the online banking to try to figure out what expenses go with what doesn't work any more..

How the heck do you manage this from a process/paperwork/billing standpoint?

This is what I'm thinking of doing for now;

Start a spreadsheet for each job, as I buy big ticket items, enter them immediately, paste the receipt on a secondary worksheet. After the trip, pile of odds-n-ends receipts can be entered in to backfill the spreadsheet.

This still seems under-optimized, and paperwork heavy.. Is there a service for this???

Would love to hear about what others do for any type of similar problem.

Freshbooks.com
$29.95 Per month
Get a credit card for all employees who should have access to purchasing on company credit.
Add Credit card to freshbooks to auto add expenses
Save all receipts and take pictures of them on phone, plug phone into computer, transfer images ... attach images (once a month).
Invoice clients through freshbooks to get an idea of P&L

Thats what I do ... I tried quickbooks, it sucks. Excel isnt designed for what you are doing so it will be a PITA and you'll eventually stop doing it.