Documentation > Jobs & Tasks
This page contains information about Jobs within UCM.
- Create a customer
- Create a job under that customer
- Choose the job task types (Hourly rate, Quantity or Fixed Price)
- Enter a Quote Date on the left
- Create one or more tasks against a job, entering the task hours/quantity/amount/assigned staff member.
- Save the Job - you now have a "Quote" ready to send the customer.
- Email this Job Quote to the customer (look for the email button)
- The Customer can click on a special link in the email to view all the job tasks, the customer can even use the "Job Discussion" feature (if enabled) to add comments or questions against individual tasks within a Job. Very handy!
- Once the customer approves the quote set a "Start Date"
- Click edit next to each tasks as they are completed, for hourly tasks you can input the number of hours worked and the system will automatically calculate task % complete. Alternatively please click on the % to set a manual task percentage completed.
- Handy Hint: clicking on the task percentage from the main task listing will toggle the task as completed or not-completed.
- Once a task is completed there will be a new 'Generate Invoice' button at the bottom
- Clicking this button will generate an invoice for the Customer based on any completed tasks.
Please set the advanced setting 'job_name_incrementing' to 1
Then go and create a job, the job name should start at "1"
Then go back to settings > advanced and look for the new 'job_name_incrementing_next' setting, set this value to the number you wish your jobs to start at (eg: 12345)
To make the Invoice number match the job number please set the advanced 'invoice_name_match_job' to 1.
More info in this blog post: http://ultimateclientmanager.com/2013/03/25/job-task-type-hours-quantity-or-just-amount/
There are two ways to create recurring Invoices, depending on your needs:
- Create a Job (eg: Website SEO Check) and assign tasks to the Job, then pick a Job Renewal Date (see bottom left in Job Advanced area). You can tick the tasks off from a Job and then Invoice for that Job. When the renewal date comes around then a complete new copy of the Job is created with Tasks ready to be ticked off. This works great if you have to physically perform some tasks each time a renewal comes around.
- Create a Manual Invoice (eg: Website Hosting) and choose an Invoice Renewal Date (see the Invoice page for more details).
If you are using the first method with renewing Jobs you can choose to Automatically renew the Job on the renewal date, as shown here:
If the "Automatically Renew" option is selected then the UCM system will create a new complete copy of the Job and Tasks on the renewal date automatically.
If the "Automatically Invoice" option is also selected then the UCM system will automatically mark all new Job Tasks as completed, generate an Invoice for those completed tasks AND send the invoice to the customer. Phwoar!
The dashboard will show an alert when a Job is about to be automatically renewed: