I have multiple clients that have the same parent company (client). Both the parent client and the specific child client pay for projects. If a parent client could be created to have the child clients associated with it, it would be easier to invoice specific projects to who is responsible for payment. Also, the parent client has a retainer that deducts projects from all companies. If the parent client retainer can deduct projects from all child clients or the retainer panel not associated within a client (separate window/panel) so that individual projects can be associated to a retainer.
Date
Votes
3 comments
-
Rob Sherrard - Imageer I have a somewhat similar situation where many of my Clients are independent real estate agents who work at a brokerage. As independent agents, the work I do for them is not billable to the brokerage, yet it is desireable for addressing purposes to send things in care of the brokerage. My solution for this is to enter each agent as a client - Last Name, First Name so that they show up in the Client navigation pane alphabetically by last name. I then enter the Contact information in Contacts. For linkage to the brokerage, I created in Contacts a Custom Field "CompanyName"
Invoices and reports are addressed: <!--ClientContactName-->, <!--Contact-CompanyName--> … This allows inclusion of the Contact Name in First Name Last Name sequence and the Company Name.
Other clients who are part of a regular business (which would include your parent company) are entered in the normal way, but also get the business name entered in the Custom Field for conformity with the setup for invoices and reports. Using this arrangement would allow for billing to either child clients or parent client as appropriate.
-
Nathan Billman Thanks Rob, that's an interesting approach that I'll have to think about. My bigger concern is the retainer for the parent company and how to deduct projects that are associated to the child client to the parent company's retainer. The parent company receives a monthly retainer update detailing all projects deducted from the original fee. Since these have numerous projects listed at one time and not an invoice per project, I'm not sure how to accomplish this. I appreciate your feedback and I'll look into that process and see if I can work on a work around for the monthly retainer update.
-
Rob Sherrard - Imageer Without understanding your whole process, my approach to the Parent pay-by-retainer, would be to include the child name in the work item description for anything that would come out of the parent retainer. Those work items would all be in the parent client area as described in the last paragraph of my first response. If you then did a monthly invoice for all those items which were earmarked for payment-by-parent you would have an itemized list of all the work items which the parent paid out of retainer with the child name as part of the work item. When that invoice is created, all the line items would automatically be paid out of the retainer set up for the parent client. Work done for and paid by a child client would be handled in the child client's area as described in my first paragraph.
Please sign in to leave a comment.