Reimbursed Expenses- best way to handle?

[ACisler]

I handle the acct for a PR and communications firm. We incur a lot of expenses on behalf of our clients (advertising, printing, graphic design work, etc) and I'm struggling with the best way to handle. Some of the expenses are charged specifically to a client, some are part of a retainer and others are part of a project cost. The retainer and project work is not specifically charged back to the client but we obviously want to be able to track all expenses related to retainer work, projects, etc.

The reimbursed expense functionality does not work for us for a number of reasons- it's too simplistic for the various situations we have.

My ultimate goal is to be able to run a P&L by customer (preferably by groupings of retainer, project work, etc) and also have a control in place that properly accounts for expenses that we need to be reimbursed for.

Would you code reimbursable expenses to prepaid and then check that account every week for invoicing that needs to be completed? Also, are classes a good way to track your P&L by customer to a sublevel of retainer, project, other?

Your help is greatly appreciated!

[lisa_mn]

Every expense that you incur can be marked for the particular client:job and can be marked billable or not. If it is directly billable, then it can easily put on an invoice if it's marked billable. If it's not billable, then click the invoice icon to X it out and it's not available to be billed while still marking the charge for the customer. Then you can run the P&L by job and you'll see income and expenses for each client.

This should work beautifully for you - what's "too simplistic" about the system?