i am not sure why this was done this way... it's a bit odd.
here's the way that i think it 'should' be done...
each employee / contractor has a 'cost' ... i pay each of them an hourly rate, or they charge me a flat rate for tasks. fine. openGoo now seems to allow me to track my costs per user if i'm working with employees / contractors who have straight hourly rates. sort of... the report for this isn't really working right... but at least it's a start. i wouldn't really call it 'billing' so much as 'job costing' at this point though.
however... many contractors will bill different rates depending on services, even if performed by the same individual. our company is one of those types... i'm primarily a software designer / architect and charge at a much higher rate for this service, but if no-one else is available to maintain a bug fix for a client we have a maintenance agreement with, i'm not going to bill them my full architect rate for this service... i'm going to bill them the rate that is on the maintenance agreement. there are other contractors and companies we work with who bill us the same way... depending on services. flash work is a different rate from .psd slicing into xHtml. for proper job costing, we would need this on that side ... where employees / contractors can be given different cost rates for different services that they are performing for us. (matching them with our own billing categories).
my suggestion would be that rates need to be specific to the following:
employee / contractor rate
i want to know how much the work is costing me when performed by the individual doing the work. he / she may charge different rates for different services though... as it is right now, there is only the ability to assign a single billing rate to a single employee. i also want to know what (as a default) i'm billing my clients for each employee's time. as is the case with myself... my default bill rate is higher than anyone else in the office. these are two different numbers... what the employee or contractor costs me vs. how much i bill my clients for the employee's time.
workspace rate
i want to know how much to bill the client for. if i have an agreed rate per hour with them, i want to make sure that we're not billing them for more / less than that amount. it seems like this might be addressed under 'administration / workspaces / billing' where it looks like you can assign a different rate for the workspace... (i get: Query failed with message 'Unknown column 'log_data' in 'field list'' when i attempt to make this change. bummer.) i guess this is the best place for this... though i'd also like to see it on the overview for the workspace rather than having to hop into administration to deal with it. (perhaps it was put there to keep away from non-admins?)
task rate
i thought i saw for a second the ability to assign an hourly billing rate for a task (or a flat rate) ... but can't find it now.
product / service
for billing purposes, a task should fall under a billing category (product or service) that has a price associated with it.
so the default hierarchy when reporting on billing should be:
workspace rate / task rate / service rate / assignee rate (who the task is assigned to)
where if there is a workspace rate set, it is used for all tasks except those that have a set task rate. if there is a task rate set, it is used for all tasks except those that have a service rate set. if there is a service rate, it over-rides the assignee's rate. so if there is no workspace rate set, no task rate set, and no service (billing category) assigned to the task, the assignee's rate is used.
i think this offers the best flexibility for multiple billing scenarios. if you've agreed to a billing rate for the client, put it into the workspace. if you need to adjust the billing rate for a task on the fly without adding it to your services / billing categories, you can do that. if you have regular services / billing categories, you can assign the task to one and that is the billing rate that is used... and as a default, if nothing was setup for the billing, the default rate for the user assigned to the task will be used. i would even take it a step further and setup a company wide default rate that is used in the case that no-one has been assigned the task but it was completed by 'someone'.
