Skip to main content

​
From agreement to payment

  1. An agreement with a client sets the rate card: what each role costs per day or hour.
  2. A project runs under that agreement, often against a client’s purchase order.
  3. People are placed on the project at a line of the rate card. Each placement also says what that person costs us, so the margin is known from the first day.
  4. Days are recorded, by the person or automatically for employees, and the month is approved.
  5. The invoice is built from the approved days and expenses, and the purchase order’s remaining amount goes down.
  6. The bank shows the payment, and reconciliation matches it to the invoice.
  7. The books receive the invoice and its payment as journal entries, when someone asks the assistant to bring them up to date.
Bills from suppliers and agencies take the same path the other way: received, read, checked against the approved time, recorded, and matched to the payment that went out. (They do not reach the books correctly yet: TD-40.)

​
The modules

​
Things that hold everywhere

  • What a document names is never deleted. A record that ended is marked so or archived, and stays as a true account of what happened; an issued invoice is never edited.
  • Every change is recorded: who made it, on whose behalf, and why.
  • Approvals are declared. Where a person has to say yes, nobody else can skip it, the assistant included.
  • What a role may not see, it does not get. A cost rate is kept from roles that may not see it; a confidential field such as a salary needs a grant naming it, and every read of one is logged.