Outsourcing and Disbursements with Xero Practice Manager: Outsourcing Decision Tree

When running jobs in XPM, we have two types of costs. We have time costs, which are created by time sheets against tasks on a job, and we have disbursements. Disbursements are any cost associated with completing the job that is not a time sheet. Disbursements are also known as costs in XPM. These costs could be from subcontractors that do not do time sheets, outsourcing fees, and any general disbursements such as Xero subscription fees. In this section we’ll be covering how to manage each type, and the considerations you need to make.

If you’re uncertain about how to treat the cost of your outsourced or subcontracted service providers, you can use the below decision tree.

It is important under both methods that staff costs are not counted twice against jobs, ie. via a time sheet and via a supplier invoice. It is also important that costs are uniquely identified per job.