Do you provide services? Whether it's IT and software development, consulting and professional services, a marketing or creative agency, service and technical support, or services for individuals and households – this guide is for you.

The following text is not a detailed manual for every button. It is a map: what needs to be set up in ABRA Flexi, in what order, and why, so you can invoice, know how much you're earning on individual jobs, and submit your tax reports without stress. For each area, we link to a detailed guide.

We show everything in the web interface (WUI). If this is your first time in Flexi, we recommend starting with the article Basic orientation in ABRA Flexi - WUI.

Flexi setup for two different service companies can look completely different. Before you start clicking on anything, answer these five questions – your answers determine practically the rest of this guide.

Regardless of what services you provide, everything starts the same way – by setting up the company and basic registers. This might be the most tedious part, but it's also possibly the most important: a mistake here will carry through to every document in the future.

You'll find everything you need in company setup. Besides the address, company ID and VAT ID, this is where you determine how the whole application behaves.

The following areas are especially key for service providers:

A key question: who all will be working in Flexi? Service providers typically have a combination of owner, project manager or consultant, and an external accountant – and each of them needs to see something different.

You create users following the guide Users in the company - WUI. We recommend enabling two-factor authentication, especially if you give external contractors access to Flexi. You can find out how many users you can have in your license and subscription – you'll also find further information about your license there, as well as the option to add additional users.

A document series determines the numbering of your invoices; a document type is a pre-prepared template (accounting, text, due date, or, for example, bank accounts or other linked document types). Document types are what speed up day-to-day work the most for service providers.

For services, it's generally worth preparing a document type for, e.g.:

You'll find the procedure in the guides Adding a document series and Document types. For a one-off recurring document, a simple document copy also works well.

Without a bank account, there's nowhere on the invoice to tell the customer where to send the money. Set up an account following the guide Setting up a bank account, and a cash register following Setting up a new cash register and creating a cash document.

If you don't want to upload statements manually, consider setting up automatic online bank connection right from the start. For a company issuing a few dozen invoices a month, this one thing saves the most time out of everything in this guide.

If you're not starting your company from scratch, you'll need to transfer data and enter opening balances. The procedure is described in the articles Migrating data from another system to ABRA Flexi, and for accounting migration, Setting opening balances when starting to work in ABRA Flexi.

Before you start bulk importing, once you've finished setup and created your registers, make a company backup. Going back an hour is always better than fixing a thousand rows.

In services, a customer is often a long-term partner, not necessarily an anonymous purchase. That's why the address book isn't just a list of billing addresses – prices, due dates, and communication history all link back to it.

You set up companies following the guide Company address book, and individual contact persons at a company as contacts. Details are pulled from public registers, so usually all you need to enter is the company ID.

Worth using in services:

In services, your "product" is your work. Even so, it's worth having a price list – without one, every invoice is written from scratch by hand, and you have nothing to base your analyses on.

You'll find the price list under Goods – Price list; the procedure for creating a card is described in the guide Price list. What matters most to you will likely be the goods and services group, and the fact that the item is non-stock – a service isn't inventory and shouldn't track stock quantities.

The second thing that matters is the unit of measure. Services most commonly use hour, day, month (for retainers), km (for site visits), or pc (for fixed-price tasks). The unit appears on the invoice and in analyses, so it's worth setting it up sensibly right away. Many units of measure aren't included in Flexi by default – create the ones you need, and don't forget to fill in the print code in addition to the code itself.

Do you have a price list in Excel? Upload it following the guide Imports from Excel - Price list. If you're unsure how to import or don't have time, we're happy to import the data for you – just write to podporaflexi@abra.eu or use the online chat directly in the app.

ABRA Flexi has many features for this situation. An overview of options is provided in Pricing - Overview; specifically, you'll be interested in:

Don't skip this section if you're in services. It's the only difference between "I know I made money last year" and "I know the project for client X was a loss, because we spent twice as many hours on it as we quoted."

ABRA Flexi offers three analytical dimensions that can be combined freely. You add them to documents (e.g., issued and received invoices, or internal documents), and then use them to filter your results.

The procedure is described in the guide Jobs. For a job, you fill in the Name and Abbreviation, the Company (client), Job type, and Job status – both registers can be defined however you like, so set up your statuses to reflect how a project actually moves through your process (e.g., inquiry, in progress, ready to invoice, closed).

You can also fill in the Job scope, Estimated costs and Estimated profit. These figures aren't linked to any documents – they serve as a plan against which you later compare the actual results. This may well be the most valuable piece of information in services.

If you keep jobs in another tool, you can upload them in bulk following the guide Imports from Excel - Jobs.

You create cost centers following the guide Cost centers, and activities following Activities. Both are just registers – you then select a value on the document.

You add the job directly on the document. The advantage is that it carries over across related documents – so if you fill in the job on the quote or order already, it will also carry through to the final invoice, for example.

The primary output is the job analysis print report – it shows you costs, revenues, and the result. It's available in the print reports menu under the relevant job.

The whole cycle, from entering a job through accounting to final evaluation, is described using a sample scenario in the article Entering a job, accounting for it, and subsequent evaluation.

The biggest cost item in services may be people. How to allocate personnel costs to individual jobs – by percentage or by hours – is described in the article Wages for individual jobs (available only in the desktop application). Only take this guide into account if you process payroll in ABRA Flexi.

Now for the main part – how to get the work you've done onto an invoice. We'll describe three scenarios that cover practically every service company: invoicing based on work performed, advance invoicing, and recurring retainers.

If a quote precedes a service order for you, you can manage the whole process in Flexi with documents linked to one another. This is handled by received inquiries, issued quotes and received orders. How documents flow into one another is shown in the article on the so-called Sales cycle.

The main benefit: you don't need to rewrite a quote into an invoice, and the job and agreed prices carry forward with the document. If you send quotes outside of ABRA Flexi, feel free to skip this part and create only the order or invoice.

You'll find the complete reference for this agenda in the article Issued invoices; issuing your first invoice step by step is shown in a video guide.

In practice, the procedure is always the same:

Do you invoice a large number of similar documents from a timesheet spreadsheet? Take a look at importing issued invoices including items from Excel.

For larger projects or new clients, it's common to invoice an advance payment upfront. The whole chain – advance invoice, tax document for the advance payment, final invoice – is described in the article Advance invoice, tax document for advance payment, and final invoice, and the deduction itself in Creating an invoice from an advance / Deducting an advance.

Do you invoice the same thing every month – service support, server administration, licenses, etc.? Then don't write invoices by hand. In ABRA Flexi, recurring invoicing is handled through customer contracts, from which invoices are generated.

Start with the guide Customer contracts; the concept is explained in Contract records. On the contract, you fill in the partner, contract number, variable symbol, dates, and items (name, quantity, price per unit, VAT rate, and posting).

The frequency isn't determined by the contract itself, but by its type. In the contract type, you set:

You'll find practical scenarios in the series Customer contracts in practice: Introduction, Monthly invoicing and Quarterly invoicing. Retainers in euros are covered in the article Customer and supplier contracts in a foreign currency.

Invoiced more than you should have? Use a credit note. Need to invoice additional amounts instead? A debit note handles that. Never correct an issued invoice by overwriting it – for VAT payers, this would cause your reports to no longer match.

Printing and exporting documents is described in the article Print reports. In ABRA Flexi, you also have access to a so-called configurable print report – so you can choose exactly what's included in it yourself. To be able to send invoices by email directly from Flexi, set up an SMTP server.

For IT companies, consultants, and agencies, invoicing abroad is perfectly normal – and it's also the place where errors in reports most often arise.

The most common case: you invoice a service to a company in another member state that has a valid VAT ID, and the recipient pays the tax. The procedure in Flexi is described in Reverse charge - Issued invoices, and comprehensively in Reverse Charge and Reverse charge within the EU.

In practice, this comes down to three things: having the correct country and VAT ID for the customer in your address book, using the appropriate document type with the correct VAT lines on the invoice, and not forgetting the EC Sales List, which must be filed for these supplies.

Do you invoice a client in Switzerland, the USA, or the UK? The setup is described in the article Reverse charge outside the EU. These supplies do not enter the EC Sales List.

If you sell digital services, subscriptions, or online courses to non-business consumers in other EU countries, the One Stop Shop scheme may apply to you. Setup is described in Setting up One Stop Shop, and filing the report in OSS return (currently available only in the desktop application).

If you provide construction or installation work to another VAT payer in the Czech Republic, you're dealing with the regime under §92a. You'll find the procedure in the article Reverse charge (domestic).

Set up currencies following the article Currencies; by default, ABRA Flexi has automatic exchange rate downloads enabled. The common situation where an invoice is in euros but payment arrives in Czech crowns is addressed in the guide Matching a document in a foreign currency with a payment in domestic currency.

In services, you don't have inventory tying up cash – your main operational risk is non-paying clients. That's why it's worth setting up receivables monitoring before anything else on the "nice to have" list.

Uploading statements and matching them with documents is described in the article Loading bank statements and matching transactions with documents, and bulk operations in Payment matching and bulk matching. It's most convenient to have statements downloaded automatically via online bank connection.

An overview of who owes you money and for how long is provided by the aging report. Sending reminders for overdue invoices is handled by Reminders; if you want to send reminders automatically at multiple levels, take a look at the Reminders app add-on.

If your contract includes a late-payment interest clause, use generating penalty invoices. If a client is also your supplier, offsets come in handy.

For job evaluation to make sense, Flexi needs to receive costs as well as issued invoices. For service providers, these are typically subcontractor costs, software, rent, travel, and payroll.

The records are described in the article Received invoices, and paying them in Paying a received invoice/liability. For costs that belong to a specific project (subcontractor, license for a client), don't forget to fill in the job – otherwise it will be missing from your analysis.

Do you pay for cloud services, advertising, or subcontracted work from abroad? Then you're also dealing with reverse charge on the cost side, i.e., so-called self-assessment. The procedure is described in Reverse charge - Received invoices.

You record cash expenses in the cash register. For accounting operations without a link to a partner, use internal documents, and for receivables and liabilities outside of invoicing, use other receivables and other liabilities.

Laptops, a vehicle fleet, or office equipment belong in asset records – the Guide to asset records will walk you through it. Annual licenses and subscriptions that span multiple periods are handled via accrual/deferral.

A video tutorial, Payroll in ABRA Flexi, will walk you through payroll administration; setting up an employee is described in HR records.

If you're a VAT payer, the same ritual awaits you every month or quarter. The Guide to VAT returns and VAT control statements will walk you through it.

We always recommend the following check before filing:

You put data into ABRA Flexi in order to learn something from it. Set up the following outputs right away – not at the end of the year.

Put on your dashboard what you need to see daily – typically unpaid invoices and account balances. Named filters, saved columns, and aggregation panels in document lists are described in the article Working with the new Views. Aggregation in the invoice list is the fastest way to answer "how much have we invoiced this year on this job."

You'll find an overview of all outputs in the article Overview of accounting outputs, and an overview for management in the video guide Management outputs.

You can find out which services are the most profitable for you in the Sales analysis. If you need an output that isn't available in the app, you can prepare a custom query and, for example, display its result as a chart.

Once your operations are running smoothly, the question of what else to save on will come up. ABRA Flexi has a REST API, so you can connect your own tools – typically time-tracking, a project management tool, a helpdesk, or an attendance system.

Don't want to build anything yourself? Check out the overview of add-ons or the add-ons on our website. The most commonly automated task for service providers is generating invoices from contracts via API or automatically sending invoices by email.

No. You don't need to deal with inventory management, reservations, or inventory valuation. However, we still recommend creating a price list – pricing and analyses are linked to it.

There is no dedicated time-tracking module in ABRA Flexi. Hours enter ABRA Flexi in two ways: as a quantity on an invoice line item (with the unit of measure being "hour"), and as a personnel cost allocated to jobs via payroll – see Wages for individual jobs. If you need detailed time tracking, it's usually kept in an external tool and transferred to ABRA Flexi via API.

In the Job accounting analysis. The condition is that you have the job filled in on your documents and that the documents are posted to cost and revenue accounts.

Through customer contracts. Invoice generation needs to be triggered – it doesn't run on its own.

Yes. Set up currencies and exchange rate downloads. Contracts and retainers can also be maintained in a foreign currency.

I don't want to set this up myself. Can you help me?

Yes. All the setup can be done together with one of our consultants – you can request a consultation on any topic on our website.