Your business details can include information for multiple branches/offices in Administration >> Settings >> Office Settings in AbtracOnline.

These Offices or Branches can also be applied to each employee, job or project and carried through to invoicing and analysis.
You can then run reports by office – comparing performance and profitability between branches and managing workflow.

It is also useful when you have one tax entity but different physical addresses, and different invoicing and accounting requirements between locations.

There’s also an option to limit access for Abtrac users by office, enabling them to only view and edit offices to which they have been assigned.

When using multiple offices in Abtrac, there are a few things to bear in mind.

Offices can be assigned to

• Clients
• Jobs/Projects
• Employees
• Invoices

Your office information is stored under Administration >> Settings >> Office Settings. Where multiple offices are created, you must choose one as the default office.

Reporting and Filtering by Office

When reporting by Office, the focus of the report is the subject.

If it is a job report, then the focus is job office. If it is employee related, it looks to the employee office. e.g. hours worked is by employee office, timesheet entries is by job office etc…

When filtering screens and reports by Office, it is suggested you use both the Clients and Jobs without Offices reports, and the Group by Office features from time to time to check for any entities who do not have an office assigned.

Clients and Jobs with Offices

Offices are not required for Clients, but they are required for Jobs.

A Client in Abtrac can have projects being managed by multiple offices within your organisation. As such, it is not required to have an office assigned at the client level – and any office assigned to a client doesn’t have to match the job offices for that client.

However, if they are different, it needs to be kept in mind when filtering by office in performance reports.

Employee Offices

Employee offices are used for profitability and timesheet reports such as ‘Employee Productivity Report’ and ‘Hours Worked by Employee’.

Managing access to Abtrac by Employee office

Employee offices can also used to manage User Rights and Access Privileges. It is possible to limit access for Abtrac users by office, enabling them to only view and edit offices to which they have been assigned.

The process is detailed in a separate article: Managing access to Abtrac by Employee office.

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Office Specific Invoices

Each Office in Abtrac can contain unique Invoice settings  – allowing you to assign different invoice layouts (templates), different numbering sequences or formats, and of course different terms and payment details for each office.

In AbtracOnLine, the invoice settings are linked to each office from Administration >> Settings >> Office Settings as per the image below, or directly via Administration >> Settings >> Invoice Settings.

If there are no Office Specific Invoice settings recorded for an office, then the details will come from the settings for the default office.

For example, you can have different invoice layouts assigned to different offices, but only have one series of invoice numbers controlled from the default office.

From Administration >> Settings >> Office Settings, click on the button for ‘View invoice settings for this office’.

This takes you to the ‘Invoice And Other Office Settings’, where you can select the ‘Default Invoice Template’ from the dropdown box or add a new invoice template using the edit button.

Invoices are assigned an Office from the Job they are associated with. You can view to which office an invoice is assigned, from the edit invoice details screen.

Abtrac KB# 2062