Account for time spent working on a lead

There isn't any way to track time directly against a lead. The only place you can track time is against a job.

There are two options to recording sales or pre-sales time:

• Record this time at a company level, on an internal job with non-billable tasks. The total time spent on sales activities along with any costs such as expenses and advertising can be recorded against this internal job too.
• Record this time at the Job level in order to account for it at the job costing level and ensure your costs are recovered in the costing of each job.
  1. Create a job (ensure you have a non-chargeable task on the job called "Business Development" or similar).
  2. Create a quote for the job from the Financial tab of the job itself (not the main Quote Manager).
  3. Create a new lead for the client you set up the job for above.
  4. In the Options button of the Lead select Add Quote to Lead and choose the quote you created in 2. above.
  5. Add time to the Business Development task as normal.
  6. When the lead is Won, Accept the quote from the Quote Manager menu. The lead will be marked as won, the quote will be marked as accepted, and the original job you set up will be updated with details of the accepted quote, whilst maintaining your time entered against the non-billable task. Then when you run the reports for that job it will take into account the cost of the time spent wining the Lead.