Invoicing

What it is#

Invoicing is month-end. A run gathers everything billable in a period — approved time, marked-up expenses, fixed and milestone fees, retainer draws — and proposes one invoice per contract, with the write-downs and the realisation percentage beside each total. Nothing here charges anybody until somebody presses Issue.

How to get there#

Money → Invoicing in the admin console rail, above Billing on purpose: assembling the month is why a finance lead opens the console, and paying us is a once-a-year thought. The ADMIN role is required to open any console page.

Every route behind this screen is gated on the commercial.billing_runs entitlement, which starts at the Pro tier. On top of that:

• finance.billing.run — assemble a run and review its proposals.
• finance.billing.issue — turn a proposal into an invoice. Without it the Issue buttons are not drawn.
• finance.billing.writeoff — reduce a line below its standard value. Without it the line editor is disabled and says why.

How to use it#

Assemble a period#

1. Press New run.
2. The dates default to last complete month, which is the run people open this screen to do. Both fields bound each other, so an end before its start cannot be picked.
3. Optionally narrow to one Client. Left as all clients, the run bills the whole period at once. The picker is only offered if you can read the client list.
4. Press Assemble. You land in the run's review screen.

Review what it proposes#

1. The four numbers across the top are what a month is judged on: To bill, Written off, Realization, and how many proposals are On hold.
2. Under them, Not billed: lists the assembler's own account of what it left out and why — period-locked time, approved time with no bill rate, time covered by a retainer allowance, approved time with no project, expenses absorbed by a retainer, scheduled fees not yet ready, and any currency with no exchange rate.
3. The left rail is one row per proposal, with its client, subtotal and realisation. A proposal billing under 90% of card rate has its percentage in amber.
4. Opening a run jumps straight to the first proposal that needs a decision — a failed one, else a pending one — rather than the first row.
5. Lines are grouped by kind: Time, Expenses, Fixed fee, Milestones, Retainer, Adjustments. Each row shows quantity, rate, Standard value and the Amount you are actually billing.

Edit, exclude or write down a line#

1. Press the pencil on a line to open the editor. It needs finance.billing.writeoff.
2. Change the Amount in major units — the form converts through the currency's own exponent, so a yen or dinar line is not out by a factor of a hundred.
3. Anything below the standard value is recorded as a write-off and the dialog says how much. A Reason for the write-down becomes mandatory at that moment, because the engine will require one anyway.
4. The circle-slash button excludes a line from the invoice without deleting it; it stays visible, struck through, and can be put back.

Approve, hold and release#

1. Approve marks a proposal ready to issue. Only approved proposals are picked up by a bulk issue.
2. Hold asks for a reason and skips the proposal on a bulk issue. A hold survives a re-assembly, which is the point of it.
3. Release puts a held proposal back to pending.

Issue#

1. Issue on one proposal, or Issue N approved in the header for the whole run.
2. The confirmation names the count and the sum. Two currencies read as "£12,000 + $4,300" rather than being added together, because no single figure would be an amount anybody is about to be charged.
3. Confirming creates the invoice, numbers it INV-YYYYMM-NNNN restarting each month, freezes the tax determination onto the document, and stamps every source row as billed — all inside one transaction. Due date defaults to 30 days after the issue date.
4. A bulk issue isolates each proposal. Some succeeding and some failing is an ordinary outcome; the run lands on Partly issued and the screen reports the split rather than claiming success.

Re-assemble#

1. Re-assemble rebuilds every proposal from source — for example after approving more time.
2. If the run has hand-edited lines, it stops and tells you how many edits would be discarded. Continuing is a second, deliberate answer.

What it affects#

• Receivables. An issued invoice appears immediately on Receivables, where it ages, gets chased and can be credited or written off.
• WIP. Issuing stamps the underlying time entries, expenses, schedule items and retainer periods as invoiced, so they leave the unbilled balance on Financials.
• Realisation and margin. Because the line keeps standardAmount and writeOffAmount separately from what you billed, the realisation report can answer "what did we give away" for every past period. A system that stored only the invoiced figure has thrown that away permanently.
• The client portal. The client sees their own copy of the invoice at Invoices.
• Your ERP. If a connection owns invoices, the new invoice is offered to it after the transaction commits. See the gotcha below.

On mobile#

The Billing screens in the phone app carry the deciding half: the list of runs, a run's proposals, and approve, hold, release and issue on a single proposal. There is deliberately no New run button — a run assembled by a thumb on a train with the wrong period is forty proposals somebody has to throw away. Editing lines and writing them down stay on the web.

Limits and gotchas#

• Retainer-backed work never bills twice. Time on a contract funded by a retainer is consumed by the allowance and excluded from time-and-materials; the retainer period is billed instead. Retainers measured in hours are excluded from assembly entirely and said so out loud — their periodic fee is not a modelled number, so it belongs on a scheduled fee line.
• Double-billing is structurally prevented, not prevented by convention. Eligibility means "no invoice line yet", and the stamp is filtered on that with a count check. Two people pressing Issue at the same moment produce one invoice and one error. If a source row was claimed while your proposal was open, you get a 409 asking you to re-assemble.
• A missing exchange rate is not fatal, but it is loud. Amounts in a currency with no rate to your reporting currency are carried at 1:1 and named in the excluded notes. Fix it on Finance setup.
• The push to an ERP is not transactional. The invoice is created locally first and the push happens afterwards, so a failed push cannot un-stamp rows that were already billed. A failed push marks the proposal Failed with the error, and Retry push re-attempts it. No connector currently has a live outbound invoice client, so a workspace with an ERP that owns invoices will see the invoice stand locally and no push happen — that is the honest state, not a fault.
• A run with nothing to bill is a normal answer for a period whose time is not approved yet. Check the "Not billed" strip before assuming the run is broken.
• Money everywhere here is in minor units on the wire and formatted for display; a currency's exponent is respected, so JPY has none and KWD has three.

Related#

• Receivables — what came back after you issued.
• Finance setup — the rate cards, tax rules and exchange rates a run reads.
• ERP — which system owns invoices, and what is waiting to be billed.
• Financials — WIP, realisation and margin after the run.
• Contracts — the contract a proposal is assembled against.