What is the best practice for accumulating charges for a customer over the course of, say, a month and then producing a monthly invoice for all accumulated charges?
I know how to do this for Billable Time and I know how to do this for Expense Claims, using Customers>Uninvoiced to keep track and to generate the month-end invoice. What I don’t know is how to do this for non-hourly (i.e., flat-rate or daily) services or how to get all these categories onto the same invoice without having to retype everything.
Currently, I open a new Sales Invoice at the beginning of each month for each customer, postdated to the end of the month, and I add flat-rate services and other line-item charges as they accumulate over the month. On the last day of the month, if there are no other unbilled items for the customer, I issue the invoice. But if there are unbilled Billable Time or Expense Claim entries, I have to create the invoice for those unbilled items and then re-add all the accumulated line items from the postdated invoice, which I then delete.
I bill my customers monthly, on the last day of the month. On May 1, I create a new Invoice Number 101 for my customer, post-dated to May 31 with a line-item for a flat-rate service I provide on May 1 – but I do not yet issue the invoice to my customer. On May 12, I add a second line-item to the same post-dated Invoice Number 101 for another flat-rate service I provide that day. On May 24, I add a third line-item for another flat-rate service on that day.
Meanwhile, throughout May, I do two chunks of hourly work for the same customer, on May 8 and May 15, and enter those hours along the way as two uninvoiced Billable Time entries.
Come May 31, I click on Customers > Uninvoiced and create a new Invoice Number 123 for the two Billable Time entries for the hourly work from May 8 and May 15. Then, since my customer wants only one invoice per month, I have to review the never-mailed Invoice Number 101 and copy the three flat-rate entries from May 1, May 12, and May 24 onto the new Invoice Number 123 along with the hourly work. I send my customer Invoice 123 with all five lines, and I delete Invoice Number 101.
In other words, the only way I’ve found to keep track of not-yet-invoiced, non-hourly, non-inventory line items is to use a post-dated sales invoice as temporary storage for the line items.
As I wrote above, there must be a better way. I can’t find a built-in mechanism for keeping track of unbilled line-item charges, only for billable time and inventory items. I must be missing something.
Unfortunately, there’s currently no way to combine invoice lines from multiple sources.
But I think there could be room for improvent here.
First, I wonder why you are using Sales Invoices in this way.
Instead, you should have used a Sales Order which is, for all practical purposes, a draft Sales Invoice which you don’t have to delete. In fact, you shouldn’t delete it at all.
But still, you will have to create multiple invoices per customer per month:
One combined invoice for all Billable Time and Billable Expenses entries.
One invoice for each outstanding order.
There’s already an idea for dealing with point (2) above:
This would reduce the number of monthly invoices required from many to only Two in your case.
But this got me thinking about another solution that would cross paths with that idea and make it such that just One invoice is required.
Why not instead of merging, better yet – in addition to copying and merging, why not make uninvoiced Order lines appear in Uninvoiced section?
@lubos, what do you think of this? Would this be a candidate worth including under ideas?
Thanks for the thoughtful response. But, I’m not clear on the workflow here. Once I create a Sales Order, what happens with it? Other than remembering to view it and click on Copy to > New Sales Invoice, the Sales Order doesn’t seem to do anything or go anywhere. Notably, it doesn’t appear on my Customers list under anything, so unless I remember at the end of the month that a particular customer has an uninvoiced Sales Order, it won’t ever be billed or paid. Also notably, there’s no way to record on the Sales Order itself whether it’s been invoiced or paid.
It would indeed be nice if Sales Orders (and maybe Sales Quotes – I’ve never been quite clear on what the difference is between the two) that don’t have matching Sales Invoices were to appear on the Customers > Uninvoiced list so I could add them directly to a new Sales Invoice. Or at least for there to be a better workflow for accumulating charges to a customer (an unbilled asset for me) until I decide to issue a Sales Invoice for them (at which point those unbilled assets become my receivables).
@Lubos: Another route might be to generalize the existing Billable Time workflow to become Billable Services, allowing for both hourly and flat-rate services, or to complement Billable Time with a separate-but-parallel Billable Services tab that works the same but doesn’t count in hours.
For now at least, you will have the Sales Orders tab where you can track any uninvoiced orders. If you do monthly billing, you will have to go over Sales Orders once a month to make sure that everything was billed.
The difference is that Sales Quotes simply make an offer to the customer, nothing binding.
A Sales Order is issued once the customer actually places and order that needs to be fulfilled and later invoiced.