When I itemize a billable expense on an invoice, that expense isn’t matching up with the single-line expense in the “Billable Expense” tab, therefore it’s generating “Billable Expense - unrecoverable” in the summary.
The best way to explain my question is to walk through my process. Hopefully it will make sense.
For example…
I purchase $100 in shirts from ABC Supplier on behalf of Client Q. This would be a “billable expense,” as I plan on billing the client for the cost of the shirts.
There are 3 different types of shirts: blue, yellow, orange. I spend $50 on blue, $25 on yellow, and $25 on orange. However, I only made ONE transaction with ABC Supplier.
In my Cash Account >> [Business Checking Account Registry] section, I record the transaction with ABC Supplier, and categorize it as a Billable Expense from Client Q.
Then I go to Client Q’s invoice, and list the breakdown of how I’ve purchased the shirts: $50 on blue, $25 on yellow, and $25 on orange.
Then I go to the Billable Expenses tab and mark the original $100 expense to ABC Supplier “invoiced” under the appropriate Invoice number.
HOWEVER…
Once I’ve done all that, my “Summary” tab (in the “Less Expenses” field) now lists that expense as “Billable expenses - unrecoverable”
I think this is where the process isn’t going correct - you create the invoice from the billable expense, so that the billable expense is picked up and transferred to the invoice.
It appears currently that you are creating a separate sales invoice for 100 and then writing off the billable expense to unrecoverable so the net effect is zero (100-100)
You can always add a comment line (no Account selected) to the invoice to write a breakup description
Indeed, @Brucanna is correct, @cherylweb27. Billable expenses (and billable time, for that matter) can only be picked up by generating a sales invoice from within the Customers tab: clicking on the blue Uninvoiced balance, selecting those items to be invoiced on a particular invoice, and clicking New Sales Invoice.
What you have done by independently marking the billable expense as invoiced is tell the program that whatever is going to be invoiced has been invoiced. Since you never generated an invoice from within the Customers tab by checking the applicable item, the program thinks it must be unrecoverable. So while you might have the items on a sales invoice, you don’t have the items that were posted to the Billable expenses account. Yet they must go somewhere since you said they’d been invoiced. Hence, they are posted as unrecoverable.
There would also be some other account activity, depending on where you allocated the shirts you put on the sales invoice without going through Customers. Maybe there is something in Suspense, maybe something went elsewhere. But you didn’t provide any information on that.
