Invoices

Invoices is where you bill your clients for project work and track the money coming in. It lives under the Finance section of the sidebar.

Before you start: Invoices show financial information, so you’ll only see this area if your role allows it. See Roles and access.

What an invoice is

An invoice bills a single client for work on one project. Each invoice has:

A client and project it belongs to
An invoice number, invoice date, and optional due date
One or more line items
Optional retainage — an amount held back from the total
A status that tracks where it is in its life

Line items

Each line on an invoice describes something you’re billing for, with:

A description
A quantity and rate (the line total is calculated for you)
Optional per-line tax
An optional cost code (the project phase the work belongs to)
A reimbursable flag for pass-through expenses you’re billing back to the client

The invoice adds everything up for you — subtotal, any retainage held back, tax, and the total.

Billing logged time

Hours your team logs against a project’s tasks can go straight onto an invoice. While editing a draft, pick the project, then click Add Unbilled Time beside Add Line. You’ll see every entry on that project that hasn’t been billed yet — when it was logged, who logged it, the task, the phase, the hours, and the person’s rate — and you can narrow the list by phase or by a date range. Tick the entries you want and click Add to Invoice.

The time comes in as one line per phase and rate, such as “Schematic Design — Project Architect”, with the hours as the quantity and the person’s rate on the project as the price. The rate comes from the professional rate they’re given on the project’s team; if someone has no rate there, their hours come in as “Unrated time” at $0 for you to price. The lines are yours to change before you save — lower the amount to bill less than the hours are worth.

Only time on tasks marked Billable or Extra Service is offered, and each hour can only be billed once: once it’s on an invoice it no longer appears for the next one. A line built from logged time shows how many entries it covers. If you remove that line, or void the invoice, the time goes back to unbilled and can be billed again.

Invoice statuses

An invoice moves through these statuses:

Draft — Being prepared; not yet sent to the client.
Sent — Issued to the client and awaiting payment.
Partial — Partly paid or credited, but a balance remains.
Paid — Nothing left to pay, whether it was settled by payments, credits, or both.
Void — Cancelled; no longer owed.

You change an invoice’s status with the action buttons at the top of the page — mark a draft as Sent, Rescind a sent invoice back to draft if you need to edit it, or Void one that has no payments or credits against it. An invoice automatically moves to Partial or Paid as you record payments or apply credits.

Filtering the list by status

The Invoices list has a row of buttons across the top — All, then one for each status. Pick one to narrow the list to just those invoices; All is what you see when you open the page, so nothing is hidden until you choose. Your choice stays put as you page through and sort, and it’s part of the web address, so a link you bookmark or send to someone opens on the same view.

The same bar has more ways to narrow the list. The search box finds invoices by invoice number, client name, or project name as you type, once you’ve entered at least two letters; click the × to clear it. Overdue shows only sent invoices that are past their due date and still have a balance. Everything you pick works together, and all of it is saved in the web address along with the status.

Recording payments

Open an invoice to record payments as they arrive. The Payments tab appears once the invoice is sent; a draft can’t be paid yet. Each payment captures the amount, the date received, the method (check, credit card, direct deposit, wire transfer, cash, or other), and an optional reference. The invoice keeps a running tally of how much has been paid and what’s still outstanding. The payment amount starts at the outstanding balance, so a full payment takes one click.

Credits

Once an invoice is sent it can’t be changed, so to reduce what the client owes you issue a credit memo and apply it to the invoice. An invoice with credits shows Credited beside Amount Paid, and its Balance is what’s left after both. A Credits tab lists each credit applied, linked to the credit memo.

If the client has credit they haven’t used yet, a sent invoice that still has a balance says so; click the arrow beside the message to open the client, whose Credits tab lists them.

Downloading a PDF

Every invoice can be downloaded as a PDF to send to your client, from the Download PDF button on its details page. The PDF shows your firm’s name and address (from Firm Settings), the bill-to client, the invoice number and dates, the itemized charges, and a totals summary down to the balance due, including any credits applied. It’s available at any status.

Where invoices appear

You don’t have to go to the Invoices area to find what’s relevant:

The Invoices area under Finance lists every invoice.
Each project has an Invoices tab showing everything billed on it.
Each client has an Invoices tab showing everything billed to them.

Every list shows the outstanding balance at a glance and links straight through to the full invoice. The project and client tabs end with a summary of the total invoiced, paid, credited and outstanding. It counts only invoices you’ve sent — drafts and voided invoices are listed but left out of the totals — so Total minus Paid minus Credited is what’s Outstanding.

Profitability

What you invoice and collect feeds a project’s Profitability tab and the financial Reports — so the money you bill here turns into the firm’s financial picture automatically.