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Audience
Invoice managers, project managers and executives
Description
While Project Insight does not replace your accounting system, the software does provide you with elegant invoice reports that may be exported to Excel or QuickBooks format, or integrated with your ERP or accounting system. The invoice report gives the financial team a ‘last look’ at project financials before they are entered into the enterprise accounting solution. If you are an accounting or financial team member or a project manager, this training shows you how to aggregate approved time and expenses onto invoice reports.
Benefits
- Understand the power and use of invoice reports
- Know how to prepare an invoice report for export or integration to your ERP or accounting system
Key Points
Transcript
Invoicing your customers for the work you do on projects is an integral part of your project management life cycle and it affects the profitability and success of your company. While Project Insight is not designed to replace your accounting software or ERP system, our software does offer invoice functionality for a couple of purposes.
If your organization is small, then you can invoice your customers using Project Insight. More likely, you have an accounting solution that works for your organization. In that case, Project Insight lets you aggregate time and expenses on an ‘invoice report,’ giving you one last chance to review finances before they are exported to integrated to your accounting system.
If your organization performs client-facing projects and you want to track financials, you can. Simply track the actual work and actual expenses that you incur on projects. Then you will be able to know in real-time what you are billing the customer for.
If you have a fixed price job or project, you need to track the actual work and costs so you can compare that to the fixed price that you are invoicing to the client. If you do not track costs, then you will not know if your project is profitable or not.
Tracking project financials helps you understand what it takes to get projects finished and helps your organization to be more profitable.
Invoice Settings
Let’s show you how to enable the Project Insight invoicing functionality. You need to be a system administrator to set the invoicing up.
Expand the left navigation.
Click on the Administration section to expand it out.
Click the arrow next to the Time, Expense & Invoice entry to expand it.
Click on Invoice Settings.
Click Enable Invoicing.
There are a few other options you can set. How you use these settings will depend on your business requirements.
For example, if you must have a time or expense code associated with each invoice line item, you can check the required option for those.
If you do that, a time code must then be entered for every time invoice line item and an expense code must be entered for every expense invoice line item.
The next item, Class Required, dictates whether or not a classification must be set for every invoice line item.
Invoice Classifications, Representatives and Terms
There is additional, optional information that you can set up for your invoicing process and that includes that Classification.
To set up the Classifications this option refers to, go to the Administration section, Time, Expense & Invoice settings, click on Invoice Classifications.
This is where you can set up different classifications that you can assign to the individual invoice line items.
For example, if you sold hardware, software and professional services, you may set up Classifications for those.
Then when you create an invoice line item, you can assign the appropriate classification to each invoice line item and you can set it to be required.
Click on the next invoice option which is Invoice Representatives.
You can record who the representative is for each invoice. This is normally a contact at your customer location but it could also be an internal account manager.
Finally, click on Invoice Terms.
This is where you can set pre-defined terms that can be applied to the invoice.
The data in these lists are usually something you would set up to integrate to your ERP or accounting system. Or you may use this data to print on the invoice.
If you leave any of these lists blank, this information will not appear for the invoice. So if you do not use it, just leave the lists blank and you will not see it.
Invoice Manager
Next, you are going to see how all this information is actually used. Now, you now see an option in your left navigation called Invoicing.
Not everyone will see this option. You must be an Invoice Manager to access the Invoicing functionality.
To see where you set that, click on Users.
Click the Edit icon for your user.
Click on the System Roles tab.
Under the Power User Roles section, there is an option called Time/Expense/Invoice Manager.
You must have this option checked in order to view the invoice option.
Check it if it is not checked.
Click Save.
Click on Administration to collapse that section.
Click on Invoices to expand that section out.
Time and Expense Approvals
Before you can associate time and expense entries to an invoice, your team must enter all their time and expenses first.
It is a recommended best practice that you set deadlines for when this information is required and that is documented in your business process manual. For example, if you invoice monthly, you may require your team to enter all their time and expenses before 5:00 pm on the last day of the month.
Those time and expense entries must then be approved before they can be associated with an invoice. An unapproved time or expense entry cannot be invoiced.
You will want to set up some procedures for that approval process as well.
More information about this can be found in the Track Your Time and Enter Expenses training webinar.
Create a New Invoice
To start, you create the invoice. Once a time or expense entry has been approved, it can be associated with an invoice.
It may be someone on your accounting team that is assigned the invoice manager role and adds invoices in Project Insight. More likely, it is your project manager or professional services manager that performs this function.
That is because your project manager knows what was delivered on the project and what tasks have been completed and what entries are okay to bill the customer. Your accounting team may not know that level of detail. Usually the project manager is very familiar with the project details and what work was done and what expenses were incurred to get that deliverable completed.
Click on Invoices.
Click on the Add Invoice icon.
If you are creating the same type of invoice more than once, you can create a template for that invoice to reduce the amount of data entry that you need to do. That is the first option here.
For now, just leave that blank.
You then need to enter the date of the invoice.
Click the Date icon and select the last day of this month.
This is a required field. You can tell by the red asterisk next to it.
Next, click in the drop down for the Company and select the customer that you are creating this invoice for.
Select Customer ABC.
This is also a required field. Project Insight needs to know which customer you are invoicing. Only time and expense entries that were made against projects assigned to this customer or associated directly to the customer itself will be allowed to be added to an invoice.
The next option Company Contracts lets you filter only time and expense entries that are also associated directly with a specific company contract.
Click in the drop down for Company Contracts to see the options.
Contracts are covered in more detail in the Leveraging Contracts and Rate Cards training session.
For invoicing, filtering by Company Contracts is not an option that is commonly used, however, it is available if you require.
For now, leave this blank.
Click in the white space anywhere on the form to exit out of the drop down.
Click in the drop down for Project.
If you are only invoicing the client for a particular project, then you can select one from the list.
Click Software Development.
If you were creating one invoice for all projects that you were working on for the client, then you would leave this blank.
The next information you need to enter is the name of the invoice. This is something that makes it easily identifiable.
If you had agreed to invoice the client on a monthly basis, you may enter something like Monthly Invoice – March 2015.
Then there are fields to enter a purchase order number if you know it. This would be the customer purchase order number.
Enter 56789
And an invoice #.
You may or may not know the invoice number at the moment. Invoice numbers are often generated by your ERP system, but that may not occur until later on in your process. That said, it is very common to leave it blank. If you know the invoice number, enter it.
Project Insight is not intended to be an accounting system. It can generate the data for the invoices, but your ERP or accounting system create the hard copy invoice and manages it from that point on.
You use Project Insight to manage what you have billed versus what your have yet to bill. You will see more about that as you work through the invoicing process.
The next three fields, Classification, Representative and Terms, were set up in the Administration section.
This data will appear here only if you have something entered in the lists.
If you do not have anything entered in the lists, then you will not see any data.
Click in the drop down for Invoice Classification and choose one.
This is the default Classification for the invoice, but you can actually set the Classification for each individual invoice line item. It will default to what you set here, but you can change it if required. You’ll see more about that in a moment.
Click in the drop down for Representative and choose one.
Click in the drop down for Terms and choose one.
Even though your accounting or ERP system creates the actual invoice, you can still enter other data that goes on the invoice header such as a memo.
There is also an option where you can keep track of paid invoices or not.
And a field you can use to flag whether or not the invoice is ready to be downloaded yet.
You will see more about the download in a moment. However, when you are first creating an invoice the Paid and Ready to Download options are usually left unchecked. It is only later on, as your invoice is processed, that they get checked.
Click Save.
Your invoice is now listed.
You can see that most of the detail showing is what you had entered on the invoice add/edit form, such as date, invoice name, company, project, purchase order number and invoice number, but there is one additional column called Total.
This is a calculated field. You cannot enter it. It is calculated automatically from the data you put on the invoice.
You can also enter a new invoice right from this form just by entering data in the gray blank line.
Click on the Calendar icon in the gray blank line.
This time, you are entering an invoice for work scheduled for a future date.
Click on the right arrow to go to the next month.
Click the last day of the month.
In the Name, type in Monthly Invoice – April 2015.
Click in the drop down for the Company and select Customer 123.
Click in the drop down for the Project and Select the Software Development project.
Leave the other fields and click Save.
Now you have created two invoices for the customer, but there is only one showing on the list.
Displaying Invoices
By default what will show here on the Invoice list, is any invoices that you have created for this current quarter.
That is the default display when you go to this list, current quarter, but you can change that by clicking on the Display Options icon.
In the drop down for the Dynamic Date Range, click Current Year. Now any invoices you created anytime this year will display.
Click the Run Report icon.
With this flexibility, you can see past invoices. Also, you can see future scheduled invoices.
Project Insight will remember your display settings, so next time you view your invoices it will be for the current year instead of just the quarter.
If you know that you will be invoicing a customer every month for the next six months, you can create each of those scheduled invoices for a future date. You can create an invoice without having time and expense entries applied to it yet.
Invoice Templates
To shorten the process of setting up invoices, create an Invoice Template.
Click on Invoice Templates.
Click Add Invoice Template.
The exact same details can be entered on the template as on an invoice. The only difference is that all the fields except the name are optional.
Leave the Date blank because that will change with each invoice.
Click in the Company drop down and select Customer ABC.
Click in the Project drop down and select the Software Development project.
Click in the name and enter Monthly Invoice.
Click in the drop down for Invoice Classification and choose one.
Click in the drop down for Representative and choose one.
Click in the drop down for Terms and choose one.
Click in the Memo and enter – Please contact the Project Manager for questions.
Click Save.
The Template is created.
Click on Invoices.
This time, to add an invoice, right click anywhere on the white space on the form to bring up a context sensitive menu right from where you are, instead of having to navigate back to the top of the form.
Click Add Invoice.
In the Template drop down, select Monthly Invoice.
The fields entered on the template are populated automatically instead of you having to enter them each time.
Then just change the invoice date by clicking the date icon.
Enter this name of the invoice.
And click Save.
Collapse your left navigation.
That’s the first step, creating your invoice.
There are several ways to add time and expense entries to the invoice.
The first way is to manually create the invoice line item that is going to appear on the invoice. The invoice line item is what the customer would see. Then you select which time entries belong to that line item.
The second way is to have Project Insight create automatically each invoice line item and the entries associated with it. You just set the parameters for how you want it to work.
There are two separate processes to add entries to an invoice, one for time for labor and one for costs, but the way you can add each type of entry is the same so in this training session, you are going to see how to do it for labor.
Adding Invoice Line Items
The next step is to create the invoice line items. These are the details the customer will see. This includes information like invoice line #, a date and a description of the work being billed for and the dollar amounts.
As part of this, you will also specific what individual time and expense entries are associated with the invoice line items or another way to look at that is to say what work or expenses were incurred to produce the deliverable.
You do not have to actually bill the customer for that work or expense and you do not even have to show it to the customer, but internally it has to be associated with an invoice so you have accounted for the entry.
Project Insight is very flexible and you have different options for setting up invoice line items and associating time and expense entries. You can use whatever method works for the requirements of your organization, customer, contract or project.
Click on the invoice name to get to the invoice display form.
This is where you add in the invoice line items and associate time entries.
At the top, it shows the invoice details, so you know what invoice you are working with.
This is all the information you set when you created the invoice, however, there is one additional column which is the Project Number. It shows here by default, but you can choose whether or not it is data that you want to export to your ERP system.
The section below is where your invoice line items will appear along with the associated time and expense entries.
It is blank right now because you haven’t created an invoice line item.
Manually Add an Invoice
To add an invoice line item, hover on the Add Time Entries icon and select Add Time Line Item.
The Invoice Time Entry Line Item – Add/Edit form appears.
You will see this form often throughout this process.
The top of this form is when you enter the details for the invoice line item.
Enter a Line # if you require, such as 1.
Enter a Date if you require. Click on the date icon and select today’s date.
Click in the drop down for the Line Item Time code. This is where you can select a time code for this invoice line item. Some organizations require this and some do not. You saw where your system administrator can set this as a required field in the invoice settings. If you are adding an expense invoice line item, there will be a Line Item Expense Code.
For now, click on Administration.
The next item is the Invoice Line Item Classification. If you did not enter anything in the list for this, then you will not even see this field. Click in the drop down for it.
It will default to the Classification you set when you created the invoice, but then you can change it for each individual invoice line item if required.
Click on Professional Services.
Now, you can enter the dollar values for this invoice line item.
To enter them manually, click in the Calculate From Entries drop down and change this to Fixed Total, Hours/QTY and Rate/Unit.
By selecting that calculation type, you are able to manually enter the hours, rate and total amounts for this line instead of having them set automatically for you.
Enter in 15 hours.
Enter in a rate of $100.
Tab out of the field.
The labor total gets automatically calculated.
Click in the Line Item Description and enter a description such as Administrative Work.
Click Save.
The invoice is displayed and now you can see the invoice line item.
The process you have seen so far, to create the invoice and set up an invoice line item, is very similar to functions that your accounting team may already do in your accounting system.
But next you are going to see where the power of the invoicing functionality of Project Insight comes in.
Add Time Entries to an Invoice
Add another line item, hover on the Add Time Entries icon and select Add Time Line Item.
Enter 2 in the Line #.
Click on the date icon and select a date, make it a date last week.
Click in the drop down for the Line Item Time Code and select Consulting.
In the Calculation Type, leave Calculate from Entries. You will see why you do that in a moment.
Leave the Hours, Rate and Total fields empty.
Click in the Line Item Description and enter a description such as Consulting Work.
Now instead of just saving that invoice line item, you are going to associate time entries to it.
This is so you can track the actual work that was done for this deliverable.
You do that through this section called Search For Time Entries to Add
You can only ever add time entries that are associated with the company. That filtering is done by default, but then you can add other filtering options, such as dates, projects, resources and time codes and some other options for also including non-billable entries.
Because you set a project on the invoice when you first created it, it is also set to select time entries only for that project, but you could change it if required.
Leave those options and click the Search to find all time entries that meet those criteria.
You can see all those time entries match that criteria are displayed.
Click on the plus sign icon to add an individual entry. Do that for an entry that has a time code of consulting.
Now, you can see that it is displayed directly underneath the invoice line item details, which indicates that it is now associated with this invoice line item.
You will see that as soon as you did that, the invoice line item hours, rate and total is being calculated automatically. Project Insight is pulling that information from the associated time entries.
Click on the plus sign icon for each time entry that has the consulting time code.
You will see as you are doing that, the invoice line item hours, rate and totals are changing.
It is taking the billable total for all the individual time entries and putting that in the Total column.
Project Insight is then taking the total hours for all the individual time entries and putting that in the Hours column.
Then the software is calculating an average rate, by taking that total and dividing it by the number of hours.
Once a time entry has been associated with an invoice, it cannot be associated with any other invoice and it will no longer appear in any invoice search results.
Click Save.
The invoice is displayed and now you can see the new invoice line item with the Hours, Rate and Total.
Also, what you can do on this view is display the time entry details that make up that line item.
Click the Display Options icon.
Click on the option to show line item time entry details.
Click Update Display.
Now you see extra lines in italics directly after the consulting invoice line item.
These are the actual time entries that are associated with the work in the invoice line item.
The first line, not in italics, is the invoice line item. This is what your customer sees.
The line below is the data that makes up the information in the invoice line item.
Even though your customers will not see the line in italics, you can display this information so that you can view what details are making up the invoice line item.
Invoices for Time and Materials Projects
The Consulting invoice line item is a time and materials line item.
You used the actual time entries and the hours and rates set there to determine the amount to bill the client on the amount.
That is one option.
Invoices for Fixed Price Projects
Your other option is to have a fixed price invoice line item.
Normally, most of our customers do not have an invoice with both time and materials and fixed price line items, but you could and Project Insight supports that. For example, maybe you are billing your customer for work on multiple projects on one invoice, and one project is fixed price and the other isn’t.
To see how you would do a fixed price line item on an invoice, click the edit icon for the Administrative Work invoice line item.
The Invoice Time Entry Line Item – Add/Edit form appears.
In the Calculation Type, change it to Fixed Total.
Leave the Hours and Rate blank.
Enter the fixed price amount for the Administrative work, such as $1,700. That’s the price your customer agreed to pay you.
Now assign the actual time entries that were associated with this work.
In the Search For Time Entries to Add section, you could click in the code and narrow your search to just those time entries enter with the Administration time code.
Or if you just click on the white space anywhere on the form to exit out that drop down, without selecting any and click the Search icon, the software will simply find all the time entries not yet assigned to an invoice.
In this case, it is the same result because the only time entries remaining are those with the Administration time code. The entries with the consulting time code are already assigned to an invoice line item so they will no longer show.
These entries are not assigned to the invoice yet. This is just a list of all the entries that match your search criteria.
You will notice that for these unassigned entries, the Invoice Hours, Invoice Rate and Invoice Total are set by default to match the Billing Hours, Billing Rate and Billing total.
Click Add All to actually assign them to the invoice.
You may have noticed that when you did that, the Rate and the Hours on the invoice line changed.
Project Insight did a calculation automatically to determine what the hours and rate should be.
It added up all the invoice hours from the time entries to get a total.
And it put that total in the hours for the invoice line item.
It then took the total fixed price that you entered, divided it by those hours and determined an average rate.
If you wanted your customer to see hours and rates, these are the values you would use.
Project Insight, also took that average rate and recorded it in the Invoice rate for each time entry.
The Invoice Rates and Invoice Totals for each time entry no longer match the billable rate and the billable total that were recorded at the time of the time data entry.
The Invoiced values have been adjusted so that they add up to the fixed total value, because you need to record what you are really invoicing the customer for that time entry, versus what you would be billing the customer if you were doing a time and materials invoice, which are the billable values.
The Billable Rates and Billable Total are not editable. You cannot change those.
However, even though Project Insight automatically calculated the invoice hours, rate and invoice total, you can change the invoice hours and the invoice rate.
Click in the Invoice Hours for one time entry and change it.
Tab out of the field.
You will see everything recalculates to support the new total number of invoiced hours.
The Project Insight invoicing functionality is very flexible, you can make any invoice adjustments as you require, or you can just let the system do all the calculations and work for you.
Click Save.
On the invoice form, you now see the time entries that are making up the Administrative work line item.
The hours and rate and total values showing for the time entry line items are the invoiced values.
To see other columns of data on this same form, click the Display Options icon.
Click the Column Selection Filtering Options section to expand it out.
In the Available columns, the columns starting with the letter B indicate your Billable Hours, Rates and Totals that you saw on the invoice line item detail form. You could add them to your view here as well.
And you could add actual values as well those as the columns starting with the letter A.
For now, leave your display as the default and click on the option to show line item time entry details to uncheck it.
Click Update Display.
This data that is now showing is a view of the data that will get exported to your ERP system. In your accounting system, you may even eliminate the hours and the rate for the invoice line item.
That is how you would manually create an invoice line item and associate time entries.
You are now going to see some automatic ways to do the same thing which can speed up your invoice creation and reduce the amount of data entry.
Removing Line Items from an Invoice
If you want to remove a time entry from being associated with invoice line item, click the remove icon against a time entry. It is no longer associated with this invoice and can be associated with another invoice.
You are removing this entry as part of this training session, but the goal in your regular process is to ensure that all billable time entries are associated with a project. By removing this one, it goes back into the non-invoiced time entries bucket. If you do that, you will want to ensure that the line item gets associated with another invoice line item, either on this invoice or on a separate invoice.
This is reflected in profitability reports. If you do not associate all your entries with an invoice, they may get lost and you may miss billable entries.
Do that for all the time entries for one invoice line item.
Now click the delete icon for the invoice line item.
That invoice line item gets removed as well.
A faster way to do this is to just click the delete icon for the invoice line item.
This disassociates all the time entries from this invoice line item and deletes the invoice line item as well.
Automatically Add Entries
You are going to see how Project Insight can create automatically each invoice line item and assign the entries associated with it based on a set of criteria and parameters you enter.
To do that, hover on the Add Time Entries icon and select Automatically Add Time Entry Invoice Line Items.
The layer that appears is where you enter the criteria to designate which time entries you want and how you want that data to be amalgamated and appear on the invoice.
The Date Range Type is where you enter date filters for the time entries.
Click on the drop down for the Date RangeType.
You can choose from dynamic dates or specific dates.
If you leave it set to all dates, it will choose all time entries for Customer ABC, and the Software Development project that have been approved and have not yet been invoiced.
Leave the option as all dates to get everything not yet invoiced, or enter a date range as you require.
The next option, Line Item Group By Option, specifies if and how you want to aggregate the time entries.
Click on the Line Item Group By option drop down.
The first option, One Line Item Per Entry creates an invoice line item for each and every time entry that matches your criteria and displays that line item on the invoice. This is useful for time and materials projects where you have to account for every time entry and show that to the customer.
The next options are used for grouping individual time entries either by task, resource, resource type, summary task, top level summary task or time code.
If you chose time code, you would group all the entries by the time code entertained against them and create an invoice line item for each time code.
Associate Invoice Line Item Codes
Click on One Line Item Per Time/Expense Code.
Click Save.
You are now seeing an invoice very similar to what you created previously when you manually entered the invoice line items, except this invoice was created automatically for you saving you time.
You then just edit the invoice line items and change them to fixed cost if required.
To delete all of this data from the invoice, click the Undo Automatic Add Time Entry Invoice Line Items option.
This is an easy way undo the entries, if they were not what you wanted.
In this training, you keep deleting the data from the invoice so you can re-use the same time entries and see the different ways the invoice can be created with the same information.
Also, turn off the display of the time entries for now, click the Display Options icon.
Click on the option to show line item time entry details so that it is unchecked.
Click Update Display.
Hover on the Add Time Entries icon and select Automatically Add Time Entry Invoice Line Items again.
This time, click in the Line Item Group By Option and select One Line Item Per Entry selected.
This creates on invoice line entry for every time entry made.
The next option designates what information to use as the line item description on the invoice.
This is the description of the invoice line item and the customer will see this. Just leave it set as Group By Name/Description. This sets the line item description to be the same as the time entry description.
The next option, Concatenate entry fields onto line item description, is where you can set additional information to appear on the invoice line item.
Click in the drop down.
You can see the additional data you can choose from. The description in this scenario is redundant, because you are already using the time entry description.
However, you can choose other information such as Resource, Resource Type/Role, Task/Project/Company Name, Time Code or Time Code Custom Code, which is usually a code from your accounting system.
Click on Resource. This adds the Resource name to the invoice line item description.
Click anywhere on the white space to exit out of the drop down.
At the bottom of the layer are additional filter options, such as Adding time entries that were entered at the project level, adding time entries that were entered at the Company level, or non-billable time entries. You may add non-billable entries if you wanted to see all work, not just billable work that was entered.
Leave them checked as their defaults and click Save.
The Invoice Line Items, as they will appear on the invoice are displayed.
There is one invoice line item per time entry.
For this Customer and this project, these are all the individual time entries that were made.
You can see the Invoice Line Item Descriptions are set to the time entry descriptions plus the resource name.
You can also see the time code, the date the entry was made, the number of actual hours entered, the billable rate applied and the total labor amount, which is the Hours x the rate.
If no time entry description was entered, or the time entry description was something that wouldn’t make sense for the customer or you wouldn’t want the customer to see, click the Edit icon on the line.
The Invoice Time Entry Line Item – Edit form is displayed. This is the same form that you used to create a new invoice line item, except this time, most of the data is filled in for you.
Change the description. It is showing only a resource name because no time entry description was set. Enter a description, such scope analysis just before the resource name.
Click Save.
You can now see that change on the invoice.
At the bottom of the invoice, you have the total of the labor.
Since you have not added expenses yet, those amounts are $0.
But you also have the total invoice amount.
Some customers do require this level of detail on invoices, but it is not common.
Usually you group your time entries by time code, resource, role etc. and you will see more of those options next.
Before that though, click the Display Options icon.
Click on the option to show line item time entry details.
Click Update Display.
Now you see an extra line after each Line Item Description that is displayed in italics. This is the actual time entry line the same as you saw before. The difference in this scenario is that there is only one time entry per invoice line entry. That is because that is the option you chose one line item per entry.
In this scenario, since there is a one to one relationship between the line item on the invoice and the actual time entry that was made you probably do not need to see that detail.
Click the Display Options icon.
Click on the option to show line item time entry details to uncheck it.
Click Update Display.
Edit and Group Line Items
Next, you are going to see other ways to group time entries on the invoice. You already saw how to group it by time code, and now you will see some other options.
You do not want to save the invoice this way, so click the X icon next to each entry to remove it.
That releases that entry back into the non-invoiced time entries so you can re-apply them with different options.
Hover on the Add Time Entries icon and select Automatically Add Time Entry Invoice Line Items.
The software remembers what you set here last, so if you are doing the same kind of invoices all the time, this will save you time and ensure standardization of the invoice creation.
Leave the Date Range Type set as all Dates.
Click in the Line Item Group By Option drop down.
This time select One Line Item Per Resource Type.
That is a common option that is used.
In the Concatenate entry fields onto line item description click the resource name to remove it as you do not want that on this invoice.
Click Save.
Now there are only two invoice line items. One for each role.
Click the Display Options icon.
Click on the option to show line item time entry details.
Click Update Display.
Now you can see that there are multiple individual time entries that are making up the invoice line item. Again, your customer will not see these. This is for you to view and review only.
For the Project Manager invoice line item, these are the entries that are making up information on that item.
For the Administration invoice line item, these are the entries that are making up information on that item.
Click the Undo Automatic Add Time Entry Invoice Line Items icon to remove the time entries from this invoice and release them back into the un-invoiced time entries, so you can see other ways to add them into the invoice.
Click the Display Options icon.
Click on the option to show line item time entry details to uncheck it.
Click Update Display.
That puts it back to the view that the customer will see on the invoice.
Hover on the Add Time Entries icon and select Automatically Add Time Entry Invoice Line Items.
Click in the Line Item Group By Option drop down.
Some of the other popular group by options are by summary task or top level summary task.
Click One Line Item Per Top Level Summary Task.
Click Save.
Now there are only two invoice line items, one for each top level summary task.
That is a popular way to do fixed priced projects. The fixed price amount is set at a summary task level for all the work that is in that summary task.
Click the Display Options icon.
Click on the option to show line item time entry details.
Click Update Display.
This time the time entries are amalgamated and grouped to create the data by top level summary task.
Click the Display Options icon.
Click on the option to show line item time entry details.
Click Update Display.
In this case, the italics show the amount this summary task would be if it were a time and materials project.
Adding Expenses
Expenses are added to an invoice the same way as time entries.
Hover on the Add Expense Line Item icon.
You will see the two options the same as you did for labor. Choose which option works best for your scenario.
Ready to Download
If you are ready to download this, i.e. it is a finished invoice, click the Ready to download option.
This can be used to help you select all the invoices that haven’t been integrated to your ERP or accounting system.
Expand the left navigation.
Click on Invoices.
Export to Excel and QuickBooks
Click on the checkbox for those invoices that are ready to download.
Hover on the Export icon and select Export to QuickBooks.
The Export to QuickBooks layer appears.
You can export to QuickBooks in an IIF format, or the Intuit Interchange format.
Or you can export to QuickBooks in the CSV format.
You would choose to export to the CSV format if you are using QuickBooks online or you are using the connector integration applications. One is called Transact or Transact Pro which works in conjunction with QuickBooks online so that you can get data into a system that does not actually accept the IIF format.
Discuss Accounting Integration
If you are working with another ERP system, you can use the CSV format to do that.
Click on the CSV format option.
Click Export to QuickBooks.
Click Open to open the CSV file that gets created.
You will see the top line is the data field names.
Then you have the actual data output.
All the invoice data that your customer needs to see is in the text file, so it does not matter what accounting or ERP system you are using, you just need to map that data into your accounting or ERP system.
Close the Excel spreadsheet.
Click X to close the Export to Quick Books layer.
Report on Invoiced Items
Now that you have invoiced information, you want to run reports on that.
Click on the Reports icon.
Click on Project Reports.
Click Create Project Report.
Click on the Column Selection Options section to expand it out.
In the Selected Columns, click on Duration, because you want to insert your new columns just above that field.
Click on a field in the Available Columns and type I to go directly to the columns starting with the letter I.
Scroll down until you see Invoiced Time. Double click on it.
Scroll up to the Bs, until you see Billable Time. Double click on it.
Click the Run Report icon.
Click in the column headers to drag the column widths wider.
This is now showing you the difference between what you invoiced the client, which is the invoiced time, versus what you should have billed based on a time and materials budget, which is the Billable time.
You can run detailed reports to see this and that is covered in Creating and Running Portfolio and Projects Reports.