Process: FI Project Invoicing

­Screencast: Use ]project-open[ to create an invoice based on hours logged

Benefits

• F­r­ee and open-source, S­aaS available
• Reduce administrative overhead ­
• Don’t loose invoiceable hours anymore
• Separate between billable and non-billable time
• Integrated with timesheet management, budget management, vacation manag­ement and project tracking

Features

• Elegant invoices, customizable by the user
• Semiautomatic invoicing via billing wizard
  
• Management of customer data, customer contact and multiple billing addresses per customer
• Project billing from very simple to very complex
• Ad-hoc invoicing - write your invoice in 20 seconds
• Billing time and material projects
• Billing complex projects - warranty, discounts and non-billable time
• Price lists per customer or default global price list.
  
• Multi currency. Automatic currency updates available (add-on)
  
• Powerful financial reporting, including data-warehouse (add-on module)

Contents

• My First Invoice­
• Simple Time & Material Billing
• Time & Material with Different Rates
  
• Warranty & Non-Billable Time
  

My Fi­rst Invoice

Let's assume you are a freelancer and you have just performed 3 days of training for a customer. You now want to write an invoice quickly and your ]project-open[ has been configured to allow such ad-hoc invoicing. You company is called "Tigerpond Inc.", and your customer is called "ABC Consulting".

• Go to our http://demo.project-open.net/  demo server
• Log on as "Ben Bigboss"
  
• Go to "Finance" tab
• Click on "Create Customer Invoice from Scratch"
• Enter some invoice lines and select "ABC Consulting" as customer and press "New Customer Invoice"
• Click on the "Preview as HTML" link of the finished invoice to preview the invoice.
  
• Click on the "Send Customer Invoice as HTML attachment" link to send the invoice to the customer.
  

The entire process takes less then a minute if the customer's information already exists.

Please see the Detailed Tutorial for screenshots.

(Creating a simple ad-hoc invoice with ]project-open[.)

Simple Time & Material Billing

Let's assume that you have agreed to update your customer's web site. During this project, one of your senior Web developers will work on-site at the customer's offices. Neither you nor the customer know how much time will be necessary to work on the Web site, so you have agreed to invoice your Web developer with EUR 80/hour, up to a limit of 100 hours.

In order to capture the time spent, you will need to set up a project where your Web developer will need log his hours:

• Go to our http://demo.project-open.net/  demo server
• Log on as "Ben Bigboss.
• Go to the "Projects" tab and choose "Add a New Project" in the page's navigation bar.
• The screenshot below shows a sample project definition. Please see the Project page for a detailed description of the project fields.
• Once the project has been created, please go to the "Project Member" plugin and click on the "Add members" link.
• In the next page please select "David Developer" and "add as Full Member" with the "Notify" field enabled to add David as a project member and to allow him to log hours on the project. David will receive an Email saying that he is now a member of the project.
  
• During the next days and weeks, David can log hour on the project by going to the "Timesheet" tab, selecting the day and entering his hours.
• Once the work is done, you go to the project, select the "Finance" tab (of the project!) and click on link "New Customer Invoice from Timesheet Tasks"  
• You will then enter a Wizard that helps you to create an invoice based on five different criterias:
  
• Planned Units
• Billable Units
• All reported Units
• Reported Units in Interval
• All unbilled Units