When invoicing a budget, Productive will generate a new invoice with line items from the current budget state (billable services & expenses). There are a few cases we need to watch out for when thinking about how budget items translate into invoice line items:
Non billable services & expenses are never invoiced.
How do we calculate what's left for invoicing?
Everything is nice and simple when you create 1 invoice for the budget after all the billable work has been done.
Let’s say you have a budget with an hourly service with 10 billable hours on it and you’re charging $20 / hour. If you invoice it, there will be one line item:
You will continue working on that budget and after some time the billable hours will go up to 15. If you decide to invoice it again, you will see the following situation.
Even though the total amount of billable hours is 15, you’ve already invoiced 10 hours before, which is why you're seeing only 5 in the newly-created invoice.
Productive will always try to account for changes in quantity between previous invoices and the new invoice being created.
When does this not work?
The “issue” arises when you’re invoicing the budget in multiple phases - because some things can change between the first and the second invoice. Productive will try, when possible, to account for the changes.
There are a few cases where Productive can’t account for changes that happened after the first invoice:
The price of the service changed ($20 / hour to $25 / hour)
Pricing type of the service changed (hourly -> fixed price)
Unit type on the fixed service price changed (hour -> day)
Line items on the first invoice were deleted and re-entered again manually
Unit type or a price changed on the line items of the first invoice
These are all situations where something “unorderly” has happened. In these cases, a new invoice will be generated with line items that represent the current budget state - ignoring all the invoices that happened before.
In the example above - let’s say we’ve changed the hourly rate after the first invoice to $25 / hour. A newly-created invoice would have the line item “$15 x hour x $25 / hour” regardless of the fact that we already invoiced 10 hours before.
However, we cannot completely ignore the fact that 10 of those hours have already been invoiced.
The amount for invoicing includes the amount from the first invoice you’ve created. To put it down to zero one more line item called Amount correction will be created.
This is when you need to jump in and manually adjust the line items before sending the invoice to the client.
When manual changes occur on the previous invoices, or if you change the structure of the budget afterward - Productive will generate an invoice with the current budget state + the “Amount correction” line item that accounts for the amount that has already been invoiced in the past.