Invoicing/Billing Data

While the system guide contains an entire section on setting up invoicing and billing rates, a complete review of the project dashboard should also mention that those invoice settings and billing rates can be adjusted from the Contracts menu on the dashboard.

In addition to setting up invoicing and billing rates, there is an excellent invoice history screen in the Budgets/Hours menu which shows a list of all of the invoices you have created or imported for this project. If you are a QuickBooks user, that screen also shows you the current A/R aging status for the project, and it details which invoices have been paid and which ones are outstanding.

Billing Rates and Cost Rates

We cover how to setup a project's billing rates in the Invoicing chapter, but the page you'll use to edit that information is in the project dashboard. If you click to Contract... Billing Rates, you'll see edit panes for entering a basic rate, custom rates and custom "cost" rates.

Every hour that a staff member inputs into your system has a "cost" attached to it. For salaried employees (and for most of your hourly staff), that cost is the same no matter what project that person is working on. For some firms, however, a consultant's hourly rate is tied to the project they are working on. They may get paid a higher hourly rate on some projects than they do on others. For situations like these, your firm may decide to ignore the difference if the impact on overall project costs is minimal.

If you'd like to create a custom cost rate for that particular staff member on one project, you can do so from the Billing Rates page. Just fill in your custom hourly cost rate in the "Custom Cost Rates" edit pane at the bottom of this page.