Consolidated Invoicing

By default, BigTime creates one invoice for every project in the system. If you have a customer with 10 active projects, then BigTime will create ten invoices: one for each project.

While that approach gives us the ability to track revenues at the project level, it's often not practical to send out ten invoices to the same customer. Because of that, BigTime allows you to create a special type of invoice document called a "consolidated invoice."

Consolidated invoices (called joint invoices or client level invoices by some companies) are like a master "document" that rolls up your project level invoices into a single form. That single form is what posts to QuickBooks, and it's also what gets printed out and sent to your customer.

Consolidated invoicing is setup at the client level, so you can have some customers who use it and others that don't. Even for clients that do use consolidated invoicing, BigTime creates project "sub-invoices" so that you can track revenues per project just like you do with any other project.

Those sub-invoices are, however, unique in a couple of ways.

• One "Shared" invoice number. Each sub-invoice will share the invoice number that the parent invoice uses.
• Shared invoice "general" information. All of the invoice-level data (terms, due date, notes, service dates, etc.) are set and maintained at the consolidated level (not on a per-project basis).
• Consolidated Posting. You don't post each sub-invoice as a separate transaction to QuickBooks. Instead, you post the consolidated invoice and only the "line items" are project specific.
• Consolidated Printing. BigTime supports a set of consolidated invoice formats that let you print a single invoice for all of those sub-invoices.