Sub-Totalling the T&M Invoice

You setup invoice templates to allow (or prohibit) sub-totalling line-by-line, but the sub-total "field" is selected in the project's Invoice Format settings. This lets BigTime use a single invoice template to cover any sub-totalling selection your firm requires (e.g. - you can have T&M invoices that are sub-totalled by staff member, by labor code, by budget item or by team role and all of those invoices use the same invoice template).

Consider the T&M charges we were working with earlier in the chapter.

These time charges produced a T&M invoice that had $3187.50 in time charges, and $186.38 in reimbursable expenses.

We can use a project's sub-totalling options to make that invoice a little more detailed. Let's assume that we want to sub-total our invoice charges by staff member. Instead of the time/expense detail you see above, we would have a "summary" of time/expenses that looks something like this:

That's because Jake has 2 time entries attached to the invoice (for a total of $1,087.50), Agnes has 3 time entries (totalling $2,100.00) and she also has two expense entries (for a total of $186.38).

The invoicing engine (using the T&M invoice format) starts out with two line items:

Then, it sees that the project is sub-totalling by staff member. Given that fact, it splits each of its line items into sub-items (1 for each staff member on the invoice).

Once that's done, it applies the variables to the "amount" column to get the following amounts.

Now, the invoicing engine removes and entries with a zero in the amount column. This step is important. The fact that the invoicing engine doesn't support zero-dollar line items makes it easy to create invoice formula that are "conditional." If the line item evaluates to zero, then it won't appear in the invoice.

Once that final bit of logic is applied, the invoicing engine has the three line items that will appear in our sub-totalled. Invoice.

This is how BigTime works with the sub-totalling settings on your project dashboard. As a result, the same invoice template can be used to produce an invoice that is sub-totalled by staff member, budget item, labor code/category, staff group, team role, etc.