Creating an invoice

An invoice in Temponia is assembled from work you have already recorded: time entries that have not been invoiced yet, uninvoiced expenses, and the fees on fixed fee or retainer projects. You choose a client and the projects to bill, and Temponia gathers everything outstanding into invoice lines.

Invoicing is a module. If Invoices is missing from the menu, switch it on under Turning modules on and off. Creating and sending invoices is limited to owners and admins.

1. Pick the client and the projects

1. Open Invoices and select New invoice.
2. Under Select a client to invoice, choose the client. Only clients that still have something uninvoiced appear here, so a client you expected to find may already be fully billed.
3. Tick one or more projects under Select one or more projects to invoice. The same rule applies: only projects with something left to bill are listed.

2. Choose what to bill

Which hours do you want to invoice? offers All uninvoiced hours, Do not include hours and Select a period. Picking a period reveals a Period list (This week, Last month, This quarter, and so on) and, for Custom, a From and Until date.

Only time that carries an hourly rate above zero becomes an invoice line. If a project you selected produces no lines at all, its hours are being tracked at a rate of zero. See Rates and who gets charged what.

Include (?) decides how detailed the lines are. Leave it empty and every time entry becomes its own line. Select Task, Project, Month, User or any combination and the hours are summarised into one line per combination. Task is preselected. If you pick several time elements at once, the finest one wins.

Which expenses do you want to invoice? works the same way, with All uninvoiced expenses, Do not include expenses and Select a period. Expenses with a rate of zero are skipped. See Recording expenses.

If any selected project is a fixed fee or retainer project, a Fixed fee & retainers panel appears. The fixed fee amount is prefilled with what is still uninvoiced and can be lowered to bill an instalment. Retainer periods are always invoiced in full, and the previous period's overage is added as a separate line at the extra hours rate. See Billing types.

Approved time only. If your company requires approved time for invoicing, a warning at the top of the form tells you how much uninvoiced billable time is not approved yet. That time is left out of the invoice and stays uninvoiced. See Reviewing and approving timesheets.

3. Fill in the invoice details

Leave Number blank and Temponia numbers the invoice for you, using the prefix and counter from invoice settings. Set the Due date (Net 15, Net 30, Net 45, Net 60, Upon receipt or Custom) and optionally a Subject that is printed on the invoice.

Select Create invoice. If the selection turns up nothing billable, the invoice is not created and you get "Nothing found to invoice" instead.

4. Adjust the draft

A new invoice starts as a Draft. Select Edit invoice to change the number, status, due date, subject and Invoice footer, and to work on the lines.

The lines table holds a Description, Quantity, Unit price and a VAT percentage per line. Add line appends an empty line, which is how you add a discount, a fixed amount or anything not tracked as time. Leave the VAT field blank and the line follows the invoice's default rate.

Creating the invoice marks the underlying time entries and expenses as invoiced. Deleting the invoice releases them again, so they show up as uninvoiced on the next one.

5. Send it

Send by email opens a dialogue with a To address and an optional Message. The PDF is attached and the mail also carries a link to the online invoice. If the client had no email address on file, the one you type is saved on the client.

The other buttons on the invoice give you the same document in different shapes: Web invoice opens the public page your client can read without logging in, PDF downloads it, and the print icon prints the page. If you send structured invoices, see Peppol e-invoicing.

Following up

Sending by email moves a draft to Sent. From there Mark as paid closes it. The full list of statuses is available in Edit invoice:

If you export invoices to an accounting package, Sync with on the invoice list pulls the current status back from there, so Sent, Partially paid, Paid and Overdue follow what your accountant sees. See Choosing an integration.