How Time Entries become Billable Items

A billable Time Entry joins the Client's Billable Items and is pre-selected on their next Invoice. Nothing is retyped and nothing is billed twice.

Before you start

A Billable Item is an amount waiting to be placed on an Invoice. Time is one source of them; a cost passed on to a Client is the other. They are deliberately the same thing — labor sold and costs passed on differ only in where they came from.

A Time Entry becomes one when two things are true: it is marked billable, and it names a Service. The Service is what supplies the rate.

An Item carries retail — what you will charge — which need not equal what the work or the cost was worth to you. That difference is the Client’s margin, and it is visible because the two figures are kept apart.

What stops double billing

An Item records the Invoice it went onto and when. Once it is on an Invoice it is no longer waiting, so it stops being offered — there is no list to remember to clear and no way to bill the same hour twice by raising a second Invoice.

Steps

Good to know

An entry logged as non-billable never becomes a Billable Item — but it is still on the Client’s record, so what a Client actually costs you stays visible even when you chose not to charge for it.

An entry that is billable but has no Service has no rate, so it cannot be priced. The Time form will not let you save that combination.

Editing a Time Entry that is already on an Invoice is refused. Take it off the Invoice first.