Customers and invoicing

Customers with their contracts, phases and label categories, cost rates, service levels, and the invoices made from the hours.

Hours become money through the customer they were worked for. A customer holds contracts with rates, phases that are billing periods, and label categories that group hours into invoice lines. Recording the hours is on Time.

Customers and contracts

A customer is an organisation that time is billed to. A project's customer is set in its settings, and a free-form activity can name a customer without a project. Customers under Time lists the customers whose billing you may see, with their projects and contracts; administrators create customers as organisations under Administration, and a role given there (Account manager, Finance, Consultant, Team lead) says what each member may do for that customer and for every project billed to it.

A customer's page holds its billing details (the email address and postal address printed on invoices, and a ticket URL prefix that turns labels into links in exports), its contracts, and its label categories. A contract names an hourly rate and a currency, a reference and the description printed on invoice lines. Label categories group labels into invoice lines ("Development", "Support") when the customer's invoices are broken down by category rather than by phase; hours whose labels fall under no category go under the customer's line for uncategorised hours. Seeing rates and amounts needs the See billing permission on the customer or a project billed to it; changing any of this needs Manage billing.

Finding a customer

The search box (or the f key) narrows the customers by name or by the key of a project billed to them, and the order can be by name or newest first. Twenty customers are shown at a time, with Previous and Next under the list, and the filters and page are part of the page address.

Cost rates

What an hour of a member's work costs the business, as against what it is billed for: under Customers, whoever may see billing anywhere sees the cost rates, and whoever manages billing adds one for a member with a rate, a currency and the day it applies from; a later rate for the same member takes over from its day, so a rise is a new line, not a change. The effort page uses the rate in force on each activity's day.

Service levels

A contract can promise service levels: for each SLA clock of a helpdesk project, the target the customer is entitled to, around the clock or within a calendar's working hours. A request from that customer then measures against the contract's target rather than the clock's own goals. When a customer holds several contracts, the one whose phase covers the day the request was made applies, else the most recent contract. Changing a service level re-runs the clocks on the customer's open requests. The customer's page shows each contract's service levels and, for the phase covering today (or the last thirty days), how many clocks on the customer's requests were met, breached or are still open; seeing this needs no billing permission, since it holds no money.

Phases

A phase is a billing period: a named date range, usually under a contract and optionally scoped to one of the customer's projects, with a rate that overrides the contract's, a budget of working days and the hours a day counts as (eight unless you say otherwise). A phase with neither contract nor project is your own period to report on. Phases under Time lists the phases you may see, yours and those of the customers you see billing for; a report or an invoice is made from a phase, which sets its dates, customer, project and rate.

Invoices

Invoices under Time makes an invoice from a contract's phases, for anyone who manages billing for a customer. Pick the contract, then the phases to bill: a phase is offered once it has ended, under a contract, with a rate of its own, of an enclosing phase or of the contract. Each phase becomes a line of its billable hours at its rate; for a customer whose labels are grouped into categories, the lines are the categories instead, the hours of an activity shared equally between the categories its labels fall under and the rest under the customer's line for uncategorised hours. An invoice covers one contract, so only that contract's phases are offered once one is chosen.

The invoice is shown as it will print, and updates as you type. The number, date, customer reference and description, the company block, the customer's billing address and email, the tax label and rate and the footer start from the invoice settings, the customer's billing details and the contract, and can be changed for this invoice alone. Tax is added when both a label and a rate above zero are set. Download PDF prints it; the download's name is the company and the invoice number. Nothing is stored: an invoice is worked out from the phases and their activities each time it is asked for, so lock the entries of a billed phase (from the reports page) if they must not move afterwards.

Invoice settings

An administrator enters the workspace's own details for invoices under Administration: the company name, address, phone and email printed at the top, the currency, a tax label and rate, and a footer for payment terms, in which a line of two or more dashes becomes a rule.