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Invoices — Creating an invoice

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unavailable in Birdview PM Lite, Team, Enterprise
available in Birdview PSA Team and Enterprise license plans

Overview

This article provides a step-by-step guide on creating invoices within Birdview, detailing how to add billable items, customize line item descriptions, and manage invoice settings to streamline your billing process. The article provides a detailed description of invoice columns and fields.

Creating a new invoice

To start creating a new invoice:

  1. Click Invoices on the left-hand menu.
  2. Click + Add invoice.
  3. Specify the invoice number. 

Tip

Birdview auto-generates a number based on the number of the previously saved invoice. You can either leave it or specify your own.

 

  1. Fill in the fields in accordance with the table below:
Field Preset values/manual entry Comment
Status
  • Draft (default)
  • Invoiced
  • Paid
  • Voided
 Set a status of the invoice.
Reference (PO number) Manual Used for reference number, purchase order number, etc. Letters, numbers and special characters are supported.
Message on invoice Manual Specify payment instructions, preferred payment method, late fees, etc. 
Note Manual  Invoice-related information: the customer will not see it. 
Invoice date Date picker Current date is substituted by default.
Terms
  • Due upon receipt
  • Net 5*
  • Net 15
  • Net 30 (default)
  • Net 45
  • Net 60
  • Net 90
 Select standard payment terms from a list of preset values.  
Customer List of available customers   For how to add a customer, see Adding customers.
Bill to Customer profile info, if any, substituted + manual entry Bill to address, i.e. the address where the recipient of goods or services would like the invoice to be sent.
Project List of projects  Only projects related to the selected customer are listed. Once a project is selected and billable items pertaining to it have been added to the invoice, no other project can be selected. To change the project, remove all items from the invoice first.
*
The number signifies calendar days.

Invoice columns

An invoice consists of the following columns/fields:

Column Preset values/manual entry Comments
# Automatically incremented item number The ordinal number of an invoiced item.
Description Automatic/Manual The field contains either automatically populated description of an invoice item, e.g. generated by using the Add time entries button, or manually entered items, e.g. a billable expense.
Unit
  • Pcs
  • Hours
  • Days
 Select a preset unit of measurement to go with the invoice line item, e.g. Pcs for delivered individual pieces of a commodity.
Unit price or rate Manual Price or rate value to apply to the line item.
Quantity Manual The quantity of selected units of measurement for the line item.
Amount Calculated value Total amount calculated for the line item.
Primary tax List of available taxes For how to add a tax, see Tax rates.
Secondary tax List of available taxes For how to add a tax, see Tax rates.
Discount Manual1 The value of a discount applicable to the line item.
1
Discount may be specified in % or as a monetary value.

Adding billable items to invoice

You can add line items to the invoice being created both from sets of existing billable items associated with the project (e.g. billable time logs entered by your employees as part of the project) so that you can bill them all at once or only part of them, and also you can add line items of your own, manually, if needed. For example, you remembered a cost at the last moment that you had not entered into Birdview yet. You can add it now directly to the invoice as explained below. There are two ways of adding line items:

Method #1 - automatic: involves automatic generation by Birdview of billable items ready to be invoiced. On the next step, you decide to either add them all to a single invoice or segregate into several invoices.

Four separate groups of billable items are available for adding to the invoice being created displayed as three tabs:

  • Add products and services 
  • Add time entries
  • Add expenses
  • Add flat fee activities
Invoices_add_items.png

The groups represent three sources of billable items available in Birdview. 

Birdview pulls records in each group pertaining to the selected project, for you to select from as line items to be included in the invoice. In the process:

  • time entries and expenses marked as Invoiced are not taken into account to avoid double billing.
  • billable items included in the invoice are all marked Invoiced so that they do get included in subsequent invoices. 

The procedure is similar for all three groups. For example, to add time entries to the invoice:

  1. Click Add time entries tab.
  2. Select time entries you wish to be added one by one, or to select all, click the checkbox button in the top left cell.
  3. Click Add to invoice.
  4. Edit the lines, if required, by editing description, adding a tax, discount, etc. 

For line item description options, see the section below.

Method #1 - manual: you can add items that do not exist in the system, too. This could be an eleventh-hour expenditure that has not yet entered to the project expenses.

To add a line item manually:

  1. Click + Add line item.
  2. Fill in the details of the item: description, rate, amount, tax, discount, etc.

Summarizing time entry items

To avoid having a long invoice or having to edit numerous line items manually, you can choose to present time entry items as a summary. You have several summary-by options: 

  • None
  • Project
  • Activity
  • Date 
  • Person
  • Job role

Important

If you have made any changes before using summarization, these will be overwritten once items are summarized!

To select a summary:

  1. Click .
  2. In the left-hand column, Summary by, select an option.

Summary.png

Manual line item description entry

You can always substitute your own description for the automatically substituted.

To enter a description manually:

  1. Click the appropriate cell in the Description column.
  2. Type the description.
  3. Press Enter or click outside the cell.

Tax application rules

The following rules govern the taxes available on an invoice:  

  1. Taxes are applied per line item. In other words, taxes may be skipped for individual items.
  2. Each tax is applied to the line item base amount (Amount column).
  3. Total tax appearing in the invoice totals is the sum of the two taxes.

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