Availability
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.
Creating a new invoice
To start creating a new invoice:
- Click Invoices on the left-hand menu.
- Click + Add invoice.
- 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.
- Fill in the fields in accordance with the table below:
Field | Preset values/manual entry | Comment |
---|---|---|
Status |
|
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 |
|
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. |
*
Calendar days are indicated in the terms of payment.
|
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 billed. On the next step, you decide to either add them all to a single invoice or separate into several invoices.
Three separate groups of billable items are available for adding to the invoice being created displayed as three tabs:
- Add time entries
- Add expenses
- Add flat fee activities
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 Billed are not taken into account to avoid double billing.
- billable items included in the invoice are all marked Billed 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:
- Click Add time entries tab.
- Select time entries you wish to be added one by one, or to select all, click the checkbox button in the top left cell.
- Click Add to invoice.
- 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:
- Click + Add line item.
- 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
Warning
If you have made any changes before using summarization, these will be overwritten once items are summarized!
To select a summary:
- Click .
- In the left-hand column, Summary by, select an option.
Manual line item description entry
You can always substitute your own description for the automatically substituted.
To enter a description manually:
- Click the appropriate cell in the Description column.
- Type the description.
- Press Enter or click outside the cell.