Add recorded time to an invoice
Once you've recorded time in FreeAgent, you need to bill it on to your customer. That means adding it to an invoice. This guide shows you how.
1. Create the invoice
Create your invoice in the normal way, by going to Work and then Invoicing, and Add New Invoice.
Because you're tracking time, you will have done this against a project. You can also start creating an invoice for a project by selecting that project from the Project Summary page, then selecting Add New and choosing Invoice.
As you set up the invoice, make sure you choose the contact and project for which you have recorded time (these fields will be populated for you if you have started from the Project Summary page).
2. Add the time
To add time to this invoice, from the "Add Unbilled Time", drop-down menu, choose one of the options for including time. Remember that this will only ever include billable tasks, not unbillable ones.
You can only ever add time to an invoice if it isn't already on another invoice. FreeAgent will not let you bill the contact for the same time twice!
What if I don't want to add time?
If you don't want to add time to this invoice, then leave the option as "Don't include time", which is the default.
How does time display on the invoice?
If you do want to include any unbilled time, then use the options to choose how you want to display that time on the invoice. You can either put all your time together on the invoice in one line, have a line for every timeslip (which will put each day's time on a different line on the invoice), group time by tasks or by dates. Grouping by tasks is useful if, for example, if you want to show your customer how much time you've spent printing his or her letterheads and how much you've spent on business cards.
What dates will be included?
FreeAgent will only include time up to the date of the invoice. Any time dated after the invoice will be left unbilled, to go on to your next invoice.
If you have chosen to add time to the invoice, when you then select Create New Invoice, the time will be added on to the invoice, as one or more item lines.
3. View the invoice
The invoice in the picture below uses the "Group timeslips by task" display.
You can see the time has defaulted to category Sales. If you want to have this showing in a different category in your accounts, you can select the button underneath that line on the invoice to post that time to a different category.
Billed time = locked time
The billed time will then be locked under Time Tracking and you won't be able to change it unless you delete this item from the invoice. Remember you can't do that unless the invoice is in draft stage. You can see which time has been locked in Time Tracking, because locked timeslips have padlock icons next to them, like this.
Although you can change the time on the invoice by selecting Edit next to that item and changing the hours, that change will not filter through to the Time Tracking area because the time has been locked here. So if you've recorded time using Time Tracking, always make any changes there because otherwise there will be discrepancies between the time on your invoices and the time in Time Tracking.