Invoices and bill rates
What an hour costs and what it bills, and invoices made from the hours you bill.
Invoicing is part of the Time Tracking & Billing extension. It turns billable hours into invoices you review, number, print and follow through to paid.
Two rates for every hour
A rate in Noots holds two figures. The pay rate is what an hour costs your workspace. The bill rate is what a client is charged for it. Both are set side by side in Org settings → Rates & Billing, whichever way your workspace sets rates - one for everybody, or by role, division, team or person. The bill rate is optional; leave it blank and that rate bills nothing.
Two more kinds of bill rate are set in Org settings → Project & client bill rates: one for a project, and one for a client that covers every project billed to that client. They are bill rates only and never change what anybody is paid.
Which bill rate an hour uses
- 1The project's own bill rate, if it has one.
- 2Otherwise the bill rate of the client the project bills to.
- 3Otherwise the person's bill rate, worked out the same way your workspace works out their pay rate.
- 4Otherwise the extension's Default hourly rate, if you have set one.
If none of those applies, the hour has no price, and an invoice made from it asks for a rate on that line before it can be sent. The same happens when a person's bill rates disagree - two roles with different rates, say - because Noots will not guess which one you meant.
A project bills to a client once you pick one under Bills to on the project's Billing tab. Clients are companies from the CRM; without the CRM, you name the client on each invoice instead.
Who sees bill rates and invoices
Only the workspace's owner and people whose role includes the See & set rates permission, which admins have by default and a custom role can be given. Nobody else sees a bill rate, an invoice or a margin - not even for their own hours.
Until a bill rate exists somewhere in the workspace, or the extension's default rate is set, there is no Invoices page, no invoice button and no money column. A project's Billing tab shows its hours and one sentence saying where to set a rate. Invoices already made stay listed even if every bill rate is later removed.
The Invoices list
Open Organization → Invoices, beside Hours & pay. It lists every invoice in the workspace, with totals for what is outstanding, overdue, paid and still in draft. Filter it by status - draft, sent, overdue, paid or void - search by client or number, pick a client or a project, and narrow it to a range of dates. Export CSV downloads the list as filtered.
Making an invoice
- 1Press New invoice on the Invoices list, or Make a draft invoice on a project's Billing tab.
- 2Pick a client, or one or more projects, and the dates the work was done in. A preview shows the billable time not yet invoiced and what it bills.
- 3Press Make the draft. The draft opens for you to review. It has no number yet.
Hours in that range that are already on another invoice are listed but not taken. You can tick one to bill it again, and the invoice then carries a warning that some of its time is billed a second time.
Editing a draft
- Change the client name, the Bill to block, the issue date and the payment terms in days.
- Change a time line's description, hours or rate; add an item, or an adjustment (a minus amount is a credit); remove a line; or press Add unbilled time to bring in time logged in the invoice's dates since the draft was made.
- Add a discount, as a percentage or an amount.
- Set one tax line - its label and its rate. It is applied once, to the total after any discount. Noots does not decide whether tax applies or at what rate: the line says exactly what you set.
- Add notes, such as a PO number. They print on the invoice.
- Defaults for new invoices - the number prefix, payment terms, the tax line, your company's details and a payment note - are under Settings on the Invoices list.
Sending, paid and void
| Status | What it means | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | Being prepared. It has no number. | Edit it, delete it, or send it. |
| Sent | Numbered, and from here on a record: nothing on it changes. | Mark it paid, or void it. |
| Overdue | Sent, and past its due date. | The same as sent. |
| Paid | Settled. | Mark it unpaid, to correct a mistake. |
| Void | Cancelled. It keeps its number as a record. | Print it or export it, like any other. |
- Send gives the invoice its number and marks it sent. It does not email the invoice to anyone: print it or save it as a PDF and send it the way you usually would.
- Send stays unavailable until the invoice names a client, has at least one line, every time line has a rate, and the total is not below zero.
- Numbers run in one sequence per workspace -
INV-0001,INV-0002and on, with a prefix you can change - and are given out only when an invoice is sent. A draft has none, so deleting a draft leaves no gap, and a number is never used twice. - An invoice is overdue once its due date - the issue date plus its terms - has passed in your workspace's timezone. Nobody sets it; it is worked out each time you look.
- Void a sent invoice to cancel it. Its hours go back to the pool so they can be invoiced again. A paid invoice has to be marked unpaid first, and a draft is simply deleted.
- Whoever made an invoice gets a notification when somebody else marks it paid.
An hour is billed once
An invoice claims the hours it takes, so no second invoice picks them up - even when two people make invoices over the same hours at the same moment. Hours on an invoice are locked: their length, whether they are billable, who logged them, their project or task and when they started cannot be changed until the line comes off a draft or the invoice is voided. Removing a line or deleting a draft lets its hours go. Deleting a task or project whose hours are on an invoice leaves that invoice exactly as it was.
Print, PDF and CSV
Print or PDF opens a clean printable copy of the invoice and your browser's print dialog - choose to save as PDF there. CSV on an invoice downloads its lines; Export CSV on the list downloads the list.
Margin in Hours & pay
Once a bill rate exists, Organization → Hours & pay adds what the period's billable hours bill, what those same hours cost at pay rates, and the margin between the two - for the workspace and for each person. Billable time with no bill rate is left out of the margin, and the page says how much of it there is.
Noots does the arithmetic - whole cents, one tax line on the total after any discount - and prints what you set. It does not know your tax rules or what an invoice has to show where you are. Have an accountant review your invoice settings and a sample invoice before you send one to a client.