Checking back in on features

Hello. Thanks for such a wonderful project. Each year I reevaluate our invoicing system and would love to migrate to IN. But the lack of 2 features always keeps us from making the move and I was wondering if they are present yet or perhaps planned.

  1. Retainer invoices. We do a lot of these and the work arounds presented in previous posts would really not work. We need to be able to charge a customer for future work done and apply future invoices against the retainer invoice.

  2. Charging sales tax on a line item basis. For instance as a consultant there are certain consulting items that are taxable and others that are not. We need to be able to select linen items that are taxable or not. We can create separate invoices but that adds extra work.

Let me know if these items are present or might be planned.

Thanks and have a great new year
Dave

Hi,

  1. There is an “Enable applying payments later” option in the payment settings which may work for this. It enables creating a payment which can be later applied to invoices.

  2. The app supports setting/unsetting line items taxes.

Yes! Gonna dig into this now and see if it will work for us…

THANKS!!

OK…I remember one other thing that is more of an annoyance but as a consultant, we never use any timer functionality in tasks. For instance, getting onsite and starting the timer and then shutting it off when we leave. There is no way this would work for us. We go onsite, do the work, leave and enter the hours we were there along with details in the description. Now the web app does have the ability to enter duration which is good. I suppose we can just ignore the start and stop time it drops into the task since it really does not apply. However, on the mobile app when we want to log a task we need to start the timer and then stop it and then change the duration. Again, definitely not a deal breaker but just a nuisance. I notice this a lot on time tracker apps as well and I can not imagine anyone (especially in IT) being that disciplined to start and stop timers especially when onsite.

Just a suggestion to give the option to enter the duration on tasks only and disable the timer function.

Thanks for the feedback!

Note: you don’t need to stop the task, setting the duration will stop it for you. Also, you can enable auto starting the tasks in the settings so you don’t need to start it either.

Yes…Perfect thanks. One other thing regarding the taxes on line items and I now remember why this was an issue. So when I create an invoice in IN the line items do indeed give you the ability to select a tax rate per line item. I can select non-taxable there if needed. However, for the invoice TOTAL, the sales tax is still being calculated for the invoice as a whole. I remember thinking this was odd and perhaps I am missing something. But I could have an invoice where all line items are non-taxable but it will still calculate sales tax as a whole for the customer. Am I missing something? If I select non-taxable on the line item I would expect that the line item amount would not be used in the sales tax calculations for the invoice as a whole.

Again even if we have a customer who has a default sales tax set for them they may often have line items that are not taxable and some that are taxable. Is there a setting I might be missing?

Thanks again

To exclude certain line items from taxes you would have to set the invoice level taxes on each of the taxable line items.

Thanks for the response. We could work with this but it could lead to human error. See below:

#1 If we do as you say and set the taxes on the line item level then we need to remember to change to total overall invoice tax to non-taxable since it doubles the tax for some reason (ie: It calculates the tax on the line item and also the total invoice amount (including the taxable line item).)
#2) Also, instead of multiple invoices we always send customers one invoice with many line items consisting of products for products and tasks. This works great in IN. However, if we have an invoice with 10 taxable items either in the products tab or tasks tab and then one particular line item that is non taxable we need to remember to set the overall invoice tax to non taxable and then manually flag the (10) taxable lines with the proper tax rate because of the double taxation mentioned above in #1.

We can likely try to work around this issue by creating multiple invoices. One taxable and the other non-taxable. But this would complicate our workflow.

Might I suggest a simple checkbox next to each line item that simply says taxable or non-taxable.

Or maybe I am missing a setting that will allow us to accomplish our needs.

Again thanks for the super fast responses.

I do see if I disable taxes on “Invoice Tax Rate” in settings then the total invoice is not taxed which is good. But then we need to make sure we flag each line item with the appropriate tax rate since it defaults to non-taxable. Not sure why or if there is a way to change that. If the default tax rate can be set on a client-by-client basis (since we collect tax in many jurisdictions with different tax rates) AND line item default tax rate could default to that client tax rate then this would solve the problem…I believe

Thanks, understood. It isn’t currently supported but we’re looking into it for a future release.

cc @david

Trying to gain some traction on the Retainer feature… Collecting feedback on this issue for now: For reference:

Invoice for credit for monthly retainer · Issue #8639 · invoiceninja/invoiceninja (github.com)