Guide to setup for billing similar to law firms

Self-Hosted | v5
1

Hello,
This is my first time setting up IN, so my questions are mostly due to my unfamiliarity with it. It looks like a great product, but I’m having issue setting it up for my use case. So I’m reaching out to see if anyone has setup their IN or are there guides on how to setup IN for billing services similar to law firms?
My use case:
I provide consulting services and charge different hourly rate depending on the tasks. eg reviewing cases. Cases may originate from different contacts within a firm (client). Billing is based on the case and the invoices go to the contact associated with that case.
Current issue I’m seeing in IN setup for my purpose:

  1. It appears that each client is associated with 1 contact.
  2. So I tried to create one client for each contact in the same firm (client), but then that shows multiple duplicate clients with different contacts.
  3. Due to #2, when I create a project (case) and try to associate that project with a contact, I just see multiple clients of the same name, I don’t know which one of those duplicate client names is the correct contact.
    If there’s a more logical way to setup IN for this type of billing please let me know.
2

Hi,

  1. A client can have multiple contacts
  2. Projects are tied to a client, not a specific contact

I suggest testing with a client with multiple contacts to see if it helps,

3

Thank you @hillel
So I’ve created a couple of clients with multiple contacts by merging. Created a project for a client. and completed pretend tasks for that project.
Then I created a second project for a differnt client.
When I go to add a task, after selecting the client, I see the projects for both clients. It appears, that selecting the client on the first dropdown does not filter the projects to only show the projects for that client.
When I go to create a new invoice for one of the clients, those tasks do not appear in the tasks tab of the invoice page to add to invoice. It appears that I have to go to the task page and select the tasks to invoice them. Is this the correct workflow? but every task for different clients and different projects are there with no easy way to filter by project? Is there a way to filter that page by project?

4

Additionally, it seems when I’m generating an invoice, regardless which contact I select in the invoice page, the preview only shows the email of the first contact for that client. Is this the expected behavior?

5

You may want to try the desktop app to see if it works better for you.

That’s correct, the preview will only show the first contact.

6

Thank you,
Using the desktop app, I can see the project name associated with each task, and can filter by those project names. However, when I invoice them, I am still unable to select which contact email to appear on the invoice. It always default to the first contact email…

7

You can check/uncheck the contact checkboxes to determine who will receive the invoice by email.

8

I see that I can check/uncheck the contact person, but the email address that appears on the invoice doesn’t change…
Also is there a way in settings to round up invoiced task time to nearest 0.1 hour? because the industry standard for billing in this field is by 0.1 hours.

9

The PDF is a preview, each contact will see their own name on the invoice PDF they receive.

@david if it isn’t too hard this would be nice to change.

Task rounding isn’t currently supported but it’s high on our list, you can follow the issue here.

Also, if you haven’t seen it I recommend checking out our new browser extension to manage tasks.

10

Awesome! thank you for that update. I’ve added my comments to that github feature request.
I do have the task extension added and enabled. Thanks again.