Keeping track of time based projects

Self-Hosted | v5
1

Hi there!

We’re running the self-hosted v5.7.58

We are currently using Invoice Ninja for estimates & invoices only, but are looking into a solution to keep track of our projects as well. I read through the documentation and experimented with a few features, but can’t seem to find a way to make things work like we would need it to work. I’ll try to describe it in detail, feel free to ask for additional info if needed!

This would be the ideal situation:

  • We create an Estimate that makes use of Products (being an hour of a specific person, with a specific price & cost; these people are also Users and/or Suppliers in Invoice Ninja so they can write their time and send us their own invoices). For this example we’ll use a price of €100 for the customer and a cost of €80 for us. This means we take €20 in profits for each hour sold.
  • Once approved, we convert it into a Project. This takes the budgeted hours from the Estimate and links them to the respective Users.
  • Users write their time spent in Invoice Ninja
  • We can follow up the status of a Project to check how it is going: a view on the time progress per User (is there an underspend or overspend?)
  • Once the Project is finished, we create an Invoice for that Project
  • This creates then Purchase Orders for each User that was assigned on the Project, based on the time that we billed the customer. Ideally these are then sent out to the respective Users and/or Suppliers.

Does that make sense? And is this possible? :sweat_smile:

Thanks for any help or information you can give!

2

Hi,

I believe that should work, have you run into an problems?

3

Hi Hillel, good to hear! Is there perhaps a manual for this?
The problem is that I tried to set it up like that, but somehow it all seems disconnected from each other. So when I create a Project from an Estimate, I need to assign Users manually. When they write their time, there doesn’t seem to be an overview of the whole Project status. And when I close it, I need to create the Purchase Orders manually.
So I think it is indeed all there, but not linked to eachother?

4

Users would need to be manually assigned to tasks, I’m not sure how that could be automated.

You can view the project to see the total time spent on it.

You can clone the invoice to create the purchase order.

5

Would it be possible to make Users into Products? That might help in assigning the tasks?
When cloning the Invoice to create Purchase Orders, we would need to change the amount from Price to Cost, right?

6

Anything’s possible… feel free to create an issue to track the request.

I’m not sure how that would work, I suggest testing it to check.