I recently provided a quote to a client for labor and equipment charges. Once the quote was approved, I converted it into and invoice. However, I’ve run into one minor problem. Since the quote included the cost of purchasing equipment for the client, I somehow still need to count that as an expense for tax purposes. Currently, it appears I profited the entire amount of the invoice when I really only profited the amount for my labor charges and not for the equipment purchase. The equipment charge to the client was simply a reimbursement of sorts. Anyway to do this in InvoiceNinja? Or will I need to amend my current invoice to show only labor charges, and then go in and create my equipment expense and invoice that separately?
One option may be to delete the equipment line items from the invoice, create them as expenses and then add them to the invoice. If this happens a lot that would be a pain though, it may be easier to track the expenses using the product name.
That’s sort of what I was thinking. This is the first time I have ever used the quote feature, so it’s also the first time I’ve run into this issue before. Anyway some sort of solution to this could be put on the road map for a future InvoiceNinja update? Not sure how it would work, but it would be awesome
What do you mean by tracking the expenses using the product name?
One other thing I have a question about. When I enter expenses and then invoice those expenses and send the invoice to a client, it doesn’t currently automatically mark the expenses paid (it still shows billable) when the invoice is marked as paid. Anyway this could be an added feature in the future? If I go in and manually mark each billed expense as paid, is this just a visual thing to see that it has been paid or will it actually count this in the PAYMENTS section? I’m worried that it might double count the payment for an expense: once for the invoice paid, and once for when I marked a billable expense as paid in the expenses tab. Hope that makes some sort of sense haha.
If all expenses have the same product name (the first field in the invoice item row) then you could use the product report to determine how much was invoiced in total for that product.
I’m not sure, it could be a bug. Are you using the latest version (v3.4.2)?
An expense can be:
Paid: when the expense itself is marked as paid
Invoiced: when the expense is added to an invoice
Billed: when the invoice it’s included with is paid
I think everything is working correctly with how you explained it. Most of my expenses are added to an invoice, so in that case I should expect it to say “billed” under status column, correct?
So how do I go about adding an expense to an existing invoice? When I select the expenses I want to invoice and then click ‘Invoice’, it creates a brand new invoice rather than allowing me to choose to select an existing one.
Ok. When I go to the edit expense page and click ‘More Actions’ I see three options: Invoice Expense, Archive Expense and Delete Expense. When I click invoice expense, it’s just creating a new invoice. Is there supposed to be an additional options somewhere that allows me to add it to an existing one? The clients are the same on both the expense and the invoice.
If the client is set for the expense and an open invoice (with a balance) exists for the client you should see it as an option when clicking ‘More Actions’.
Ah, ok. They’d already paid the invoice, so that’s probably where the issue is. I guess I can edit the invoice to show that it hasn’t been paid so that I can add the expense to it?
Ok. Got it to work. I initially tried to add an additional, temporary line item worth $10, saved the invoice and then attempted to add the expenses, but that didn’t work. I ended up having to delete the payment entirely, and then I finally received the option to add my expenses to the existing invoice.
One thing I came across that might be a very minor bug: When I was adding my expenses to the existing invoice, I forgot to type in what a particular expense was for in the public note section of one of the expenses. It therefore didn’t show any details on the invoice other than the cost of the item. I went back and added the details to the public notes section, re-saved the expense, but the invoice didn’t update to reflect the changes I made. I had to completely delete the expense and start over.
It’s by design, the details from the expense are copied over when it’s invoiced however if the expense is update at a later date we purposefully don’t modify the invoice.
I ran into this issue again; albeit, in a slightly different fashion. I entered an expense for a client and saved it. I then entered a task for the same client and saved it. I then invoiced the task and saved the newly created invoice. I figured I would be able to add the expense to the open invoice, but no such luck.
Both had the same client and the invoice had a balance. Any ideas?
I ended up just creating two invoices because I got fed up with it haha.
