Invoicing several jobs at once

The most expensive thing a small business forgets to do is invoice. This is the Friday-afternoon answer to eleven finished jobs and eleven trips through the same form: select the jobs, get the invoices.

Find the jobs nobody has billed

The Jobs list has a Needs invoicing filter: completed jobs with nothing billed against them. That is the list, and it is usually shorter and more alarming than people expect.

If you have the automated reminder turned on, its email opens this list for you with the jobs already filtered and already selected, so the nudge and the fix are one click apart rather than one email and eleven forms.

Create the invoices

Select the jobs you want and choose Create invoices. You get one draft invoice per job, carrying exactly the lines the single New Invoice page would have preselected for that job:

• its milestones not yet invoiced, and
• its approved change orders not yet invoiced,

with the same due date and tax that form would have applied. Nothing is guessed differently just because it was done in bulk.

A job with nothing billable on it is skipped and named, never given an empty invoice. You end on a page listing what was created and what was skipped and why, with every draft one click away for whoever wants to look before anything goes out.

They are drafts. Nothing has reached a client yet.

Send them together

Send all sends each draft the way pressing Send on a single invoice does — the same email, the same payment link, the same record on the invoice and in that client’s history.

They go one at a time, deliberately. If one fails — a client with no email address on file, say — that is one invoice’s problem and the others are unaffected. You are told which one, and the rest have already gone.

What is deliberately not included

Logged hours and expenses are not added. Whether a job’s hours get billed, and at what rate, is a judgment the New Invoice page leaves to a person — and batching it would make that judgment for you eleven times without asking.

If you bill time and materials, open the job and invoice it there. Batch invoicing is for the jobs where the milestones and change orders already say what is owed.