Here it is my friends, kudos to Adam of MC for the finishing touches. this invoice renders labor information on one set of sheets, expense information on the next, provides subtotals, and provides a really nice summary/cover page with that information. it also lets you put a short synopsis of the bill on the cover page, a little touch I invented that I'm proud of.

First, look at a filled-in invoice to see what it gives you:

Sample Rendered Invoice

Next, you must set up your Billings data entry for it to sort and render some of the elements. it will take a little bit of set-up, but once done it's done for good.

1. When entering time/comments on a time slip, "category" must be either "labor" or "expense" (without the quotes). If it's nothing or anything else, the invoice will not count it, it won't print, and you won't get paid. I personally set up slip templates for different attorney and rates (labor) and one for entry of expenses.

Also note that for the "date" field, I use the "started" as my only date, so if you use a "completed" as your date it will not render that date, only the "started" date. In other words, if you "start" a project on a monday, finish it that friday, and only keep a total of the time, say twenty hours, the finish date will not show and it will look like you billed 20 hours on monday.

2. For the "synopsis" shown rendered on the cover page, up to seven days (that's how it's programmed, my choice, so it doesn't print last month's notes) before compiling the bill, you can double click on your project name, which will open a window where the right-most choice at the top is "notes"

3. If you want notes to appear on the cover page, enter notes on that screen for the case, making sure of the date. My idea is you can give a short, 50-ish word synopsis of what you've done that period on that case, make announcements ("we will be closed July 4, 5, 6" or "Please see our new website") or whatever, to set your bills apart from the herd.

4. If you want a client's internal code to appear in the "project information", under preferences>definitions>extra fields, you want "field 1" to say something like "client project number" or "client code" You must then enter the client's code in the project data entry screen described above, but under "details" and "client project number" or whatever will appear.

This MUST be "field 1" because that's what the template looks for (adam FYI, I changed this one to this for clarity on data entry).

5. Enter a due date when compiling the invoice.

6. Note that the "remit to" information, and the tag at the bottom of the first page, is hard-text, you will have to go into the invoice template to change that to your information, it does not do that automatically. I suppose it could, but at this point someone else can take charge of that project.

That's it, I think I got everything covered. Here's the template, save it where your templates are (probably library>application support>billings>templates):



To top it off, I picked up a nice little case today that I can use my new invoice on!

UPDATE; So sorry, I just went to render an invoice and realized I did not upload the right revisions to match the description. Here's the right invoice with "field 1" as described above. sample template

Good luck.

Mike

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Michael P,

Wow, that's an awesome invoice. Thanks for sharing this work with us other users. I'm not yet very proficient with the designer, but your invoice is doing a lot of the things I'm interested in, and I think it'll serve as a useful reference.

I love your cover sheet - the projcet being a seperate table and the synopsis table idea are just excellent. It also is definitely nice where a lot of work has been done to keep activity on seperate pages.

What I'm thinking about doing is creating a table near the bottom of the form of the cover and using that to build a small payment slip which would have the payment remittance address and show the total due as well as payment blanks. That combined with a perforator would make for some rather professional bills (and also having the payment come back with a slip indicating precisely which invoice they're sending a payment for.)

Thanks, Adam of MC did most of the work. I am proud of the synopsis, my own little invention.

All the information you need to create a payment slip is on the first page, due date, invoice no., amount, remit to, etc. Just a question of finding pre-perforated paper and re-formatting the cover page to fit.

Mike

Do you know of a way to show past due balances from say, the immediately previous month? I often have clients who pay 60 days after billing and when I bill them for the second month, I want to be able to show their past due amount.

Thanks

I don't know how exactly to do that, but I would imagine the data is out there and maybe someone from MC could help. One of my main problems were finding the correct data path for the info I wanted.

good luck.