How can I edit the bill-to address when the invoice needs to be sent to someone else? We just bill the client one fee -- half at the start and half at the end. How would it be billed? Why do negative hours appear on a job billing? The Billing FAQ has all the answers:

Q. What's the absolutely fastest, easiest way to create invoices for everything that's unbilled?

Use the Pre-bill function. It creates client invoices for any job with unbilled amounts automatically and without any data entry. All you do is click the pre-bill button on the Job Ticket page, enter the percentage of the Job you wish to pre-bill, as well as an invoice description, then click Save. Once the job is pre-billed, an invoice is created automatically and can be printed or emailed to a client in PDF format from the Accounts Receivable page (Accounting > Accounts Receivable). Learn more about pre-billing jobs in this Clients & Profits ASAP tutorial.

Q. Which report tells me what needs to be billed?

The Job Hot Sheet is the best basic report for seeing what's unbilled. The report lists unbilled jobs by client, showing each job's priority, start date, and status. Choose Snapshots > Production to print the Job Hot Sheet. It makes a great billing checklist, too. While it gives you a great Big Picture, job cost reports show the task-by-task and cost-by-cost detail. These reports show just what account service needs to decide what to bill now.

Q. How can I edit the bill-to address when the invoice needs to be sent to someone else?

Each invoice has its own billing address. The billing address is copied from the bill-to client account, but can be changed on the Edit Invoice Description page. Choose Accounting > Accounts Receivable, then click the invoice's Edit button. If you change the invoice's billing address, the client's account won't be changed (i.e., you'll only see it on this printed invoice).

Q. Can I bill for miscellaneous fees, such as consulting, that have no job ticket?

No. Clients & Profits ASAP does not offer this feature, but it is available in our full-featured Classic software. The "miscellaneous" billing type lets you bill for non-job charges. You can enter as many line items as you want and there's lots of space for a description of each item. When the invoice is posted, its billing amounts will update the General Ledger and the client account, but won't affect job tickets.

Q. We just bill the client one fee -- half at the start and half at the end. How would it be billed?

When pre-billing the Job Ticket, enter 50% in the "pre-bill now" field. By choosing to pre-bill 50% of the estimate, the invoice will calculate half of each of the task's billing amounts. At the end of the job, you can bill the other half of the estimate and choose to include change orders if you need to.

Q. Can I manually enter invoice numbers?

No. Invoices are numbered automatically by Clients & Profits ASAP based on an invoice counter in Accounts Receivable. When an invoice is added, you'll see the next invoice number instantly.

Q. Why does invoice number "43" always come up as the last-added invoice when the last invoice I entered was number "1616"?

The invoice number field is alpha-numeric. So when you're finding the "last" invoice number, you need to think about the number alphabetically, not numerically. Alphabetically, "43" is higher than "1616". To make "43" appear first, it would need the leading zeros (i.e., "0043" would come before "1616").

Q. Why do negative hours appear on a job billing?

There are several ways this can happen, one caused by user error. Here's why: each job task on a job ticket keeps a running total of its unbilled hours. When time is added to a job, the job task's total unbilled hours increase. When a job task is billed, its total unbilled hours are copied to the A/R invoice. When the invoice is printed, the hours billed appear for each job task. If a user who's adding the job billing adjusts the invoice's hours billed -- so that more hours appear billed on a one task and fewer hours appear billed on a different task -- the job task's unbilled total hours will be inaccurate, even though the job's total hours are correct.