What is invoicing?
Invoicing in Operating is how you assemble and finalize what to bill a client — pulling together time entries and expenses into a billing document that captures revenue and feeds your profitability reporting.
Written By Lauri Eurén
Last updated 1 day ago
What an invoice is
An invoice is a billing document for one or more projects belonging to the same client. For time-and-materials work, it pulls together the selected time entries and billable expenses for the period; creating the invoice marks those time entries as invoiced. For fixed-price work, billing follows the project's schedule and budget rather than individual time entries.
When the invoice is created, the person responsible for billing can adjust the price of individual line items — for example, to write down hours or re-price work. That adjustment changes only the invoiced amount, not the underlying time entries or expenses. This is why a project's invoiced revenue is not always the same as its earned revenue — see why earned and invoiced revenue don't match.
Sending and exporting
The invoice is usually issued to the client from a finance or accounting platform such as NetSuite or QuickBooks, not from Operating directly. You export the invoicing data from Operating to that platform, which handles the actual send, payment tracking, and bookkeeping. Operating keeps the link between what was budgeted, planned, tracked, and invoiced, so it remains your single source of truth across the whole cycle.
When invoices are created
Each project can have an invoicing schedule — a pattern for when invoices should be raised, such as monthly, weekly, on completion, or a custom schedule you define for that project. The schedule is what tells you which projects are due to be billed in a given cycle.
Correcting a sent invoice
Mistakes on a sent invoice can be awkward to fix, so Operating's correction pattern is to issue a credit note that reverses the original invoice, then create a corrected invoice.