Project managers are responsible for creating invoices for their clients each month. PMs should create the invoices in Harvest but not actually send them.

Most clients have Core Coverage plus ongoing Planned Projects. So their invoice will have the fixed fee for Core Coverage and then hours for each Planned Project for the prior month.

📏 Rules

• Send Invoices Promptly. Invoices should go out no later than the 7th of the each month.
• Add Notes. This should be a loose summary, not a comprehensive breakdown, but it should help alleviate the question “What are we paying for, again?”
• Follow Conventions. We have a convention for invoice naming and numbering. Please pay attention to how existing invoices are formatted before creating invoices. Harvest will fill this in automatically whenever possible, but sometimes it messes up.

Invoicing Workflow

1. Double-check that all uninvoiced billable hours are in the right Harvest projects, and the right tasks within each project

2. Make sure it’s fair for us to charge for all the hours, based on the results we delivered.

   1. If we have to comp/write off any hours, make sure they are actually moved to non-billable categories in Harvest, not just ignored on the invoice.

3. Construct the invoice via the Harvest projects

4. Update the title to match the conventions

   

5. Add notes clarifying what was included in each line item

   

6. Copy the invoice to Xero but do not send it or mark as “Sent”.

7. Add an approval sub-task for the site’s Strategist to approve the invoice.

8. Once approved, complete the task and at-mention @Cantilever Operations within the task to alert them that it is ready to send.

Invoice Monitoring

The Operations team is responsible for monitoring payment status. Operations should alert the relevant project manager and strategist when a client falls significantly behind on invoices.

Additional Notes

If you create an invoice with a negative “quantity”, the invoice cannot be copied into Xero. So for any lines for removing charges based on a deposit or discount please use a negative rate rather than a negative quantity.