Billing Time

One of the many valuable features of todo.vu is the ability to track your time. Adding beef to this benefit are the billing reports. Here you can dig into that captured data to create comprehensive billing reports for your clients. These reports can be tailored to either provide a detailed report or a simple overview of the project and hours you are billing for. The reports are then converted into a beautiful reader-friendly format which can be sent as a URL to your clients.

These features are exclusive to our Business Time premium customers.

Note – Only ‘Admin’ users can set and adjust billing rates and see billing reports.

The Billing Dashboard

To access the Billing page, click on the $ icon on the left sidebar.

Once on the Billing page, you will see a list of clients down the left-hand side of the page and some graphs in the main section.

Billing timeline

Once you select a client from the left-hand side, you will see your graphs populate in the main view section.

The first graph up the top is the ‘Billing timeline’. This graph shows a chart of your billing progress.

Each horizontal line to the right of the chart represents 10 hours of time.

You will notice various colours in the chart. The colours represent:

• Blue: Unbilled – A billing report has not been created.
• Red: Draft – A billing report draft has been created but not sent.
• Green: Created – Billing report has been created and sent.
• Purple: Non-billable – This section measures the time spent on tasks which is not billable to the client.

Unbilled time

Moving down our page, beneath Billing timeline, we have ‘Unbilled time’. You will see a pie chart including your top clients that you have not yet billed. This section is designed to give you an easy visual of all the work you have not yet billed, as well as the ability to dig deeper into the information.

1. Client drill down

Clicking on a particular client will allow you to see in greater detail the projects that are yet to be billed. This will be represented through the pie chart. Once you are in the project you can click on the individual tasks to drill further into the information.

2. Project drill down

Drilling down further, you can click on the project to go into the tasks.

Note – Clicking on the pie chart allows you to go back up a level. E.g. If you are in the project, you can click on the pie chart and it will take you back to the client. If you are in the client, you can click on the pie chart and it will take you back to Unbilled.

Draft bills and Top clients

Below Unbilled time, you will see a column for Draft bills and Top clients. These are quick reference tools to remind you when you have drafts that you have not sent and to quickly see who your top clients are based on hours in the past 12 months.

How to create a billing report

Remaining in the ‘Unbilled time’ section, once you have selected the client you wish to create a billing report for, you can click on the ‘Bill time’ button.

Note – You can also do this by searching for the client on the left-hand side.

Once you have clicked on the ‘Bill time’ button, you open the following page:

Navigating the left column

On the left-hand side, you will see at the top ‘Not included in a report’. Underneath this is Unbilled and Non-Billable. Unbilled is where all of your logged time is stored and waiting for you to review and create billing reports for your clients.

Unbilled is where all of your logged time will automatically be stored. Here is where you can manage logged time to either bill for it or move it into the Non-billable category.

Non-billable is for hours logged that are not billable to a client. This option exists so that you are able to monitor and manage your own, or your team members hours, even those that you cannot charge to clients.

Billing reports is where you will find all of your previous billing reports. These can be selected to open up the comprehensive report and dig deeper into the data. If you partially create a report and aren’t able to complete it, you will find the draft in this section in red. Completed reports are green.

Unbilled

You can see in the main view section a list of all your unbilled time. In here you can select an individual time entry, an entire task, an entire project or you can work your way through the list selecting individual tasks.

Once you have selected the items you wish to bill for, you will see a menu bar pop up down the bottom.

On the menu you will see the following:

• Add to a new report – this is what you will select to create a new billing report.
• Change rate – here you can then edit from this page the billing rates.
• Non-billable – this will move those entries to Non-billable. If you do this by accident you can go into the Non-billable tab to the left to find them and correct.

Before we click on ‘Add to a new report’, let’s look at some further filters.

Filters

Date range selector

The Date range selector, found on the top right, allows you to apply filters to the entries in your main view. Perhaps you want to look at only the last month or you need to look at the entire financial year, then maybe you need to drill further into that to find entries only by one particular staff member. Here is where you are able to deep dive into your data.

You can select a range of dates and the filter will update the listing below. You can use the + – buttons to the right of the filter to zoom in/out. You can also use the D, W, & M options to the left of the filter to change how it snaps to dates:

• D, W, M = Day, Week and Month.

Label and staff filter

To the left of the graph, you will see a few icons. The Label icon, the Person icon. Let’s explore these:

• Label icon – Here you can filter the entries in your main view by selecting a label. You can label tasks to reflect the needs of your business and make searching more sophisticated. Perhaps “deployed” or “awaiting client response”.
• People icon – Here you will find a list of your staff members. You can filter the results below to include only those completed by a specific staff member. Allowing you to send separate billing reports for different staff if required by the client.

Now all of your filters are applied and you have selected the entries you wish to bill for, click on ‘Add to a new report’ from the pop-up menu down the bottom.

From here you will see a new billing report created on the left-hand side, under Billing reports. This will be red rather than green. That is because it is still in draft.

Once your report is created you can name it in the main view section up the top.

Clicking on the number billing report number, next to the name you have just added, allows you to attach an External invoice ID. Here you would put the ID of the invoice for this client, to make a link between your invoicing system and your billing system.

Note – As your report is still in draft, you can still use the pop-up menu below to add another report, remove an entry from the report, change the billing rates or move to Non-billable.

Now that you have checked over everything and you’re ready to create your billing report, click on Create bill in the top right corner.

You will now see a reader-friendly, beautiful layout of your billing report.

In the top left corner of the main view section, you will see the URL for the report. This can be copied and sent to your clients where they can view this on its own in a web page.

Congratulation – You have created a new billing report. 

Note – all past Billing reports can be viewed from the left-hand column.

Editing Published Billing Report

By default, the billing report will show all entries. You can, however, edit this. All edits happen in real-time so even if you have sent a link to a client and wish to edit, the client will see those changes as soon as they are applied.

In the top right-hand side of the main viewing section, you will see ‘Time entries’ – if you click on here you will see that you can change the view to Project totals, Task totals or Time entries.

You will also see an Edit button to the right of the view selection drop down. This will take you back to the editing page and will give you the option to make edits or Retract bill.

Selecting Retract bill will move it back into a draft state, which you will be able to see on the left-hand side under Billing reports.