You can increase your efficiency by creating your invoices directly from your expenses. What's more, by utilizing this work flow, you'll be able to generate profitability reports that will help you identify the cases you make money on the and the cases you don't.
Step 1: Verify Your Configuration
The first step in this process is to make sure all of your billable expense items are setup as invoice items. Once you've done this, you may also want to setup your price lists, in order to automatically adjust the rates of your services based on the client.
Step 2: Approve Your Expenses
Once you have confirmed that your items and price lists are setup correctly, you can start generating your invoices from your approved expenses. From any case that has expenses that need to be billed. Click the Expenses tab, and make sure all of the expense entries are in the Approved status.
Any expenses that need to be billed must be in the approved status. Make sure the entries are accurate and then click the Approve button at the bottom of each.
Note: If you choose to Decline an expense entry, you'll be prompted for a reason for the decline and your investigator will be notified that they require revisions to the entry.
Step 3: Generate Your Invoice
Once all of your expenses have been approved, click the Billing tab from inside a case. This tab shows all of the invoices that have been generated for this case, as well as any approved expenses that need to be billed.
Check the boxes next to the entries that you would like to bill, and then click the Convert Into Invoice button at the top of the list.
If an invoice already exists, you can append these items to that invoice, otherwise you can create a new invoice. Check any options you wish to enable, and click Convert Into Invoice.
Step 3: Confirm and Save Your Invoice
At this point, you will be editing a new (or existing invoice if you chose to append) invoice and you can make any changes necessary, including adding, removing or modifying the items that were pre-populated for you.
Once you save the invoice, the expense items you converted will be marked as Billed, and will be permanently linked to the invoice via the "Billed Expenses" tab on the invoice itself.
You've now successfully converted your expenses into an invoice, and will be able to use such tools as the the "Profit By Invoice" report to evaluate your margins.