[]Before an invoice can be created the job needs to be completed.

To create an invoice on any of the 3 job card layouts:

1. Open the Job. You can search for it.<
2. On standard Lite jobs, go to the Invoicing tab and press “Create Invoice”. If this button is not available, the job is either incomplete, unbillable or has already been invoiced. In the last case you will see an invoiced date on the same tab.<
3. The Invoice date will be set to the current date. This is important because if the invoice needs to be back- or forward-dated, this date needs to be entered at this point.<
4. Press Save. You will see the amount owing in the bottom right corned of the Invoicing tab which equals to the invoice total minus the prepaid amount.<
5. If the Invoicing trigger on Job Cards Setup 4 is not set to anything and the job status needs to be updated to reflect that the job has been invoiced, go to the Job Logging tab and change the status accordingly. Press Save again.<

This completes the workflow for creating an invoice.

One should be aware of several processes that may occur in the background during this workflow.

Firstly the invoice PDF will be created automatically and stored against the job in the root directory of TSM. It will be located in the PDFARCHIVE/I_xxxx folder, where xxxx equals to the invoice number in question. There is an Invoices Setup “Archive Invoices” option that enables this process. Secondly, if a prepayment has been entered against the job, it will now be applied to the invoice automatically. The Amount Owing field will be update accordingly. Thirdly, if the Job Cards 4 Setup option for invoicing is set to anything, the job status will be set accordingly. Typically, it will automatically change from “COMPLETED” to “INVOICED”.

To print an invoice, you can either press the “Print Invoice” on the Invoicing tab or go to the Documents tab, select the archived invoice and press “Print”. If done from the Invoicing tab, you will notice that the Printed Date on the right of the screen will be updated with the current date. This feature can be used to determine if the invoice should have been sent to the customer yet or not. If it is empty – it is obvious that the invoice has never been printed and therefore the customer has not yet seen it.

There are several invoice reports available:

There should be no differences between the total amount on the invoice record and the total amount on the job. If a job is updated with financial information, these changes travel over to the invoice. This however is potentially a problem if the customer has already been invoiced and/or the invoice has been posted to the accounting package. Once again, the Audit Trail will record changes to financial information on an invoiced job. Right-clicking on the Notes button at the bottom of the Job Card module may reveal entries such as:

18/12/2008 11:36 ADMIN: Invoiced Job Total changed from $115.00 to $135.00

Which should aid you in determining if the change was legitimate.

One other tool that can be useful here is the invoice archiving feature that automatically saves the invoice’s PDF file when the button “Create invoice” is pressed. The Invoices Setup option to “Archive Invoices” needs to be on.

To check the current invoice against the original follow these steps:

1. On Job Card’s Invoicing tab press “Print Invoice”.<
2. No need to select the invoice layout. TSM would have generated the invoice in the default layout, so unless that has changed in the interim, there is no need to select it at this point.<
3. Select “Screen” – the invoice will be generated on your screen.<
4. Go to the Documents tab.<
5. There may be other documents attached to the job, but the archived invoice file will have a path similar to this:

PDFARCHIVE\I_1003\INVOICE_NO_1003_20081020195845.PDF<

1. Press “Launch Document” on the right-hand side of the screen – the original invoice will appear on your screen.<
2. Compare the results.<