Part 3 — Run Your Operation · Chapter 19

Invoicing & Getting Paid

Invoicing is where every discipline this manual has preached pays cash. Field-entered time and materials (chapter 17), rates that price themselves (chapter 11), statuses that say what’s billable (chapter 7), templates that make the paper (chapter 12). With those in place this chapter is short work, daily. Without them, invoicing is where their absence gets discovered, monthly, painfully.

From work to lines

By completion, a disciplined work order’s Quote / Invoice panel already holds its lines, each tagged with where it came from: the approved quote, timecard labor, materials picked in the field, expenses, supplier purchase orders (chapter 21), or ad hoc entries. Grace’s review is subtraction, not creation. Check the lines against the job, adjust the exception, done. The panel shows cost against price line by line, so margin problems surface before the invoice exists rather than at year end.

Status drives billing

The bridge between operations and billing is the status flow. Beacon’s projects all define a status meaning the work is done and billable, and a status meaning invoiced. So:

  • Grace’s worklist is a chapter 3 view: work orders in Complete, sorted by completion date. She never asks who’s ready to bill.
  • Invoicing a job and moving it to Invoiced empties the queue truthfully.
  • A stale-status timer on Complete (chapter 13) makes unbilled work nag on its own. Unbilled and forgotten is the most expensive list in field service, and this is the machinery that keeps it empty.

Generating and sending

Generate on Quote / Invoice produces the invoice from your invoice template: your branding, the lines, the totals. Company-wide numbering and defaults come from Setup/Invoicing, chapter 5. The invoice then moves through its own small lifecycle, draft to open to approved to sent, separate from the work order’s status. Emailing it uses the chapter 12 HTML template so it lands branded and readable on a phone.

Residential (the Okafors): invoice generated from the approved quote’s lines plus the as-built adjustments, emailed the day the panel job closed, service summary attached. Homeowner invoicing is a same-day habit. The correlation between invoice lag and payment lag is not subtle.

Commercial (Harbor Grill): two extra gates, both from setup. The PO number, because Harbor Grill won’t pay without one, so the inspection project requires the PO custom field before invoicing (chapter 10) and invoices carry it. Beacon also handles Harbor Grill’s running PO arrangement, where one blanket PO covers the year and each invoice references it. Then the paperwork: the signed report deliverable must be complete, which Grace sees on the same screen. Neither gate depends on anyone’s memory.

Customer logins see approved invoices in the portal, chapter 14. One more reason the approval step exists.

Payments and credit memos

Payments are recorded against invoices, and each customer’s Payment History panel (chapter 8) accumulates the account story: invoiced, paid, outstanding. Adjustments that reduce an invoice after the fact are credit memos, so corrections are their own auditable documents rather than edits to history. Every payment and status change writes to the invoice journal, attributed to whoever, or whatever automated process, caused it.

The Accounting screen and export

The Accounting screen, on the Actions menu, is the money-side rollup: an Invoices / Payments report across all projects, plus an Active Logins panel. For the books themselves, invoice line items export to your accounting system, with chapter 11’s accounting codes mapping each line to the right account. QuickBooks users get a direct integration, enabled under Setup/Integrations. Everyone else exports the lines and imports them on the accounting side. Either way, BigWave is where operational billing lives, your accounting package is where the general ledger lives, and the export is the one-way bridge.

Checklist

  1. Define the billable and invoiced statuses in every project, and build the billing queue view on day one.
  2. Timer the billable status. The system should complain about unbilled work before the bank balance does.
  3. Gate commercial invoicing on the fields and deliverables the customer’s payables department will demand anyway.
  4. Record payments as they arrive so Payment History and the portal stay truthful.
  5. Run the accounting export on a schedule with the codes already mapped, and reconcile monthly.