When deleting/editing a time entry line item from an invoice, it should warn that the time entry will not be deleted

Hi Christopher,

In the case I’ve described, I want a warning that time entries deleted from an invoice are not actually deleted — only the invoice line item is deleted.

The problem we get into is that there is always ambiguity, when editing invoices, about what happens to the actual time entry when it is deleted from an invoice. I feel that this is something that should be more intuitive, perhaps by telling the user how Harvest deals with the time entry when it is deleted from the Invoice, right at the time the user deletes the line item.

Also, this ambiguity can create billing problems. For example, we create two invoices: One for the first half of the month and another for the second half of the month. Then, for whatever reason, we decide to move one time entry from the first invoice to the second invoice. We do this by deleting the line item from the first invoice and then adding a new line item to the second invoice that’s identical to the one we deleted from the first invoice. Next month, we create a new invoice for all uninvoiced time, and the time entry from the line item we deleted from the first invoice reappears.

Here’s what happened: The time entry was removed from the first invoice and marked as uninvoiced, but the time entry was not actually deleted. Then, a new line item was added to the second invoice, but it was not the actual time entry, it was just an invoice line item. Then, when we created the third invoice, the uninvoiced time entry was added (since it got marked as uninvoiced).

You can see how this is a problem: we billed our customer twice for the same time entry! That’s not good and makes us look really unprofessional.

While you and I understand why this happened, an admin who is creating invoices probably doesn’t — it’s not intuitive.

So, at a minimum, we need better information shown in the invoice editing UI that tells the user what happens to the time entry associated with the line item they deleted.

What would also be useful (to directly address the use case I described) are:

1) A way to move a line item from one invoice draft to another invoice draft.

2) A way to add time records to an existing invoice draft.

Thanks,

We are new to Harvest, but we bumped up against this issue already – a Reconciliation Report that shows discrepancies between Timesheets and Invoices by client/project would be really helpful. So we can see the difference in hours and dollars, between timesheets recorded and what was actually billed on an invoice.

@William: I’ve been requesting a Harvest feature to allow tracking Purchase Orders (that our customers send us for projects) where we could invoice against a purchase order and then see the total amount invoiced against a given PO. It would then be very easy to compare the total billable hours revenue with the total amount billed against a PO.