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Removed line items from an invoice, now they're "lost" !!
This is something that I consider a huge flaw in Harvest’s invoicing rules.
Ok, let’s say I have a client “ACME Ice Cream” and I have 5 line items to invoice them for. I create my invoice #1000, but then the client says “oh please split up our invoice into 2, we are going to pay you separately for items 1,3, and 5”.
Okay, so I go back and edit the invoice, I delete line items 2 and 4 and then save the invoice. Now I go to create the client’s 2nd invoice which will be #1001 (which should contain just those line items I removed) but — Harvest politely tells me that there are “no uninvoiced billable hours”. How can that be?
So I run a detail report and lo and behold I see those line items #2 and #4 that were previously on my invoice #1000 are showing up with the little “padlock” indicating they’ve been billed. But I know they haven’t.
YES i know I can run a custom report and click the tiny “mark these hours and un-invoiced” button but that’s if I’m careful enough to remember to do that. Otherwise, if I got distracted or my assistant was helping me with the bills etc, this would just be lost in the system and money down the drain.
When a line item is removed from an invoice, please UN-PADLOCK IT!!
Also, I am sure that in your database structure, you store a key that links a line item to whatever invoice it is attached to, I’d like to be able to SEE THIS on a report (e.g. line item….date…description…etc and also the INVOICE# that it appears on. Seeing the little green padlock does not make me feel secure, because as I have just outlined, just because that icon is there does NOT mean you have invoiced the time.
Ahmen! (+1)
This is also a HUGE source of pain and confusion for us, too.
At a minimum, when you delete a line item, Harvest should ask you whether you would like to leave the item marked as invoiced or revert it to be marked as uninvoiced.
We basically follow the rule that if you want to remove line items, you need to delete the whole invoice and start again with a new time range — ouch!
Regarding the last comment about invoices and time entries knowing about each other: I, too, really want the ability to see which invoice a given time entry is associated with. And, I’ll go further and say that I need to know which invoices are associated with a project (since time entries are associated with projects).
Hi @luckman212 and @Jim – Thanks for bringing this to our attention. You’re right – this functionality can be counter-productive, and the last thing we want is for people to continually delete invoices and start over. Thanks again for the feedback!
Cheers,
Samara
Hey Samara: Thanks for the Ack. As you prioritize this, please realize that the severity of this issue isn’t just “counter-productive”, it generally causes you to mark time entries as invoiced that have not actually invoiced — this means that you’re not billing customers, but working for free! For us, a lost time entry can potentially be worth more than one years worth of Harvest subscription. And, we didn’t realize this was happening until we did an audit of the sum of our invoices vs the sum of all time entries (times their bill rate). I suspect that a lot of Harvest customers have lost time/money without realizing it.
Jim: I’m interested in how you created this report. I want to do the same thing. Did you just run a detailed time report and export to Excel for the summation? How did you go about assigning the correct billing rate to each line item? I have quite a number of different billing rates so this would seem to be a daunting task for me.
luckman212: I think we did the reconciliation audit separately for each client. The detailed report shows the total billable time in dollars, and then we compare that to the sum of all invoices for that client in an invoice report.
Okay thanks. I’ll give it a try. But the important thing here is that hopefully the Harvest team will address this critical issue quickly!
luckman212: I just realized that I posted a related question here. After re-reading this, I realize that you actually want three different options when removing a time entry from an invoice: 1) Delete the time entry and remove it from the invoice. 2) Remove the time entry from the invoice and mark it as uninvoiced. 3) Remove the time entry from the invoice but leave it marked as invoiced. Right now, Harvest only does #3, but doesn’t indicate what it’s doing, so it’s very confusing to users.
@luckman212: I also just noticed that William Mak posted a comment in that previous thread about needing to run Reconciliation Report (comparing time entries to invoices).
@luckman212 The best we can tell you is that it’s on our list, which has many other mission critical features to other customers as well! We hope to fix this soon.
As long as you plan to fix it… but seriously this seems like it would be in the top 3, if not the #1. Unless there are other bugs I’m not aware of that cause actual money to be lost ??