Improved invoicing for organisations

Organisations can manage their projects, employees, contracts and invoices on ZEIT.IO. The following 3 actors are shown very well on ZEIT.IO:

Many customers are looking for specialised temporary experts for their projects. Some agencies specialise in finding the right experts for their clients. As a rule, these are freelance experts who have a direct contractual relationship with the agency and work on the project directly at the customer's site.

On ZEIT.IO, the agency can manage the projects including the budget, as well as the contracts with their freelance experts. The freelance experts can record their times and expenses on ZEIT.IO and also generate their monthly invoice and export it as a PDF.

The agency can of course also generate its PDF invoices on ZEIT.IO and send them to their customers directly from the portal. Agencies with a large number of projects and employees are particularly dependent on good tooling in order to avoid errors and save time. ZEIT.IO offers agencies two ways to generate an invoice.

The "Project - Expert" template is intended to bill an expert per project at the customer. This process was revised and simplified last week. Instead of jumping directly into the input mask for the invoice, there is now an intermediate step that looks like this:

In the first step, you can select the period for invoicing, as well as the project and the expert you want to bill. The period is automatically pre-assigned to the last month. In the case of the project, the first project is pre-assigned in alphabetical order. With the employee drop-down, only employees appear who have recorded actual times or expenses in the selected period and for the selected project. In the example above, a red warning appears because there are no expenses or times for the project in the selected period. So there is no employee to choose.

If you change the project for which there are billable times in the selected period, an employee drop-down appears as follows:

In the employee drop-down only employees appear who have recorded either times or expenses for the project in the selected period. It is therefore impossible to select the wrong employee who may not have worked on the project at all. The summary for the selected expert then appears below the input fields.

If you click on "Next" you will get to the regular invoice form. However, this is already occupied with the values from the first step.

The invoice form is now pre-filled with the selected project and employee. Even the customer is already pre-selected, provided the project is assigned to a customer. On ZEIT.IO you can optionally assign a project to a customer. If you select the project when generating the invoice, then the customer is also automatically adjusted. The "Delivery/Service date" is automatically assigned to the last day of the service period. You can still adjust everything now, but usually no further adjustments are necessary. Now the PDF invoice can be generated with one click. Here's an example:

The PDF invoice contains all the necessary details and can optionally also contain a company logo. The first page contains the invoice, followed by the proof of performance. Since the employees book their times in ZEIT.IO, ZEIT.IO can of course automatically attach the time statement to every invoice. Thus, the customer can understand exactly when the expert has done what.