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Calendar Events as line items on a Project's Invoice

PostPosted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 7:47 pm
by DPmax
I'm planning a modification to the Invoice tab on the Calendar Event details window. My game plan is that rather than generating a new invoice for the event, I will have the event add line item(s) to the Invoice for the Project. I'd have a "Project" Invoice created at the same time a Project is created... thus one Invoice per Project.

I will also be modifying Time to be more Event/Milestone based rather than Resource based for the Project Analysis section.

Has anyone ever done such a mod?
Are there any scripts or hooks in SCC 2.2 that might jump start this?
Are there any pitfalls that I need to look out for?

Thanks

PostPosted: Tue Jan 04, 2011 8:37 am
by John Sindelar
Nice mod! Two scripts in particular should help...

One the invoice is created you can add lines to it from other contexts (like time) using the script "Create Invoice Line { InvoiceID , ItemID , Qty , Name , PriceEa, Desc , Taxable , Override }"

That is your real worker script to make new invoice lines for an existing invoice.

And "New Invoice" is the basic script for creating a new invoice.

As for time being more Milestone based, you certainly can log time against milestones instead of or in addition to logging against resources: perhaps the time inherits the resource of the milestones it's being logged against? I like keeping the resource in there as we have a project analysis section that rolls time up by resource: http://www.seedcode.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.p ... ctAnalysis

Seems like in your mod you could continue creating invoice lines from time, or create them from milestones (maybe from the project's schedule tab) creating one invoice line for the total time logged on the milestone.

Hope that helps!

PostPosted: Tue Jan 04, 2011 2:46 pm
by DPmax
Got it.

When you have a moment can you expand a bit on the relationship of Time and Invoice and Line Items (or maybe there currently isn't one). I'm looking at optionally having a "Time entry" auto-create a Line Item on a Project's Invoice.

As I'm charting out my game plan for this "Event" mod, I can see a better method than my original plan... or maybe this will another tab in the Event details window.
The basic concept/goal:
- We use calendar events for projects in multiple ways, sometimes it is a task that takes "an amount of time", sometimes we need to log when a billable item was used for the project... and in many cases there is a combination of the two.
- By using the Event detail window to log/enter time/items the staff will be able to do these functions from the calendar and from the project's schedule tab... keeping them out of the Invoices!
- As long as we are logging/entering time/items in Events it only seems logical that we make line items on the project's invoice at the same time.

My original plan was to do this all via reworking the Invoice tab in Event Details to add line items to an existing project invoice rather than starting a new invoice.
I think I will still do this for Items, but now I'm looking at using another tab in Event Details to log/send data directly to Time so I get the added bonus of all the great analysis/charts built into Time.

I've already added "Start Work" and "End Work" buttons/time-stamps that calculate "Hrs Worked" based on 15 minute intervals (2.25 Hrs for example) this is on the Main Info tab for Event Details... I think I will move this over to a new "Work Log" tab where notes can also be added. The "Hrs Worked" and other data from the Event will be used to auto-create a Time entry for this project, and thus a Line Item on the Project's invoice.

I've noticed the HoursActual field in Events, is this in use?
If yes, can I leverage it's current use by sending my calculated "Hrs Worked" to HoursActual?

Thanks again.