Project managers are responsible for creating invoices for their clients each month.
Most of our clients have Core Coverage (Formerly known as Core Retainer), plus hourly work. This is our most common invoice structure. Some of our clients also have a Friends-and-Family discount or are Pro-Bono clients. This document provides basic guidelines for how to invoice those types of clients.
Typical Case: Core Coverage
- Core Coverage is shown as the last line item with its associated fixed cost
- Hourly services are shown with the discounted hourly, $225.
- There is no overall discount on the invoice.
Friends-and-Family Invoice
- There is an overall 25% discount on the invoice, including Core Coverage.
- Make sure this matches the pricing in the SOW for the client. Some of our SOWs are non-standard.
Retainers
Harvest has the ability to create “Retainer” invoices. These are not counted as typical revenue for the company in our books. We should use these to handle cases where:
- The client wants to pre-pay in advance for services over multiple months
- We are asking for payment in advance, or the client wants to pay in advance
- We have a pro-bono client (more below)
If you create a retainer invoice for such a client, when you create invoices, you will be able to mark them as paid by paid fees on the retainer invoice. For example, if you issued a retainer invoice to a client, you can create invoices for them as normal. Once they pay the retainer invoice, you can apply their payments to the regular invoices you created.
Pro-Bono Clients
Pro-bono clients receive normal invoices using the Friends-and-Family rate. However, they also receive a yearly gratis retainer. They can use these funds to pay for their anticipated invoices.
The retainer should be the same as the normal retainer invoice, but “marked as paid”.
After the retainer is created and processed, please invoice the client the same as any other client, but apply the retainer fees to the invoices.
If the client wants to do more work beyond our pro-bono retainer, they are free to ask us. Continue to invoice based on hours used. They will exceed their retainer, and therefore will have an outstanding balance which they will pay.
Additional Notes
- If you create an invoice with a negative “quantity”, the invoice cannot be copied into Xero. So for any lines for removing charges based on a deposit or discount please use a negative rate rather than a negative quantity.