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Invoices
Raising one
Invoices → New invoice. Choose the client, then choose what to bill:
- Everything outstanding for that client, or
- Particular jobs, which is the usual answer when a client has several running.
SimpliWork pulls in every approved, unbilled hour and every billable expense in that scope. Nothing is pulled twice — once an entry is on an invoice it is spoken for.
You can also raise one from an accepted estimate, which brings the agreed lines across instead of the hours.
A running timer is never billed
An hour that has not finished yet has no duration. The invoice skips it rather than billing it as zero and stamping it as invoiced.
How much detail the client sees
Three groupings, set per invoice — or once per client, if they always want the same thing:
| Grouping | What they get |
|---|---|
| By category | One line per kind of work. The default, and the quietest. |
| By task | One line per task, hours summed behind it. What a client recognises. |
| Detailed | One line per entry: every hour, dated and described. |
You can regroup a draft as many times as you like and see each version before sending. Descriptive notes sit on top of any of these — a rolled-up line with bullets under it is the common case.
Sales tax
Off until you turn it on (Settings → Time & billing rules), and nothing about invoicing changes while it is off.
With it on, an invoice picks up the rate from the job, works the tax out, and lets you change the amount. That last part matters: which lines are taxable varies by state and by trade, and that is bookkeeping rather than arithmetic. The invoice stores what was actually charged, plus the rate and the jurisdiction it came from, so reprinting a two-year-old invoice shows what it said at the time.
Invoices → Sales tax report totals it by jurisdiction for a period.
Sending
Send emails the PDF to the client's billing contact and puts it in their portal. Mark as sent records that it went out without sending anything.
Preview first — the send dialog shows the address it will go to and the message it will carry.
Without a billing contact and an email address on the client, there is nothing to send to. That is the one thing worth filling in before you invoice anybody.
After it is sent
A sent invoice is locked, and so is everything on it. The hours, the expenses and the lines all stop being editable, because somebody else now holds a document that says what they said.
To correct one: void it and raise a new one. The void stays in the list. That is not bureaucracy — an invoice number that vanishes is the thing an accountant will ask about.
Getting paid
Record a payment against the invoice — cheque, transfer, cash, card. Part payments are fine; the invoice shows as partly paid until the balance reaches zero.
If you have connected Stripe, the client can pay by card from the portal and the payment records itself. See Taking card payments.
Overdue reminders are off by default (Settings → Time & billing rules). They go to your clients, so switching them on is a decision about how your business talks to people who owe it money. Individual clients can be excluded.