Billing settings for approving labor

Billing settings dictate whether and how billable labor is approved before it appears on an invoice.

There are three billing options: Manually, On timesheet approval, and Immediately without review. In Autotask, all labor uses the manual option unless a contract setting overrides this setting.

You specify the contract billing setting when you create the contract. Refer to Page 2: Revenue and billing.

In Autotask Help, all discussion of approving and posting labor items assumes that the first option, Manually, is in effect either as the default approve & post setting or as specified in a contract.

Manually

All contracts default to Manually.

When this setting is selected, timesheet approval is separate and independent from billing approval. All labor items must be approved and posted in > Contracts > Approve & Post > Labor before they can be invoiced. The billing approver can edit all aspects of the labor entry that affect how it is billed to the customer, such as Role, Work Type and Contract settings.

On timesheet approval

With this setting, labor gets posted to the customer when the resource's timesheet is approved. This setting can save a step for small organizations where the timesheet approver is also the billing approver.

If your company uses On timesheet approval, we recommend that you enable the Proxy time entry system setting and give the timesheet approver proxy time entry permission, so they can adjust the labor entries on the timesheet, if necessary.

Immediately without review

With this setting, labor is posted to the customer as soon as it is entered; there is no provision for error checking at all. This option should be reserved for very small organizations where technicians would in effect have to approve their own work.

If you need to generate an invoice for a customer on-site, you should use the Invoice Now option of Generating an invoice from a ticket.

NOTE  The Outsource module does not support Immediately without review for Service Partner time entries. When the outsourced ticket is associated with a contract set to Immediately without review, Service Partner time entries are sent to Approve & Post.