ArgentumInvoice Blog

Getting Started With ArgentumInvoice

Welcome to the first installment of our development and usage blog. On this page we will offer usage tutorials and tips as well as development tutorials and guides for creating your own plugins for Argentum.

Initially, we are going to go over general usage scenarios for different kinds of workflows with ArgentumInvoice.

From a basic standpoint, logging your time and creating invoices in a fairly simple process with ArgentumInvoice. The general workflow is as follows:

Create a client
Create a project and assign it to a client
Create hourly or physical tickets to log your time and charge items to your client
Create your invoice from your tickets and email it to your client

Freelance Usage

Contract Freelancers – Hourly Billing Structure

If your workflow consists of hourly billing to your clients, ArgentumInvoice can allow you to create your invoices. First, we are going to navigate to the Projects section of the application, and click the New Project button near the top of the screen.

Fill out the information on the screen and create your project. If you need to create a new client for this project, choose New Client from the dropdown menu. Give it a meaningful name and fill in the notes for the project so that you can find the project in the future. ArgentumInvoice has a robust search feature that will enable you to easily find archived projects.

Tickets

After you create your project, you will need to create tickets that will represent the tasks you need to complete for your client’s project. Click the Create Ticket link on your project page.

You will be presented with a new window where you can enter your ticket details. There are two kinds of tickets:

Hourly Tickets
Physical Tickets

An hourly ticket is a task that you spend time working on, such as development work, graphic design or on-location photography.

A physical ticket is a set cost for a client, normally something you pay a set cost for, then upcharge to the client, such as a domain purchase, hosting charges, physical prints or other kinds of materials.

If your ticket is a physical ticket, simply check the Physical Item checkbox, and enter the final cost for the item.

You can assign the ticket to a user account, assign an operation to the ticket and enter a description for the ticket. Operation Types allow you to categorize your tickets and assign different billing rates to your tasks.

As you do work on the project, you enter time for the ticket using the Enter Time button on the ticket page.

To enter time for a ticket, simply type in the start time and end time. This can be in any human readable format. If it’s the same day, you can simply enter the start and end hour, such as 11:15 AM to 12:30 PM. If the ticket is complete, simply check the Ticket Complete option.

This will add 45 minutes of time to this ticket and close it, making it ready for invoicing. Just repeat this ticketing process for all of your tasks for your project.

Invoicing

Once your ticketing and time entry is complete, it’s time to make an invoice for your client. To do this, click the Invoices link in the menu.

On the create invoice screen, select the client you would like to create the invoice for from the dropdown and click Start Creation Process. On the next screen, you can enter some invoice comments, choose the currency for the invoice, and set a due date. Finally, you select the items you would like to bill.

By default, all items from the client’s projects are selected to be invoiced. In this table, you will also see each ticket’s description, time spent, and total cost. You can uncheck the Bill checkboxes for each item you don’t need to invoice yet.

Click Create Invoice to finalize the billing process and view your final invoice! On the invoice screen, you can print the invoice to mail to your client, or you can generate a PDF of the invoice to e-mail. If you have the Email module installed, you can even email it directly to your client from the application. We’ll get into that option in a later post.