Invoice Formats as Part of Your Company's Invoice Printing Solution
All of these invoice printing strategies, which use different applications and different tools, rely on the invoice data that is created in Oracle Projects. You can control the format of the invoices using invoice formats. You should consider the definition of your invoice formats as part of your invoice printing solution.
The sections below describe what an invoice format is, how to define and use invoice formats, how the Generate Draft Invoice process uses invoice formats to select and group expenditure items on an invoice line. Some sample invoice formats and the resulting invoice lines are also illustrated.
What is an invoice format?
An invoice format determines how Oracle Projects creates an invoice line for a project that is billed based on time and materials. You can define different formats for labor, non-labor, and retention invoice line items. You can specify how you want to summarize expenditure items, which fields you want an invoice line to display, and the order in which you want each field to appear. You can also include free-form text in an invoice line.
You define invoice formats in Oracle Projects which will create invoice lines formatted in a way that meets your business needs. The invoice lines can then be printed, subtotalled, and totalled in the detail region when you print the invoice.
Defining Invoice Formats
Before you define invoice formats, you must consider your business requirements for invoice formatting, particularly:
- the layout of the invoice, including the header and detail regions, when printed on paper
- the different types of invoice layouts required by groups in your company or for certain types of projects
You can define different formats for labor, non-labor, and retention invoice lines. You can define as many invoice formats as you need for different types of projects or organizations.
You need to determine if your company's taxing requirements affect your invoice formats. You may need to define invoice formats to tax specific invoice lines. See: Applying Tax to Project Invoices.
When you define contract project types during implementation, you specify default invoice formats for labor and non-labor invoice lines. These invoice formats provide default values to all projects that are classified by the project type. See: Invoice Formats and Project Types.
Using Invoice Formats
When you enter a contract project, the invoice formats are defaulted from the project type that you selected for the project. You can override the default invoice formats in the Projects form using any of the formats defined during implementation.
When you generate invoices for the project, the Generate Draft Invoice process looks to the project to determine which format to use when grouping expenditure items on an invoice.
Processing Invoice Lines Using Invoice Formats
The Generate Draft Invoice process performs the following steps to create invoice lines:
- Selects eligible expenditure items for invoicing
- Groups selected expenditure items according to the grouping defined for a project's invoice format
- Selects expenditure item information and adds text objects to produce final invoice lines as determined by the invoice format detail on the project invoice format
Figure 1 - 62 illustrates how you can create and format invoice lines.
Before the expenditure items are processed for billing, Generate Draft Invoice sets the job, job title, and employee billing title for all labor items for easier processing of invoice formats.
