2 Invoice Formatting for Contract Billing and Service Billing

This chapter contains these topics:

2.1 Objectives

  • To understand invoice layouts and formats

  • To create layouts and formats for printed invoices

  • To understand retrieval references

  • To access variable information for an invoice from multiple sources

2.2 About Invoice Formatting for Contract Billing and Service Billing

You can use invoice formatting to design printed invoices that meet the specific information requirements of your business and customers. You can design a wide variety of invoices.

For example, an invoice might include only summarized transaction information, such as a single line description for the total for all employee hours. A more complex invoice might also show the total for all employee hours, but present the information in detail to show employee overtime hours, part-time hours, and so on, with a subtotal for each new group of transactions.

The information you choose to print on the invoice can be retrieved from various systems, such as Contract Billing, Service Billing, Address Book, and Work Orders.

Before you design printed invoices, you should have a clear idea about how you want the final invoice to appear. Consider the types of information that you want to include on the invoice, the visual appearance of the information on the invoice, and where that information resides in the system. Then, you can design invoice layouts for your customer invoices.

Invoice formatting for Contract Billing and Service Billing consists of the following tasks:

  • Working with invoice layouts

  • Working with formats

  • Defining formats

  • Defining custom retrieval codes