This video covers the billing system in Leadtime – the path from a closed ticket to a finished invoice. Billing follows a clear three-step process: invoice review, invoice creation and sending, and accounts receivable management.
The most common case in IT services is billing working hours on tickets. Once a ticket is closed, it becomes relevant for billing. Leadtime collects all closed tickets from a project and automatically creates an invoice draft. In the invoice review, you see all included tickets with title, logged time, corrections, and net amount – calculated from logged hours times hourly rate.
Before approval, every line item can be adjusted: titles can be rephrased to be customer-friendly, times can be corrected up or down, and individual tickets can be marked as "Do not bill." Beyond tickets, products from the product catalog and subscriptions (monthly, quarterly, yearly) can also be billed – they automatically appear in the invoice review when due. For anything that doesn't come from tickets or products – travel expenses, third-party costs, special agreements – manual items can be added.
After approval, the invoice receives a sequential number and appears in accounts receivable management, where open, paid, and overdue invoices are tracked.
Your team has been working, closing tickets, logging hours. Now that work needs to become an invoice.
In this video, I'll show you the billing system in Leadtime. From a closed ticket to a finished invoice, step by step. And you'll see: it's simpler than you think.
Billing in Leadtime follows a clear three-step process.
First: invoice review. As soon as billable items are available, such as closed tickets, due subscriptions, or completed projects, Leadtime automatically creates an invoice draft. Here you review everything: quantities, descriptions, amounts. You can adjust, correct, add, or remove line items.
Second: create and send the invoice. When you approve the draft, it becomes an official invoice document with a sequential number. You can send it directly from Leadtime, by email or as a PDF download. We'll cover sending in the next video.
Third: accounts receivable management. Leadtime tracks open, paid, and overdue invoices. When the payment deadline has passed, the invoice automatically shows up in the overdue section, and you can send payment reminders.
The basic principle: Leadtime turns daily work into billable items. All you need to do is review and approve.
The most common billing method in IT services: working hours on tickets.
Here's how it works: your team works on tickets and logs time against them. When a ticket is set to the status Closed, it becomes relevant for billing. Leadtime collects all closed tickets from a project and automatically creates an invoice draft.
I open Billing, then Invoice Review.
Here I see a list of all open invoice drafts. Each row shows the organization, the project, the invoice type, the service period, and the net amount.
I click on a draft. An overlay opens with the details.
In the Included Tasks section, I can see all tickets that are part of this invoice draft. For each ticket, I see the title, the task type, the estimated time, the logged time, any corrections, and the net amount.
The calculation is simple: logged hours times hourly rate. The hourly rate is stored in the project settings.
Before you approve the invoice, you can review and adjust every single item.
Adjusting titles. Sometimes ticket titles are too technical for a customer invoice. You click the title and rephrase it so the customer immediately understands what they're paying for. For example, you might turn a technical backend description into a clearer business-level summary.
Correcting times. You can adjust the billed time up or down. Using the plus and minus buttons or in the detail dialog. For example: a ticket has 10 hours and 45 minutes of logged time, but 12 hours were agreed with the customer. Then you set the billed time to 12 hours. The difference shows up in the Additional column.
Or the other way around: if you want to charge less as a goodwill gesture, you reduce the hours.
Do not bill. If a ticket shouldn't be charged at all, for example internal effort or a goodwill fix, you mark it as Do not bill. It disappears from the invoice draft.
At the bottom of the dialog, you see the totals: net amount, VAT, and gross amount. When everything looks right, you click Settle. This turns the draft into an invoice. It appears in the Receivables section with a sequential invoice number.
Besides working hours, you can also bill products and recurring services.
Products are standardized services from your product catalog. These can be one-time prices, for example a workshop or a setup fee. Or they can be subscriptions, monthly, quarterly, or yearly payments. Hosting packages, license models, support contracts.
When a product is due, it automatically appears in the invoice review. For one-time prices, as soon as the project reaches billing status. For subscriptions, at the configured interval.
For variable subscriptions, for example a per-user price, you enter the current quantity manually. The amount is calculated automatically.
All of this works just like with tickets: review, adjust, approve.
Sometimes there are costs that don't come from tickets or products. Third-party costs, travel expenses, special agreements.
That's what manual items are for. In the invoice draft, I click Add manual item. I enter a title, for example travel expenses for a customer meeting, and the amount. The item appears on the invoice like any other line item.
This is convenient because everything ends up on one invoice. The customer doesn't receive three separate documents, but one clean combined invoice.
You've now seen how billing works in Leadtime.
Close tickets, review the invoice draft, adjust times and titles, approve. Products and subscriptions are automatically queued for billing. And for anything that doesn't fit the standard categories, there are manual items.
In the next video, I'll show you how to send invoices, track payments, and create payment reminders.
