An invoice run is the process by which outgoing invoices are created and sent at a certain interval. A monthly frequency makes sense for various reasons: First of all, most costs are incurred at a certain regularity: rents have to be paid at the beginning of the month, salaries at the end; in addition, there are VAT payments, which are usually due in the middle of the month. To stabilize liquidity, the company should strive for the same regularity in incoming payments. This is not only clearer, it also increases the satisfaction of customers, who ultimately also need to keep an eye on their own liquidity.

Leadtime is essentially a system that convertswork into turnover : Customers feed the system with projects and tasks. These are processed in the company and finally transferred to "billing". Added to this are revenues from maintenance contracts, subscription models and license income. Leadtime keeps track of all these issues for you: As soon as an invoice is due, a new draft invoice appears in Invoice Verification.

After checking, the final invoice documents can be sent directly to the customer at the touch of a button. If a payment term is exceeded, the invoice automatically appears in a separate list of overdue invoices. You can then send corresponding reminders from there.

Specifically, the process consists of three consecutive steps:

The system prepares draft invoices for all due items, which must then be checked and approved by an employee. Completed projects, closed tickets and automatically triggered recurring revenues, such as those resulting from SaaS contract models, are considered "due". The individual items can be adjusted manually in this step.

Once all corrections have been made, the official invoice document is generated from the system with a consecutive invoice number. All items contained in the invoice are marked as "billed". This step is a central step in the Leadtime value chain, as it is also linked to the "Leadtime service fee", the payment model of the ERP system: For every invoice created with Leadtime, a small percentage is charged as a usage fee for the entire platform.

Once an invoice has been sent via the system, it becomes an "open receivable" for the system. Each invoice has a payment deadline that can be set individually for each customer. If the invoice is paid within this period, it is moved to the "paid invoices" pile. If the deadline expires, the invoice is moved to the "Overdue receivables" pile. Payment must then be made subsequently with the help of reminder documents.

In customer relationships that have already been established through long-term cooperation, various short-term, smaller routine orders regularly arise in day-to-day work - these can be support requests, for example, or other small, acute implementation requests. Quotations are often not even necessary for these matters; a general hourly rate is simply agreed that the provider may charge for completing these tasks.

With its integrated ticket system and time recording, Leadtime offers precisely the infrastructure to systematically record, process and invoice such requests. In principle, the working hours booked on completed tickets are totaled and billed at an hourly rate agreed with the respective customer. The customer receives a billing document sent from the system by e-mail, in which all billed tasks are listed.

Many digital service providers do not only offer individual services - i.e. services that really have to be designed individually for each customer and each order. On the contrary, it makes perfect sense to standardize services. What does this mean in concrete terms?

+Digital service providers can, for example, design their processes and services in such a way that they are repeatable, efficient and more easily scalable. So instead of starting from scratch with every order, they can fall back on proven templates, structures and processes that can be flexibly adapted. Instead of developing tailor-made offers for each customer, predefined service packages can be offered that can be easily adapted to individual requirements.

In some digital business models, such as SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), standardization goes one step further: products are sold, not just services. SaaS solutions are typically highly standardized in order to appeal to a broad user base while offering specific customization options for individual needs.

Such standardized services and products are recorded in Leadtime in a product catalog with corresponding list prices. Various price models can be stored, for example

The revenue from a project is usually dependent on the expenditure resulting from the customer's individual requirements. The service provider analyzes these requirements and prepares an offer on this basis. The customer's expectation is, of course, that the service provider will maintain the price that he presented at the beginning when invoicing. Subsequent changes to the quotation price are generally only accepted if they can be well justified.

Leadtime ERP makes it possible to streamline the implementation of such projects, i.e. to structure them into a standardized sequence of predefined "work packages". Work packages are the steps that the team must carry out to complete a project; what exactly is done within these work packages usually depends on the customer's requirements. Depending on the customer's requirements, more or less effort is required, which is measured in Leadtime ERP in working hours. And this effort multiplied by the hourly rate set for the respective customer results in the quotation price.

At the end of the project, the initially created quotation can then be converted into an invoice document. Additional work packages added during the course of the project can be invoiced as change requests.

Express quotes in Leadtime enable urgent customer inquiries to be processed and billed efficiently. They are particularly suitable for smaller, short-term services that lie outside the regular project plan.

With retainer models, the customer commits to a regular monthly budget that covers certain services. This creates planning security on both sides and enables the service provider to reserve resources.

In Leadtime, the associated project component is created as a retainer package. The actual effort is still fully documented in the system, but is not directly included in the invoice - unless it exceeds the agreed scope. In this case, an additional work package or a change request can be renegotiated and invoiced separately.

Invoices are usually issued monthly, automatically on the basis of the fixed lump sum.

Not all billing-relevant items arise directly from the operational work in the project - for example, if service providers have been commissioned, licenses purchased or travel expenses incurred. Such external costs and other one-off services can be added to the invoice in Leadtime as manual items.

These items can be freely named, provided with individual prices and optionally linked to receipts. They appear in the finished invoice like all other items and can be edited in the invoice preview module if required.

This means that the invoicing of external services remains transparent and fully documented - without having to artificially integrate them into the internal project structure.