Invoices
Invoices (Accounting ▸ Invoices) is where you turn a matter’s work-in-progress into a client bill, post it to the general ledger, and track payment. It’s the Accounts-Receivable counterpart to Vendor Bills.
Build a bill from WIP
Section titled “Build a bill from WIP”Click New bill from WIP and pick a matter. Athenty drafts an invoice from everything currently billable on it:
- Time dockets (billable, not yet invoiced)
- Fees (billable, not yet invoiced)
- Recoverable disbursements — soft (estimated) and hard (paid)
This is the generate-then-trim model. The draft starts with all eligible work; you remove what you don’t want to bill yet.
Trimming a draft
Section titled “Trimming a draft”Use the trash icon on a line to remove it. Removed work returns to WIP and reappears next time you bill the matter — nothing is lost. Prefer to start empty? Use Blank draft and add lines by hand.
Non-billable work
Section titled “Non-billable work”Work you’ll never bill shouldn’t clutter every draft. On the matter’s tabs:
- Mark a time docket or fee non-billable → excluded from WIP, no ledger effect.
- Mark a hard cost non-billable → the firm absorbs it: its recoverable asset clears to a write-down expense (DR 5950 / CR 1210). Soft costs simply drop out. Re-enable billable to reverse.
Issuing
Section titled “Issuing”Set an optional due date and click Issue. Athenty assigns the next
gapless number (INV-YYYY-NNNN), freezes totals, and posts DR Accounts
Receivable / CR revenue + tax. Each fee or time line credits its source
timekeeper’s revenue sub-account (4001.NICK fixed fee / 4002.NICK
hourly); ad-hoc lines and work without a timekeeper land on the
UNASSIGNED catch-all so the books always reconcile. Issued lines are
locked.
Collecting
Section titled “Collecting”| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Record payment | DR Bank / CR A/R; advances status. Anything beyond what the invoice still claims → refundable client credit. Money arriving on a written-off invoice never reverses the write-off — see below. |
| Settle from trust | Pays from the client’s trust in one GL-correct move. At/above the requisition threshold, Form 9A signatures are required first. |
| Settle several from trust | Select two or more issued or partially-paid invoices and pay them with one trust cheque. The server prices each line from the invoice’s own outstanding balance — you never type an amount — and raises a single itemised Form 9A requisition listing every matter, with the threshold measured on the cheque total. Every invoice must share the trust account’s currency. |
| Write-off | Recognizes an uncollectible amount as bad debt, and prompts for the collection evidence the deduction depends on. Taken to part of the balance it is a write-down — the same operation, the same obligation. |
| Credit memo | Reverses fee revenue to correct an over-bill, together with the tax those fee lines actually bore. An agreed discount, never a bad debt — no collection evidence. |
| Downloads the client-ready invoice. |
If a linked invoice changes before the cheque posts
Section titled “If a linked invoice changes before the cheque posts”A multi-matter cheque is rejected, not re-priced. Between raising the
requisition and posting it, one of the invoices it settles may be part-paid,
credited or written down. When that happens the post refuses outright
(REQUISITION_BATCH_INVOICE_MISMATCH), names every invoice that moved, and
writes nothing — void the requisition and raise a fresh one.
That is deliberate, and it is the difference from the single-invoice path. When one invoice is settled by one requisition there is exactly one way to absorb a smaller balance, so that path clamps the payout down. With several matters on one cheque there are many ways to re-apportion the difference, and picking one would post a figure nobody signed. An invoice whose balance went up is not a mismatch: the leg still pays the amount that was signed for, never more.
What a write-off posts
Section titled “What a write-off posts”A write-off does not book one undifferentiated loss. It splits the amount across the same components the invoice was made of, and each component goes to the account that describes what was actually lost:
| Component written off | Posts to | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Fees | DR 5900 Bad Debts | Revenue the firm earned and will not collect. |
| Hard costs | DR 5950 Disbursement Write-downs | Money the firm actually paid out on the file and will not get back — a real cash loss. |
| Soft costs | DR 4210 Soft-Cost Recoveries Written Off | Not an expense. Nothing was ever spent: a soft cost posts no ledger entry when it is incurred, so there is no asset to write down. What is lost is the recovery revenue booked at billing (4200), so the write-off reverses that revenue through a contra-revenue account. Booking it as bad-debt expense would count the loss twice, because the underlying overhead was already expensed when it was incurred. |
| Disbursements with no recorded cost type | DR 5950 | An unknown is not a soft cost. It stays visibly unclassified rather than being guessed into either column. |
| Sales tax | The invoice’s own tax accounts, per rate | See the add-back note below. |
The whole amount credits Accounts Receivable (1200).
Why soft costs get their own account rather than sharing 4200. A write-off is a bad debt; a credit memo is an agreed price reduction. The two are governed by different provisions and tested against different conditions, so Athenty keeps them in different accounts — an audit of one population never has to be traced through the other.
Collection evidence
Section titled “Collection evidence”A write-off asks for more than a reason. Because the bad-debt deduction is conditional on collection having been genuinely doubtful, Athenty prompts you to describe what you did to get paid — letters, calls, emails, a demand letter, a collections referral, with dates — and to attach the supporting documents from the matter’s Drive.
The record attaches to the write-off event, not to the invoice, because the deduction is assessed per bad debt rather than per invoice. It is encouraged, not enforced: a write-off is never refused for want of evidence, and write-offs recorded before this shipped read as empty rather than having a history invented for them.
A write-down carries the same obligation — it is a write-off of part of the balance, so it prompts identically and books to the same accounts. A credit memo never does: nothing went bad, so there is nothing to have chased.
Full detail, including what makes a usable narrative: Write-offs, write-downs & bad debt →
When a written-off invoice gets paid
Section titled “When a written-off invoice gets paid”A client sometimes pays a bill the firm had already given up on. Receiving the money does not reverse the write-off.
Reversing a write-off is a tax-relevant election — where a deduction was claimed, recovering the debt requires it to be added back in the period of the recovery — and Athenty will not make that election on your behalf because money happened to arrive. So the payment is recorded as a payment. A written-off invoice claims nothing, so nothing is applied to it, and what arrives is handled the same way as any money received against a bill with no balance:
- Paid into the operating account — it becomes a refundable client credit against the client, applicable to another bill or refundable.
- Settled from trust — a settlement that would move more than the invoice claims is refused outright and nothing is recorded. The surplus stays in the client’s trust; moving it across because there happened to be an overage is exactly the withdrawal trust rules exist to prevent.
Correcting the write-off — restoring the balance, reversing the matching ledger entries, and generating the tax add-back when the reason is recovery rather than error — is a separate, deliberate operation, and it is not built yet. Until it ships, a recovered debt is recorded as money received and any add-back your regime requires is handled with your accountant when the return is prepared.
Voiding, reversing, undoing
Section titled “Voiding, reversing, undoing”Void, Reverse, Removed, Undone and Undo are the same operation wherever they appear — on an invoice, on a write-off, on a credit memo. Voiding an invoice reverses its ledger entry and returns its billed work to WIP; issue a fresh, corrected invoice rather than editing a posted one. An invoice is the only one of these you can undo today.
Athenty allows it only when both of these hold:
- Both accounting periods are open — the period the invoice’s own issue date falls in, which is the rule about which invoices may be undone at all; and the current period, which is where the reversing entry lands, because it is dated today.
- The invoice is untouched — no payment, write-down, write-off or credit memo.
Otherwise it refuses and tells you why; it never reverses “the part that is left”. The second condition is a check on amounts, not a permanent mark — if a reduction is ever undone the invoice becomes voidable again on its own — but undoing a write-off or a credit memo is not built yet, so today the remedy is to write the balance off as of today instead.
Void, Reverse & Undo → covers every refusal, where the reversing entry lands, and the warning that appears when an undo reaches back into an earlier period.
One invoice covers one matter (consolidated multi-matter statements are a future enhancement). For aged receivables and per-client balances, see Accounting ▸ A/R Reports.