Usage Reports for your Retainer PDF Invoices

A lot can happen in a month. Support tickets, project work, ad-hoc tasks and urgent changes.. they're almost always billable - and when it comes to bundling and invoicing all this work, Retainers are a great option. However, to-date it hasn't been easy to include a list of all the work related to a retainer period invoice. 

This handy update allows you to provide a lot more activity detail when creating a PDF invoice for your retainer periods - whether pre-paid or post-paid!

The next time you use the Create PDF Invoice option from a period invoice, you'll see Activity Detail settings on the left, with some extra options pertaining to the period.

• Current Period means activities linked to the period you're invoicing will be shown in the detailed activity table. It doesn't matter whether the activities are directly on the period, linked to a period task or linked via a support issue/ticket - they're all pulled into the report.
• Previous period - this option is most useful for pre-paid invoicing where you might want to include a report of all the work done in the client's previous retainer period. It could help them understand just how important their pre-paid services are!
• Date Logged fields - these allow you to narrow down the activities to a specific time range. This might be helpful if you are creating a 2nd post-paid invoice and only want to include activities logged after the initial invoice date.
• For (object title) - a new option only relevant to Retainer period reporting. Since activities could belong to various issues and projects, this column allows the title of those objects to be displayed - giving each activity important context.

As you toggle these settings, the table of activities on the right of the screen will automatically refresh, giving you a real-time preview of the work/activity to be included with the PDF invoice.

Because you can create a detailed PDF while saving a new invoice and from an existing invoice, you're able to produce a Detailed Activity Report for any previous retainer invoices. From the invoice view screen, just look for the "Create PDF Invoice" option.

Note: Because we let you customize which activities are included (E.g. current or previous period, as well filtering by date range) it's quite possible that the total value of the activities in the table doesn't match the invoice amount.