We would like to be able to set up an invoice line item for hourly billing.

There is no practical way to do this, however, because the Quantity field does not accept decimal fraction values (so you cannot input anything between whole hours).

Eg. the following item is not possible:

Website Development, hourly // Qty: 2.5 [= 2h 30m] // Price: $100 // Total: $250

2.5 is not considered a valid quantity–only 2 or 3.

This does not work for billing an exact hourly amount such as 2h 45m.

POTENTIAL WORKAROUNDS:

Option 1 - Setting the Quantity to "1", setting the cost to the total calculated hourly amount and explaining in the "description" what the time amount was and hourly rate.

Example:

Website Development, hourly || Qty: 1 || Price: $250

Description: 2h 30 mins spent on the XYZ Project at $100 / hr

In order to do this, one must enter a custom "service item" as a line item (and not use a previously-created 'service') AND leave the Tier field blank AND decline to save these custom items for use later.

The reason one must do it this way is that previously-created "Service Items" must have a "Tier" created as well, and that tier must have a specific price set.

If you want to use a saved Service Item, one ends up with many separate "Tiers", one for each amount that has previously been billed as an hourly total in an invoice.

For example:

Invoice 1

----------------

Service: Website Development, hourly

Tier: "2h 45m tier"

Qty: 1

Price: $275

Invoice 2

----------------

Service: Website Development, hourly

Tier: "6h 17m tier"

Qty: 1

Price: $628.34

Invoice 3

----------------

Service: Website Development, hourly

Tier: "12h 52m tier"

Qty: 1

Price: $1,286.67

RESULTS:

After sending a multitude of invoices, you now have a large number of obscure "Service Tiers" stored in your invoicing system that may look something like this:

SERVICE TIER OPTIONS:

• 2h 45m tier

• 6h 17m tier

• 12h 52m tier

• 4h 32m tier

• 13h 15m tier

• 1h 48m tier

• 1h 51m tier

• 3h 43m tier

etc. etc.

This becomes very impractical very quickly........

The simple and obvious answer would be to be able to:

--Scenario A (ideal)--

create an hourly line item type where QTY can be configured as a hourly duration value (hh:mm)

--Scenario B (less ideal but still workable)--

Be able to enter a fractional decimal into the line item quantity

(This obviously creates problems when invoicing items which should NOT ever include decimal fractions, like "WordPress Site Migrations || Qty: 1.4")

I would assume, correctly or incorrectly, that creating an hourly-based invoice line item would be a very common scenario for freelancers and agencies. I even expect it as a capability of an an invoicing system.

I was very surprised, therefore, to find that there is no functionality for this in the Growth Suite invoicing and that the only ways to do it are by using odd and impractical workarounds.

The lack of this feature is currently the sole reason we have not moved forward with making the transition to managing our billing and invoicing centrally through Growth Suite.