I too would love this feature.

I have various reoccurring expenses/charges that need to be invoiced to the customer Id like to be able to keep track of these in freshbooks however my clients would prefer these were merged into a quarterly/yearly invoice.

At the moment i have to just add them as reoccurring invoices (expenses can't reoccur) and have them created as draft... then manually merge and delete them.

Last edited by wizdum (Jan 5/2009 6:24 am)

Hey there holden,

I see where you're coming from.  You don't want to create two invoices, but if you combine them, you can't make use of the recurring profiles.

I'll definitely pass this on to the team here.  I personally think it would be great if we could somehow combine recurring invoices with the hours logged to projects.

Thanks for the feedback and welcome to the forums.

Obviously the behind the scenes part would be more complex to make this work, but the user-side portion could simply be an checkbox option on the recurring invoice that says "Click here to add any outstanding client expenses/hours to each invoice"  If this was a monthly recurring invoice, this would provide a one stop sweeping cleanup of all things still due for that client every month. 

MY SUGGESTION: Ideally the ultimate way to work this would be to add a recurring expense option to the expenses tab.  This would not create a recurring invoice simply recurring expenses.  Then the recurring invoice function could be totally transformed to allow what was mentioned above where you selected what items would be grouped into that recurring invoice.  So I could choose to add all outstanding expense, all outstanding hours, all basecamp project hours, etc or maybe I only want to select all outstanding expenses and make it work like it does now.  Bottom line this functionality would solve everyones problems.  Right now if you had a monthly hosting fee every month for the client and a domain name registration that only happened in March, it would require two invoices.  With the new setup you would simply have two recurring expenses, and your Recurring invoice could be selected to add all outstanding expenses and therefore Mar would still only be one invoice for the client, but would contain both the hosting fee and the domain name registration.

I would quite like this feature as well, but perhaps not quite in the same way.

I would like the system to be able to send out invoices at the end of the month for all unbilled work for any clients that have unbilled work.

+1 for this feature. I have a client that is invoiced quarterly recurring for a standard fee, but I occasionally have hours/expenses for them. The multiple invoices (the regular one, then a small one for an expense like renewing a domain name) confuse them when they run too close together. The result is I usually sit on outstanding expenses for awhile until I can roll them into a large enough invoice for it to be worth the effort.

Great, great work. This business is a side project for me that I hope to expand to full-time work soon. I wouldn't think of expanding it without a service like Freshbooks.

I was actually quite surprised when I just a few minutes ago was planning to set up a recurring invoice which billed all my unbilled hours for a specific project once a month.
It's not a big issue to manually generate and send this invoice once a month, but I've become too spoiled by Freshbooks and just assumed the feature was there.
Silly me.