How to Run Billing Reports and Invoice Clients

Tracking your time is only half the job. The other half is turning those hours into something you can actually bill. Once you've submitted a few weeks, the Billing screen's billable hours report totals your work across all of them, splits it into billable and non-billable, and shows the value per project. From there you can export the figures to Excel or generate a client-ready PDF invoice. Here's how it all fits together.

1. Add your business details

Before you raise your first invoice, pop over to Invoice Settings and fill in the Invoice details section. Your business name, address, email and VAT or tax number all appear in the FROM block of the invoice. They're optional, so if you leave the name blank VibaCloud falls back to your account name, but a complete set looks far more professional to a client. You only need to do this once.

2. Open Billing and choose a period

On the Billing screen, pick the period you want from the dropdown. There are quick presets for this month, last month, this quarter and this year, plus a Custom option that reveals two date pickers for any range you like. If you only want one client's work, choose them from the Client filter. Leave it on "All clients" to see everything side by side.

3. Read your billable summary

The summary cards at the top give you the headline figures for the period: billable hours, non-billable hours, total hours and total value. Below that, each row breaks the same numbers down by organisation and project, so you can see at a glance where your time and your money came from. It's a quick way to sanity-check a month before you bill it, or to see how a particular client is tracking. A line above the table repeats the period and client you're looking at, which matters more than it sounds once you've stepped back through a few months and lost track.

One thing worth knowing: reports are built from submitted timesheets only. A week still sitting in draft won't appear until you submit it. That's deliberate, because submitting a week freezes its rates and values, so a report always reflects what you actually committed to rather than a figure that might still change. If something's missing, check it hasn't been left as a draft on My Timesheets.

4. Export or print the report

Happy with what you see? Use Export to Excel for a tidy spreadsheet you can keep for your records or hand to an accountant, or Print for a clean paper copy or a quick save as PDF. Both reflect the exact period and client filter showing on screen, so what you export is what you reviewed.

5. Generate a client invoice

To bill a specific client, choose them in the Client filter and click Create invoice. VibaCloud produces a PDF laid out the way clients expect: your details in the FROM block, the client as the bill-to, an invoice number and date, and a line for each project showing the rate, the hours and the amount. Only billable work appears, since non-billable time is worth nothing to invoice. The button stays disabled until you've selected a client with some billable hours in the period, which stops you raising an empty invoice by accident.

Watch for the notice above the table before you click. If part of the period can't be billed yet, VibaCloud says so and tells you what the invoice would actually come to. That usually means work on a team project whose week hasn't been approved, and it's worth reading, because an invoice is a frozen record once it exists. Fixing a short one means voiding it and starting again.

Where the charts live

Billing answers "what can I invoice". Reports answers the slower questions. Pick any period and you get your hours and value over time, a billable split, your busiest projects and your most valuable clients, all as charts. Hover any bar on the trend and a card tells you what that day or month was made of, down to the projects behind it.

Underneath sits a breakdown table you can group by client, project or task, and sort by any column. It carries the long tail the charts cut off, plus each row's share of the period and its effective rate. That last number is the one to watch. It's your value divided by every hour you recorded rather than just the billable ones, so it shows what an hour of your time actually earned once the admin, the write-offs and the goodwill are counted. A client whose headline rate is £75 but whose effective rate is £48 is telling you something.

There's also a bar showing where your billable work has got to: waiting on approval, ready to bill, invoiced, or paid. The four add up to the total value above it, which is the point. Total value is the worth of work you recorded, not money in your account, and the bar is there so nobody confuses the two. Anything past its due date gets flagged.

Handling VAT

If you charge VAT or another sales tax, set the rate in the Invoice details section of Invoice Settings, then choose how it should be applied:

• Add VAT on top of my rates. Your rates are treated as net. The invoice shows a subtotal, adds the VAT, and the Amount Due is the larger figure. This is the usual choice when you bill other businesses.
• My rates already include VAT. Your rates are treated as VAT-inclusive. The invoice discloses how much of the total is VAT but doesn't add it again, so the Amount Due stays the same.

Leave the rate at zero and no tax line appears at all. Whichever you pick, the invoice always reconciles against the line totals, so the numbers add up however you work.

A sensible billing rhythm

A little routine keeps invoicing painless:

• Submit each week as you finish it, so reports are always up to date.
• Run a report at the end of the month to check the totals before you bill.
• Keep your project rates current, since the invoice uses the rate frozen at submission.
• Fill in your business details once, then every invoice comes out polished.

Working with colleagues rather than on your own? Approvals change the order of all this, and Reports will show you the whole firm instead of just yourself. That's covered in how team timesheet approvals and reporting work.

Not billed a week yet? Start with Getting Started with VibaCloud, and make sure you know how to fill out a timesheet correctly so your reports and invoices are accurate from day one.