All staff timesheets must be completed by the end of the 15th of each month. This includes all General Admin time to be allocated correctly to projects where required. The monthly invoicing process starts on the 16th of every month and should be completed with all invoices sent to clients by the last day of the month.
When the finance team creates the billing sheet all timesheets from the 16th of the previous month to the 15th of the current billing month become locked and are unable to be updated by staff. If a timesheet has an incorrect entry to Admin General that can be allocated to a project to invoice or if a timesheet has been put to a project incorrectly please notify the finance team to update the timesheet and recreate the billing sheet as soon as possible. Noting this in the notes is helpful, however, it delays the process if not attending to until the billing sheet comes back to the finance team for processing as once this time is moved the other discipline manager or project lead will require reviewing the billing sheet again as this reverts the process back to discipline approval. If time is transferred between projects, both projects will require updated billing sheets, so this has quite a flow-on effect for other disciplines or invoicing staff if a project is updated. This is important to ensure accuracy for the project time cost and invoicing.
Billing sheets are created in TIMS by invoicing staff and appear in the relevant staff members dashboard with the expectation that this will be completed within three working days of being created. There should be an e-mail to you from the Finance Team in your region to advise this has been actioned.
The dashboard will only show five tasks, but you may have more. Click on the number in orange beside the dashboard and this will open the outstanding tasks. This will show all billing sheets that have disciplines to be invoiced with your name for invoicing purposes. On the right side of the project name and reference information is an orange option to click VIEW, you will be connected directly to view the billing sheet for this period.
The Invoice wording guideline is expected to be used by all staff to ensure consistency across departments and regions when filling in the notes field of the billing sheets. It's expected that all staff fill in the notes field with correct notations as per the guideline. The guideline is a live changeable document - if changes are required or extra notations to be added please contact the Operations Manager to ensure these are added.
Billing sheets allocate a staff member responsible for marking the invoice up in each discipline applicable to the project (adding a description and determining the amount an invoice should be for their discipline) and approving the invoice for that discipline. A Project Invoice controller is also assigned to each project to approve the full billing sheet for the entire project each month. This is either the Project Director or Regional Manager where the project is based.
All invoices are to be checked and approved by the Regional Manager before being sent to the client. This is to ensure accuracy and consistency.
All invoices are to be sent via email or post via the respective regional finance team member and need to be sent by the last day of the month.
Invoice queries will be responded to by the finance team member wherever possible and when required will be escalated to the appropriate member of staff to provide an answer for the finance team member to respond to the client. If the query isn't answered within a timely manner this will be escalated to the Regional Manager.
All invoicing processes should follow the dates specified in the timeframes. If for any reason this cannot be adhered to the staff member/finance team member/Regional Manager who cannot complete this needs to inform the Operations Manager and COO due to the impact this has n the delivery of invoices to clients etc.
Invoicing Timeframes
|
Responsibility |
Activity |
Duration (working days) |
Start Date (of month) |
End Date (of month) |
Est End (if the end date falls into weekend) |
|
ALL STAFF |
Time sheet - (Cut off) |
0 |
|
15th |
16th or 17th |
|
ACCTS |
Create & Distribute Billing Sheets |
1 |
16th |
16th |
17th - 18th |
|
Departments/All staff |
Mark-up and Approve Billing Sheets |
3 |
16th-17th |
19-20th |
21st - 22nd |
|
ACCTS |
Process Invoices and Progress Claims |
5- |
17th |
27th |
28th - 29th |
|
REGIONAL MGR |
Check all Invoices |
2 |
27th |
29th |
29th - 30th |
|
ACCTS |
Reconcile TIMS & Xero |
1 |
30th |
1st |
- |
|
ACCTS |
Send Invoices |
1 |
29th -30th |
30th-31st |
30th- 31st |
|
ACCTS |
Complete Financial Reports |
3 |
2nd |
5th |
6th-7th |