Overview of the job sales invoicing data

When you invoice a project in Business Central, the invoice is built from your job planning lines. Only the lines marked as Billable, including the Both Budget and Billable type, transfer to the sales invoice. Budget-only lines stay out of the invoice.

When you post a project sales invoice, Business Central does not just create one record. A single posting generates job ledger entries of the type Sales, customer ledger entries, general ledger entries, and depending on what you sell, item ledger entries and resource ledger entries as well.

Your billable amount going to the customer does not have to match your budget. The budget side and the billable side are tracked separately, so you can plan one figure internally and invoice another to the customer.

How job planning lines feed the invoice

The starting point is the job hierarchy: you have a job, then job tasks, and under those your job planning lines. There are three types of planning lines, but two of them matter for invoicing: Both Budget and Billable, and Billable. These are the lines that get transferred to the invoice.

The Budget-only lines describe what you expect internally. The Billable lines describe what goes to the customer. The two do not have to be identical. Your budget may differ from what you actually invoice, which is why it is worth keeping the distinction clear when you set up your planning lines.

How usage and cost flow into the project

Before invoicing, you register usage on the project. Resources book time through time registration, and costs come in from purchase invoices and similar sources. All of this lands in the project module as job ledger entries of the type Usage.

From there, you create a sales invoice to the customer. When you post that invoice, Business Central creates job ledger entries of the type Sales. So your job ledger entries hold two sides: usage entries from time and costs, and sales entries from posted invoices. Keeping that division in mind makes it much easier to understand what your project numbers are telling you.

From draft invoice to posted invoice

When you first create the sales invoice from the job planning lines, it is a draft. Nothing is committed yet. The moment you post it, the system generates the actual ledger entries.

On the job itself, you get a new job ledger entry of the type Sales, and the invoice is linked back to the job so you can always trace it.

What a single posting generates across the system

Because Business Central is an ERP system, posting one project invoice creates entries in several places at once:

• Job ledger entries of the type Sales on the job.
• Customer ledger entries on the customer set up for the job.
• General ledger entries based on your posting setup.
• Item ledger entries if you are selling items.
• Resource ledger entries if you are selling resources.

In other words, one click to post the invoice generates a lot of data across the system. That is exactly what you want in an ERP solution, but it helps to know where everything ends up so you can find and reconcile it later.

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