Skip to main content
Shiftsheet’s Invoices module lets you generate client-ready invoices directly from approved timesheet entries. Go to Invoices in the sidebar.

​
The Invoices page

At the top, a row of stat cards summarises your invoices at a glance — Total Outstanding, Overdue amount, Paid This Month, and counts of Pending/Draft/Approved invoices (which cards you see depends on your role). Below that, invoices are organised into status tabs: All, Pending, Approved, Paid, Rejected, and Archived — each its own filtered, paginated table with sortable columns (click a column header to sort).
“Overdue” isn’t a separate status — it’s a badge that appears on any Approved, Sent, or Pending invoice once its due date has passed.

​
Filtering, searching, and bulk actions

Use the date range picker, Project filter, Client filter, and Department filter together with the search box to narrow the list — an active-filter badge shows how many are applied, and on mobile these collapse into a Filters sheet. Select rows with the checkboxes to reveal a bulk-action toolbar: Bulk Approve (Pending tab), Bulk Mark Paid (Approved tab), Bulk Download, or Clear selection. Managers-only actions are hidden for other roles.
Made a mistake approving, marking paid, or archiving? Use Undo (or Ctrl/Cmd+Z) — Shiftsheet keeps a short history of your recent invoice actions on this page, with Redo (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Z) to bring one back.

​
List vs. Calendar view

Toggle between the table above and a Calendar (Gantt-style timeline) view of your invoices — see Calendar view below.

​
Generating an invoice

Click New Invoice to open a 3-step wizard: Configure source & period → Select team members → Finalize billing details. Managers and admins first choose an invoice mode:

Employee Invoice

Pay your team for logged hours — an internal invoice per employee (or a batch of employees), not sent to a client.

Project Invoice

Bill a client for project work — a Client Invoice covering one or more projects.
Employee Invoice mode:
  • Pick the period and, optionally, restrict it to specific projects (All Data vs Specific Projects)
  • Auto-Select by Project pre-selects every team member with approved timesheet hours on the chosen project(s) for that period
  • Or search the team-member picker manually — each person shows an Eligible badge if they have billable hours in range, with a Select All shortcut
  • If you’re not a manager, you’ll see this flow scoped to generating your own invoice
Project Invoice mode:
  • Select one or more projects — Shiftsheet shows a live “N contributors found” count as you pick
  • Choose the Recipient: your Default Company details, or a saved client
  • Billed To / Billed From can be overridden per invoice, with one-click Autofill from Client / Autofill from Profile buttons
Both modes let you set:
  • Line Item Format — how hours are grouped into lines: Summarize by Project, Breakdown by Task, General Task Only, or Group All Hours
  • Currency and Tax Rate
  • A Preview Totals button to see the computed subtotal/tax/total before finalizing
If an invoice already exists covering the same period and scope, Shiftsheet warns you before you proceed — a blocking warning if the existing invoice is already Approved or Paid, or a dismissible amber warning if it’s only a Draft or Pending. Either way, a clickable badge takes you straight to the conflicting invoice.
Finish the wizard to Save as Draft, or submit straight for approval. The same wizard reopens when you edit a Draft later.

​
Reviewing an invoice

Open any invoice to see its detail view: totals, line items, recipient/period details, and Created By / Approved By / Template metadata.
  • Preview — an in-app PDF preview
  • Download — saves a PDF copy locally (works at any status); a toggle lets you choose whether to include the Audit Log in the exported PDF
  • Audit Log — a read-only, per-contributor breakdown of every time block that makes up the invoice, with a “not billed” indicator on any excluded block (see Excluding time from an invoice for the editable version of this same log)
For a Client (Project) Invoice, managers/admins who aren’t the invoice’s own subject also see a Client Billable View — the billable rate/amount charged to the client shown side-by-side with the internal cost figures, grouped by contributor. This margin view is never shown to the employees whose hours are on the invoice.

​
Excluding time from an invoice

Not every approved hour should go out on a client invoice — a block that was already billed elsewhere, logged in error, or written off by agreement with the client can be held back at the individual timesheet-block level, without changing the underlying timesheet entry or its approval status.
  1. Open a Client Invoice’s editor and expand its Audit Log — every timesheet block that contributed is listed there, grouped by team member
  2. Exclude (or re-include) any block — totals recalculate immediately, no separate save step
  3. An excluded block shows a “Not Billed” indicator on the employee’s own timesheet
Managers can only exclude/include blocks on invoices within their own team; Company Admins can do so company-wide. Note that toggling a block can change an invoice’s line items — if you’ve already typed in manual per-line adjustments, those are cleared (with an on-screen warning) rather than silently kept against numbers that no longer match.

​
The approval workflow

For companies that require internal sign-off before sending:
  1. Submit the invoice from Draft → status becomes Pending
  2. A Company Admin (or Manager, depending on the invoice) reviews and Approves (or Rejects with a note)
  3. Once Approved, the invoice can be Sent
Approved or Sent an invoice by mistake? Click Unapprove to revert it back to Pending.

​
Sending an invoice

  1. Open an Approved invoice
  2. Click Send
  3. Enter or confirm the recipient’s email address
  4. The client receives a professional PDF via email

​
Marking as paid

Once payment is received:
  1. Open the Sent invoice
  2. Click Mark as Paid
  3. The status updates to Paid and the date is recorded
Paid invoices can be Archived to tidy up your main list (and Unarchived/restored later); Company Admins additionally have a Force Delete option to permanently remove a non-draft invoice, behind a confirmation dialog.

​
Editing invoice content

Open a Draft (or any invoice still editable) in the Invoice Editor for a three-pane view — Info, Preview, and Content (a segmented toggle on mobile). Info pane: Billed From/To fields, each with an Autofill dropdown (your profile, or a saved client); Notes; Payment Instructions. Preview pane: a live rendered invoice next to the same interactive Audit Log described above (per-block include/exclude checkboxes, filters by date/task/person/approval status, and a manual Refresh Totals button if you’d rather not wait for the automatic recalculation). A * marks any line priced from a live, non-frozen rate rather than the rate that was actually applied at the time. Content pane:
  • Per-line Hide toggle — unlike deleting, a hidden line stays in the underlying data and simply drops off the PDF
  • Add New Line for a custom, manually-entered row
  • Manual Subtotal/Tax/Total overrides, with a Reset to original button
  • A Visibility section split in two: toggles for what appears on the PDF (Billed From/To, Hours column, Rate column, Notes, Payment Instructions), separate from toggles for what appears in your own review screen only (Audit Log, Approval column) — the review-only toggles never affect what the client sees
Content edits are stored as overrides layered on top of the underlying timesheet data — the original timesheet entries are never modified.

​
Customising your invoice branding

There are two separate places to manage how your invoices look, reached from the Settings button on the Invoices page:

​
Invoice Settings (quick, company-wide defaults)

A 3-tab modal:
  • My Details — your legal/business name, a Tax ID label you choose (ABN, Tax ID, VAT No., GST No., Business No., or a custom label) plus the ID value, address, and contact email
  • Branding — Employees see a read-only “Company Managed Layout” card showing the template applied to their invoices. Managers/admins instead see a grid of saved templates and presets to pick the default template, auto-applied to every new invoice — plus an Edit Templates shortcut into the fuller Template Studio below
  • Managing saved clients — see the next section

​
Template Studio (building and managing multiple templates)

Edit Templates opens a gallery of your saved templates as thumbnail cards, plus a Create Blank card and, for managers, a Company templates section — shared, company-wide templates anyone can clone as a starting point. From a card you can Delete it or Set default. Open a template to edit it: upload/replace/remove your logo, pick Brand/Accent/Wave colors, choose a Footer Decoration style (Wave, Solid Block, Dashed Line, Gradient Strip, or Angled Geometric) with its own color, pick from 6 fonts, and set an Invoice Label (INVOICE, TAX INVOICE, STATEMENT, RECEIPT, QUOTE, or a custom label). You can save multiple templates and switch which one applies when generating a specific invoice.

​
Managing saved clients

Under Invoice Settings → Saved Clients, keep an address book of recipients: Contact Name, Business Name, ABN/Tax ID, Email, and Address. Add, edit, or delete entries here — this same list is what populates the Recipient dropdown in the generation wizard and the Autofill menus in the invoice editor, so you only need to enter a client’s details once.

​
Calendar view

Switch the Invoices page to Calendar for a month-by-month, Gantt-style timeline instead of a table. Rows are grouped by billed resource — an employee for Employee Invoices, or a project/client for Project Invoices — with a bar spanning each invoice’s billing period (bars stack into lanes when periods overlap for the same resource). Navigate months with the prev/next controls or jump to Today; a legend explains the status color coding. Hover or click a bar for a tooltip with the invoice’s details and quick actions — Download, Submit, Approve, Reject, or Mark Paid — right from the timeline, without opening the full invoice.

​
Checking what hasn’t been invoiced yet

A project’s Stats tab (visible to managers and admins) shows an Outstanding Billable Value figure — the gap between all billable work logged against that project and what’s actually been captured on a generated invoice (any invoice that’s left Draft). The same tab breaks down total hours per team member on the project, with a click-through to their day-by-day task log.