Invoices

Invoices (Accounting ▸ Invoices) is where you turn a matter’s work-in-progress into a client bill, post it to the general ledger, and track payment. It’s the Accounts-Receivable counterpart to Vendor Bills.

Build a bill from WIP

Click New bill from WIP and pick a matter. Athenty drafts an invoice from everything currently billable on it:

• Time dockets (billable, not yet invoiced)
• Fees (billable, not yet invoiced)
• Recoverable disbursements — soft (estimated) and hard (paid)

This is the generate-then-trim model. The draft starts with all eligible work; you remove what you don’t want to bill yet.

Trimming a draft

Use the trash icon on a line to remove it. Removed work returns to WIP and reappears next time you bill the matter — nothing is lost. Prefer to start empty? Use Blank draft and add lines by hand.

Non-billable work

Work you’ll never bill shouldn’t clutter every draft. On the matter’s tabs:

• Mark a time docket or fee non-billable → excluded from WIP, no ledger effect.
• Mark a hard cost non-billable → the firm absorbs it: its recoverable asset clears to a write-down expense (DR 5950 / CR 1210). Soft costs simply drop out. Re-enable billable to reverse.

Issuing

Set an optional due date and click Issue. Athenty assigns the next gapless number (INV-YYYY-NNNN), freezes totals, and posts DR Accounts Receivable / CR revenue + tax. Each fee or time line credits its source timekeeper’s revenue sub-account (4001.NICK fixed fee / 4002.NICK hourly); ad-hoc lines and work without a timekeeper land on the UNASSIGNED catch-all so the books always reconcile. Issued lines are locked.

Collecting

Action	What it does
Record payment	DR Bank / CR A/R; advances status. Overpayment → client credit. Money arriving on a written-off invoice is a bad-debt recovery, not an overpayment — see below.
Settle from trust	Pays from the client’s trust in one GL-correct move. At/above the requisition threshold, Form 9A signatures are required first.
Write-off	Recognizes an uncollectible amount as bad debt.
Credit memo	Reverses fee revenue to correct an over-bill, together with the tax those fee lines actually bore.
PDF	Downloads the client-ready invoice.

What a write-off posts

A write-off does not book one undifferentiated loss. It splits the amount across the same components the invoice was made of, and each component goes to the account that describes what was actually lost:

Component written off	Posts to	Why
Fees	DR 5900 Bad Debts	Revenue the firm earned and will not collect.
Hard costs	DR 5950 Disbursement Write-downs	Money the firm actually paid out on the file and will not get back — a real cash loss.
Soft costs	DR 4210 Soft-Cost Recoveries Written Off	Not an expense. Nothing was ever spent: a soft cost posts no ledger entry when it is incurred, so there is no asset to write down. What is lost is the recovery revenue booked at billing (4200), so the write-off reverses that revenue through a contra-revenue account. Booking it as bad-debt expense would count the loss twice, because the underlying overhead was already expensed when it was incurred.
Disbursements with no recorded cost type	DR 5950	An unknown is not a soft cost. It stays visibly unclassified rather than being guessed into either column.
Sales tax	The invoice’s own tax accounts, per rate	See the add-back note below.

The whole amount credits Accounts Receivable (1200).

Why soft costs get their own account rather than sharing 4200. A write-off is a bad debt; a credit memo is an agreed price reduction. The two are governed by different provisions and tested against different conditions, so Athenty keeps them in different accounts — an audit of one population never has to be traced through the other.

Suggested — verify

Bad debt vs. credit memo (GST/HST). A bad-debt deduction is claimed under the Excise Tax Act, s. 231 (CanLII), and is conditional — among other things the debt must be written off in the books and collection must be genuinely doubtful, which in practice is evidenced by attempts to collect. A credit note for a reduction in consideration is a different provision, s. 232 (CanLII), with no collection-attempt condition. Keeping the two in separate accounts is what lets each be tested against its own provision. Confirm the treatment and the supporting evidence for your own filings with your advisor — this is a suggestion to check, not a determination.

When a written-off invoice gets paid

A client sometimes pays a bill the firm had already given up on. That is a recovery of a bad debt, not an overpayment, and Athenty books it as one:

• Reverses the bad-debt expense rather than recording a refundable credit balance. Nothing is owed back to the client — they paid a debt they owed.
• Splits the recovery across the same components the write-off used (fees, disbursements, and the tax share), and returns each part to the same GL account the write-off debited, including the invoice’s own tax accounts where the firm charges more than one rate.
• Adds the sales tax back. Where the firm claimed the sales-tax bad-debt deduction on the write-off, that deduction must be reversed in the period of the recovery, in proportion to the amount recovered. If no deduction was claimed there is nothing to add back — check the figure against your filings.
• Only the amount actually written off can be recovered. Anything the client sends beyond that is still a genuine overpayment and still becomes a client credit, exactly as before.

The recovery posts its own ledger entry against the invoice, so the cash and the add-back are both traceable. The invoice’s own Amount paid is deliberately left alone — the receivable was cleared when the debt was written off, and putting it back is a separate “correct a write-off” action.

Suggested — verify

GST/HST (federal). The tax add-back is grounded in the Excise Tax Act, s. 231(3) (CanLII): where a bad debt for which a s. 231(1) deduction was actually claimed is later recovered, the tax portion must be added back in the reporting period of the recovery, in proportion to the amount recovered. The qualifier matters — a debt written off without having claimed the deduction produces no add-back, so the figure below is a suggestion to check against your own filings, not a determination. The related write-off conditions are in s. 231 itself.

QST (Québec). The federal rule is not universal. Québec’s mirror is the Act respecting the Québec sales tax, CQLR c T-0.1, s. 446 (the deduction itself is s. 444, with a four-year limit at s. 446.1), administered by Revenu Québec. Athenty posts the add-back to the invoice’s own tax accounts whichever regime applies; confirm the timing and limitation period for yours.

This treatment is attorney-review-pending — confirm it with your own advisor before relying on it for a filing.

Voiding, reversing, undoing

Void, Reverse, Removed, Undone and Undo are the same operation wherever they appear — on an invoice, on a write-off, on a credit memo. Voiding an invoice reverses its ledger entry and returns its billed work to WIP; issue a fresh, corrected invoice rather than editing a posted one. An invoice is the only one of these you can undo today.

Athenty allows it only when both of these hold:

1. Both accounting periods are open — the period the invoice’s own issue date falls in, which is the rule about which invoices may be undone at all; and the current period, which is where the reversing entry lands, because it is dated today.
2. The invoice is untouched — no payment, write-down, write-off or credit memo.

Otherwise it refuses and tells you why; it never reverses “the part that is left”. The second condition is a check on amounts, not a permanent mark — if a reduction is ever undone the invoice becomes voidable again on its own — but undoing a write-off or a credit memo is not built yet, so today the remedy is to write the balance off as of today instead.

Void, Reverse & Undo → covers every refusal, where the reversing entry lands, and the warning that appears when an undo reaches back into an earlier period.

Scope

One invoice covers one matter (consolidated multi-matter statements are a future enhancement). For aged receivables and per-client balances, see Accounting ▸ A/R Reports.