Core concepts

Invup has about ten moving parts. Once you know what each one is for, the rest of the product explains itself. The short version: an organization does work for clients, organized into projects. Team members log time entries and expenses against those projects. Unbilled time and expenses become invoices. Money arriving against an invoice is a transaction.

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Organization

Your organization is the container for everything: your team, your clients, your work, and your money. It holds your business name, your logo, your address, and the settings that shape how the rest of the product behaves. Two of those settings matter more than the others, because they change how dates and numbers come out everywhere else. Timezone decides how every date and time in Invup is displayed, no matter where the person looking at it happens to be. A time entry logged at 9am in Vancouver reads as 9am to a colleague in Toronto when the organization runs on Pacific time. Working days records which days of the week your business operates. Daily time tracking prompts follow it. One person can belong to more than one organization, and switches between them inside the product.

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Team members and roles

Everyone who works inside your organization is a team member. What they can see and do is decided by their role. On the Pro plan you can also build custom roles and grant them exactly the permissions you intend.

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Clients

A client is a business or a person you invoice. The client record holds the billing details that appear on the invoice, along with the contacts who receive it. Contacts are the individual people at that client. Each contact has contact types that control which client facing emails reach them, such as invoices, reminders and receipts. A contact with no types set receives nothing, which is useful for someone you want on record but not in the mailing. Everything downstream hangs off a client. Projects belong to a client, and so do invoices.

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Projects

A project is a body of work for one client. It is the thing time gets logged against: a case, an engagement, a build, a campaign, a retainer. Every project has a type: Separately from type, a project can have services enabled or not. This is the single most consequential switch on a project, because it changes how rates are worked out. Projects also carry an optional budget, start and end dates, and a lock date. Locking a project up to a date stops members and contributors editing or deleting entries on or before it, which is what keeps a billed period from quietly changing underneath you.

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Services

A service is a type of billable activity, describing the kind of work rather than who did it. Legal research. Site visit. Copywriting. Expert testimony. Services live in an organization wide library. You attach the relevant ones to each project that has services enabled. A service can be billable or non billable, and it carries a base hourly rate that other levels can override. Marking a service non billable is absolute. Any time logged against it is worth zero, regardless of every other rate you have set.

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Rates

This is the part worth slowing down for, because it is where most of Invup’s quiet intelligence lives. Nobody picks a rate when logging time. Invup works it out by walking a chain from the most specific rate it can find down to the most general, and the first rate it finds wins. Which chain it walks depends on whether the project has services enabled and whether the entry names a service. Projects with services, where the entry names a service:

1. This member, on this service, on this project
2. This member, on this service, anywhere
3. This service, on this project
4. The service’s own base rate
5. The project’s rate
6. The member’s base rate for the organization

Projects without services, and any entry that names no service:

1. This member, on this project
2. The project’s rate
3. The member’s base rate for the organization

The practical consequence is that you should set rates broadly once and then override only the exceptions. A senior partner who bills at a special rate on one particular engagement needs one setting, not a policy. Alongside the chain sits the rate lock policy, an organization wide choice about when an entry’s rate stops being able to move: Whichever you choose, once an entry has been invoiced the amount you billed is the amount you billed.

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Time entries

A time entry records that a team member did some work, on a date, on a project, for a duration. It can name a service, and it can be marked non billable. Each entry carries the rate that was resolved for it. Billable entries with no invoice attached are exactly what the invoice builder offers you when it is time to bill.

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Expenses

An expense is money your business spent that you want to track, and often recharge. Expenses can be typed in, or captured by forwarding a receipt to an address that belongs to your organization, in which case Invup reads the receipt and fills in what it can. Expenses sit in categories, can be measured against budgets, and the billable ones can be pushed onto a client’s invoice.

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Invoices

An invoice is a bill sent to a client. It is assembled from line items, some pulled from unbilled time entries and expenses, some typed in directly, with taxes and discounts applied. How time collapses into line items is your choice. The same fifty hours can appear as a single line, one line per project, per service, per team member, or one line per individual entry, depending on how much detail that client expects to see. Invoices are numbered from a sequence you control, carry your default payment terms, and can chase themselves. Reminders go out on a schedule before the due date, and again once an invoice is overdue. For work that repeats, such as retainers and monthly fees, a recurring invoice is a template that issues a real invoice on a schedule.

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Transactions

A transaction is money received against an invoice. Card payments made through the customer portal record themselves. Cheques, bank transfers and anything else that happened outside Invup get recorded by hand, so that the invoice reflects reality.

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The customer portal

Your clients do not get an Invup login. They get a link. That link opens a portal showing their invoice, what it covers, and a way to pay it. It is the only part of Invup your clients ever see, which is why it is worth setting up your logo and payment options before you send the first one.

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Beyond the core

Once the loop above is running, three further areas build on it.

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