Agency invoicing from milestones, approved hours and retainers

Invoices built from the work

Billing in Simplr starts from what has actually happened on a job, not from a blank template. Each invoice draft is tied to the client and, where it applies, to the project it comes from, so finance and account teams are looking at the same numbers.

Choose where an invoice comes from:

• Project milestone: bill a fixed amount for an agreed stage of work
• Approved time: select approved, billable hours from a chosen week, with rates and currency taken from the project budget
• Standalone: invoice a one-off service that sits outside a project
• Retainer: a draft prepared from an active retainer agreement

Review the draft, then issue

Drafts stay drafts until someone with billing access is ready. Add line items with quantities and unit prices, set a manual tax rate with tax included or excluded, add a service period and notes, then issue the invoice when the details are right. Saving a draft never sends anything to the client.

Issuing gives the invoice the next number in your agency’s sequence and fixes its amounts and billing details, so later changes to rates or client records never rewrite it. Every issued invoice is available as a PDF.

Retainer agreements without the guesswork

Retainer clients are billed on their agreement, not their hours. Record the fee, the currency and the billing frequency, monthly, quarterly or yearly, along with the first billing date and payment terms. Saving the terms does not start billing; you activate the retainer when you are ready.

Once it is active, Simplr prepares one invoice draft for each billing period, and your team reviews and issues it. Changes take effect from the next period without proration, and cancelling ends the agreement at renewal. There are no hour caps or overage charges, and the fee does not depend on time logged.

Payments, statuses and exports

Follow every invoice from draft to awaiting payment and paid, with overdue invoices clearly marked. Record a payment when it arrives, or void an unpaid invoice while keeping the issued document in your history.

Set your agency’s seller details, invoice number prefix, payment terms and payment instructions once, and they carry through to every invoice. Export invoices and line items as CSV files for your accounting tools. Online payment collection is coming soon.

Financial access for the right people

Billing is only visible to people whose agency role includes financial access. Account and creative team members can see the work and the plan without seeing rates, fees or invoices, and the client portal never shows your internal rates.

Because invoices are prepared from the same jobs as the brief, the plan and the approved time, the step from delivered work to an invoice draft is short, and every line can be traced back to where it came from.