Billable Expenses: Rebill Customer Costs

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What Billable Expenses does

Billable Expenses lets you flag costs recorded on a Bill, Direct Expense, Purchase Order, Vendor Credit, or Journal Entry as billable to a customer. You can then convert those costs into a customer invoice, with an optional markup added on top. Use it whenever your company incurs a cost on behalf of a customer (including an intercompany customer) and needs to pass that cost through on an invoice. Common cases include:

• Reimbursable travel, contractor, or other pass-through costs incurred while delivering a service.
• Purchases made on a customer’s behalf.
• Costs that should carry a margin or markup before they are rebilled.
• Costs recorded in one company that need to be invoiced from a different company (cross-company rebilling).

Billable Expenses is not project accounting and not the same as intercompany billing. It gives you a way to tag a cost as reimbursable and get it onto an invoice with minimal manual work. Projects are a related but separate record, used to group billable expenses under a customer. Job costing, budgets, and profitability reporting are not part of this feature. Billable Expenses and Intercompany Billing (also available under Options) both move costs between companies, but they produce different results. Billable Expenses issues a customer invoice from the AR company, so the cost is billed out to the customer. Intercompany Billing instead posts intercompany receivable and payable balances (Due To / Due From) between your own entities, along with the matching elimination entries, and produces no customer invoice. For how DualEntry books those balances, see cross-company billing.

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Key terms

These terms appear throughout the Billable Expenses screens and the rest of this page.

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Status values

Status is where a billable line sits in its lifecycle. DualEntry calculates it rather than letting you set it directly, with Excluded as the one exception.

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Setup

Before you use Billable Expenses day to day, configure four things: an organization-wide setting, at least one Billable Expense Item, your customer records, and, optionally, projects.

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Defaults and precedence

Both the markup and the invoice item resolve through a chain of defaults. The first value found wins.

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1. Organization settings

Navigate to Settings → Organization → Money-In → Billable expenses. A company can also have its own default Billable Expense Item, which overrides the organization default for transactions in that company. This is optional.

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2. Item setup (required for invoicing customers)

Navigate to Accounting Setup → Items. Billable Expenses uses a Service item as the Billable Expense Item, the item that appears on the customer invoice line generated from a billable cost. This does not have to be the same item used on the original bill or expense. For how items feed invoice lines, see invoicing and dunning. To configure one:

1. Create or open a Service item.
2. Turn on Use for Billable Expenses. This option is only available for Service items.
3. Optionally set a Contra Account. If left blank, the cost side of the entry reverses into the original source account. If set, it routes to the override account instead.
4. Optionally set a Default Markup. DualEntry uses this only when neither the billable line nor the customer already specifies a markup.
5. Confirm the item has an income account set, since that account receives the invoice revenue.
6. Save the item.

Items flagged for billable expenses are hidden from ordinary product and sales pickers. They only appear in the item picker used during invoice generation.

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3. Customer setup

Navigate to Money In → Customers, open or create the customer, and find the Billable Expenses section on the customer form. A customer is required on every billable line. There is no way to mark a line billable without assigning a customer.

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4. Project setup (optional)

Navigate to Accounting Setup → Projects. Projects are optional, standalone records tied to a customer. Use them to group billable expenses, and the invoice lines they produce, at a finer level than “the customer,” for example one project per engagement or job. To create one:

1. Select New Project.
2. Select the Customer (required, a project always belongs to one customer).
3. Enter a Name.
4. Set the Status.
5. Save.

A customer can have any number of projects. Assigning a project to a billable line is optional. It is used for grouping and for filtering the Billable Expenses report and invoices, not for job costing or profitability reporting. The Project record also carries memo, project manager, budget, billing method, team, and start and end dates. Billable Expenses reads only Customer, Name, and Status.

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Using billable expenses

Marking a cost billable and turning it into an invoice takes seven steps, from flagging the line on the source transaction through posting the resulting invoice and reversing it if you need to.

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Step 1: Mark a line as billable

On a Bill, Direct Expense, Purchase Order, Vendor Credit, or Journal Entry, turn on Billable for the line that should be passed through to a customer. Only that line changes. A single transaction can mix billable and non-billable lines, and the rest of the transaction is unaffected. For the source transactions themselves, see bill management and purchase orders. Turning Billable on for a line reveals the Customer, Project, and Markup % fields for that line. Two things to keep in mind:

• Billable and Enable Intercompany Posting cannot both be on for the same Bill, Direct Expense, or Vendor Credit. Turning one on automatically turns the other off and clears whichever fields no longer apply.
• The Billable flag cannot be used on lines coded to a bank or credit card account.

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Step 2: Assign a customer, and optionally a project and markup

• Customer (required): who should be billed.
• Project (optional): which project to group this expense under.
• Markup % (optional): overrides the customer’s and item’s default markup for this line only.

If Markup % is left blank, DualEntry falls back to the customer’s default markup, then the item’s default markup, in that order.

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Step 3: Save the transaction

Saving creates one billable line for each line marked billable. These appear on the Billable Expenses report with status Unbilled.

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Step 4: Review the Billable Expenses report

Navigate to Money Out → Billable Expenses. The Overview tab lists every billable line with its source transaction, source company, vendor, customer, project, amount, markup, and status. Use the Draft, Posted Invoice, and Excluded tabs to see lines at other stages. Filter by date range, source company, customer, project, source type, status, classification, or currency. Switch between grouping by Customer or by Source Company. If a line should not be billed after all, for example because the accounting period is locked and the source transaction cannot be edited, select the line and then select Exclude. That opens a modal asking for a reason before the exclusion completes. Excluded lines drop out of the Overview tab. Use Re-include to bring a line back if needed.

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Step 5: Generate invoices

Select the unbilled lines to invoice, then select Generate invoices. DualEntry groups your selection by customer, project, and currency, so one generation run can produce several invoices at once. For each resulting group, complete the following:

• Select the AR Company that issues the invoice (required).
• Select the Billable Expense Item (pre-filled from the customer, company, or organization default; required).
• Select a Consolidation Mode: By Line or Consolidated.
• Optionally edit the transaction date, posting date, payment term, due date, and memo, and include or exclude individual lines.

If a selection mixes source companies with the AR company chosen, DualEntry flags it as an intercompany rebill, forces By Line consolidation, and requires the intercompany.post permission before it generates. If a selection spans more than one currency, DualEntry splits it into a separate invoice per currency. Each group shows a Complete badge once its AR Company and Item are both set. Select Create Drafts once every group is complete.

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Step 6: Review and post the draft invoices

After creation, DualEntry opens the invoice list, pre-filtered to the drafts just created (Status: Draft, Created From: Billable Expenses). From there, edit, post, or export them like any other invoice. Billable lines tied to a draft show status Invoice Drafted and are locked from being selected again until the draft is discarded or posted. Once posted, the linked billable lines move to Billed, then to Partially Paid and Paid as payments come in against the invoice.

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Step 7: Undo if needed

DualEntry does not support voiding invoices, so use Archive instead. Archiving an invoice that came from Billable Expenses reverts its linked billable lines back to Unbilled, so they can be re-invoiced, and reverses any intercompany and elimination entries created for it.

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Bulk actions

From the Billable Expenses report, act on multiple lines at once: mark as excluded, re-include, change markup %, and generate invoices. From the invoice generation screen, bulk-edit AR Company, Billable Expense Item, and Consolidation Mode across multiple groups at once instead of setting them one by one.

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Known limitations

Billable Expenses has the following constraints today. Each one is a current boundary of the feature, not a configuration problem to work around.

• DualEntry does not convert costs into the customer’s preferred currency. A selection spanning multiple currencies produces one invoice per currency.
• The Billable, Customer, Project, and Markup % fields can be set only through the transaction forms. There is no public API or bulk-import path for creating billable lines.
• There is no line-level trace between a billable expense and its resulting invoice line. You can see that a bill produced an invoice, but not click through line by line.
• DualEntry does not match an expense straight to an existing billable line. You create or select the billable expense item manually.
• There is no approval workflow for billable expenses; approvals are handled elsewhere in the product.
• Project records support grouping and filtering only. Budgets, task-level tracking, and profitability reporting are not available.

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Frequently asked questions

These answers cover the questions that come up most often about which transactions qualify, how defaults resolve, and what changes on the source transaction. Which transactions support Billable Expenses? Bills, Direct Expenses, Purchase Orders, Vendor Credits, and Journal Entries. Does marking a line billable change the original transaction? Yes. Marking a line billable is an edit and save on the source transaction itself (Steps 1-3). Beyond that one edit, nothing in the invoice generation process further edits or reverses the source transaction. What decides the markup percentage? In order: the markup entered on the billable line itself, then the customer’s Default Markup, then the Billable Expense Item’s Default Markup. What decides which item appears on the invoice? In order: the customer’s default Billable Expense Item, then the company’s default, then the organization’s default, which is required. Can I bill a customer for costs recorded in a different company? Yes. The invoice can be issued from an AR company different from the source transaction’s company. This requires the intercompany.post permission and forces By Line consolidation. Can part of a transaction be billable while the rest is not? Yes. The Billable flag is set line by line, so a single transaction can mix billable and non-billable lines.

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Related pages

• Bill management - the most common source transaction for billable costs.
• Purchase orders - another source transaction that supports the Billable flag.
• Invoicing and dunning - what happens to the invoices this feature generates.
• Multi-entity consolidation - how DualEntry books the Due To / Due From and elimination entries behind cross-company rebills.