Did you know you can create a Custom expense item to combine expense items on an invoice?

The accounting structure for handling expense items in many companies is quite detailed, and may even go down to the individual meal per day (breakfast, lunch, dinner) depending on their internal travel policies.   Tracking internal expenses to this level does not necessarily mean you need to display all of this detail on your customer invoices from OpenAir.   OpenAir supports the idea of grouping expenses together for a more general category name on the invoice.
This feature is a standard option available on the Invoice Layout of OpenAir.  If you navigate to the Administration -> Application Settings -> Invoice Layouts area of the system and select a layout, scroll down the form to see

When you click on Create, a form will pop-up to allow the designation of an expense item group.

Define the group name and the expense items that belong to that group.  The Group Name is what will appear on the invoice instead of the individual expense items.  The only limitation to this feature is that you MUST have more than one expense item in the group (i.e. you can’t use this as a rename of a single expense item).

Typical groupings that we’ve seen are:

• Transportation (example above) combining all transit related expense items
• Meals combining personal, business, lunch/dinner/breakfast breakdowns
• Lodging combining values such as hotel, stay with friend, etc.

Since this setup is unique to a single invoice layout, you can setup invoice layouts that would be unique to customer reporting needs, or just clean up your information display!

Did you know you can customize invoice terminology per invoice layout?

  As with many systems, the convenience of templates for documents like Invoices comes with the tradeoff of accepting the field names and column titles setup in the template.  OpenAir takes it one step further, however, by allowing you to override the field names with whatever you would like, including converting to another language (other than standard English).

The renaming feature is only available by contacting OpenAir Support and requesting enablement of the internal switch:  Customize invoice terminology per layout.

Invoice Layout form (Administration –> Application Settings –> Invoice Settings –> Invoice Layouts) before the switch:

Invoice Layout form (Administration –> Application Settings –> Invoice Settings –> Invoice Layouts) after the switch:

What you will immediately notice is that almost every field on the invoice is listed in the terminology options with a copy of the same value in the override text field.   For any value you would like to change, type over the text field and Save the form.

The terminology override supports foreign language characters as well so you can use this feature to convert your English invoices to other common languages such as Spanish, German, French, Dutch, etc.   The override is UNIQUE to the invoice layout.  If you need invoices to reflect a variety of languages, you would setup a new layout for each language and ideally adopt a naming convention so it is clear which terminology is leveraged on the invoice layout.  Example:  Dutch T&M Layout, Spanish Fixed Fee layout, etc.

So don’t feel like you are locked into standard wording – take control today!