Summarizing Items By Category in an Invoice

Also See: Showing and Hiding Specific Categories on Invoices and Reports

A recent support ticket question:

Question about invoice formats: my current invoices present same-category entries as a single line item even though they may be made up of several individual entries. Poking around with Studiometry invoices and formats, I'm not finding a way to do that. In this example 4 different entries for Design Development with different dates show up as separate line items. I didn't find anything in your knowledge base about this but I bet you have a solution. Or at least I hope you do.

You can easily combine items by showing your CATEGORIES on your invoices instead of your actual items. Each item has a category associated with it and you can total by these categories. When editing a visual invoice template simply change the data columns to Category related data columns. Just make a data column for each field of the category you'd like to show (name, total, default rate, hours, hours detailed, notes, and project notes are available) and line them up in the Invoice Template. Studiometry will do the rest of the work for you. When you select a data column, the properties window will have a "Data Type" popup, where you can select the fields as shown here:

Drag these into columns or a data row like such:

To easily produce:

If you're using a codebased invoice, you'll want to use the DebtCategories tags. Throwing in something as simple as the following code will total up your categories for you:

<!--DebtCategories--><!--DebtCategoryName--> (<!--DebtCategoryTotal-->)<br><!--/DebtCategories-->

Could Produce:

Hourly ($334.49)

Expenses ($259.99)

You could also include item, data if you'd like, in the category information. If you put in the Item tags, Studiometry will loop through all of the items on the invoice for each category as it goes through the categories.

<hr><!--DebtCategories--><b><!--DebtCategoryName--></b> (<!--DebtCategoryTotal-->)<hr><!--Item--><!--ItemName--> : <!--ItemAmount--> <br><!--/Item--><hr><!--/DebtCategories-->

Could produce: