The best way to bill only expenses on a client is to go to the client information > holds. In there you can choose to hold time charges for one bill or a period of time.

Caren

Thanks for the feedback and the fact that you do monitor this forum.

That suggestion might be true if it was a client that would normally only receive expenses. However, this is a client that is normally billed time and expenses and in this case, however, we want to interim bill expense only for extraordinary costs advanced. Often, on this and other clients we will make these kinds of decisions as we are working through numerous bills in Billing Assistant. Today, however, I just had to deal with 2 clients to get bills to work and at this point I have wasted 1.7 hours of billable time trying to invoice an expense bill using the system as it was represented and designed then looking for online solutions or patterns of similar problems.

Second, since at least TS2010, I could easily just unmark time entries in Billing Assistant and they would be omitted. In TS2017 that feature exists but its not fully or reliably operational. Thus, users who pay a lot of money for the software should expect it to work as designed. Is that asking too much particularly when the feature is one that has been in the system perhaps 15-20 years now and was working?

I have tested this numerous times on different databases in Timeslips 2017, John, and cannot replicate the issue you are describing.

I have a client with multiple slips for Fees and for Costs. I go to Fees:Time Slips and click the box at the header of the column left of the word Date and see that all of the fees are now deselected. I go back to Overview and confirm that the fees have been removed from this bill run. In the bottom right, I have Generate Bills and Current Client selected, click the printer icon immediately above the Options link and I get the bill on my display with only costs on the bill as expected.

Can you try this process and confirm you get a different behavior or describe your process?

Roger:

I don't think that is where he is "clearing the checkmarks." I think he is using the Billing Assistant LIST view, and trying to filter there.

I agree with you that if he looks only at an individual client in Billing Assistant it would work, but he seems quite attached to List view for some reason.

In order to get the bill done yesterday (after wasting more time than the bill represented), I finally determined that the only way to generate the bill was to open just the client, go into the client's Client Information->Holds and turn off fees for next bill. I then could run the bill with expenses only. When that worked, I printed the bill and finalized it.

This morning, I did as you asked but the process has not replicated so far. I would note that after the original post I installed the Dec TS2017 update. The problem continued after the update but for that client it has not recurred after finalizing the actual bill. The difference now is that the only charges on the bill are time entries - there are no unbilled expenses - so the bill generates more like a statement.

As a note, I did find this release note relative to the Dec 2016 service release which is close to what I was experiencing and did continue to experience even after the update:

"
Issue #04: In Billing Assistant, if you unmark all slips for a client, those slips will appear on the bill.

Details: You can use Billing Assistant (select Bills > Billing Assistant) to view and change billing information for each client and then print bills for them. If you exclude (unmark) all slips for a client, those slips would still appear on the bill. However, unmarking some slips for any client would properly exclude them from the bill.

(Ref: 24049)
"

When I load Billing Assistant in TS2017 - as I have done for almost a decade with TS2010 - I now get two windows a) Billing Assistant List and b) Billing Assistant Details. I select which clients I plan to bill in the Billing Assistant List - even if it is just one. I then review and edit the bill through Billing Assistant Details. I was using the Fees:Time Slips screen to deselect all the timeslips by clicking the checkbox at the top of that column.

As noted, I am only using the list view in order to select clients for a bill run that could include 100 to 200 bills.

The last entry above is relative to your other thread, and yes I have confirmed it as an issue, and it has been reported to Development as not operating as expected.

All updates should be installed, certainly to correct for issues that have already been addressed.

Thank you JohnHarris, that helps me understand better where you are clicking. Might I suggest that you just close the Billing Assistant List view altogether if you are just interested in focusing on a single Client in Billing Assistant. You can change between clients by just changing the name showing in the top middle of the Billing Assistant view.

I am also a huge fan of using Billing Assistant to focus/work/tweak one client at a time.

Nancy, thanks. I am glad to learn of any workarounds to product features that are not functioning properly. At the same time, workarounds should be temporary solutions to either programming errors or design flaws and my hope is that TS would be addressing these kinds of issues quickly in a service release b/c my suspicion is that this is just one of many in what would otherwise be a "mature" product.