[Interviews] Invoicing in Wrike 🧾

I would be happy to participate! 

I would be happy to provide some input on this. Also, maybe provide some feedback that would apply to the process I'm trying to figure out in my org that applies to invoices and such.

I don't need this feature but I can give you some info on how we use timelogs from Wrike to our ERP.

Happy to join. 

Thanks a lot for your help with this research, folks! 🤗

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Hi Igor,

We don't do invoicing with Wrike, so I won't sign up for an interview, but I think your invoicing initiative will also run into a couple of core features we've been flagging as missing in Wrike:

• Finance-related custom field values need to be inherited from parent projects/tasks to child tasks in order to be included in timelog reporting
• Timelog reports need to be able to include finance-related custom field values in order to be useful in ERP workflows

Since those features are missing in Wrike, we've had to develop a couple of custom solutions in order to match our timelog reports with SAP products:

• A custom solution which cascades the project's SAP WBS from a project level custom field to every task in the project
• A custom timelog report solution which combines the task's logged hours, reporting user and SAP WBS

Our finance department then uses the resulting timelog report to import the reported task hours as costs to the relevant SAP products.

I would imagine that a Wrike invoicing solution would need both solutions in order to produce useful output, so here's hoping that your invoicing initiative brings the missing functionalities to Wrike's core offering, which would eventually allow us to remove our current custom solutions for including financial data in reports.

I would love to be a part of this discussion! 

Thanks a lot for this detailed feedback Tuomo Suominen, I'm sending it to Igor now 👍

Caitlin Beaty - WFH 12.5 Thank you! 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Hi Tuomo Suominen, thank you for the detailed answer! Your use case of integration with ERP is relevant and very interesting to us. If you don’t mind, we would like to arrange an interview.

Hi Igor Ziuzin, sure thing, let's arrange an interview. Can you provide a Calendly link or propose available times from your calendar?

Tuomo Suominen Looks like this is now arranged 👍 Thank you for your help! 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Hi again Igor Ziuzin, one more invoicing related thing. When it comes to automated time reporting, there's another important function missing in Wrike: automating locking of time entries. It’s essential to lock project dates to prevent time entries from being edited or added, in order for the time entries in Wrike to match those exported for invoicing, accounting or other financial purposes. Any time entries added on a date span after the export will fall in limbo between the previous and next export, which in turn obviously skews both financials and statistics. Currently, it’s only possible to lock dates manually in the Timelog view, and that's quite a chore when timelog reports are generated from multiple spaces/folders/projects.

Automating locking of time entries isn't currently supported at all in Wrike:

• Automation in Wrike doesn’t include triggers for e.g. "Date [1st of each month]" or ”Timelog report is generated for [space/folder/project]”
• Automation in Wrike doesn’t include an action for ”Lock dates for time period [e.g. last month]”
• Locking dates via the Wrike API isn’t possible (see this thread)

We have custom automations that run several timelog reports on the 1st of each month. They pick up all timelog entries from specified spaces that meet these criteria:

• They’re dated between the first and last day of the previous month
• The task's “SAP WBS” custom field is not empty
• The reporting user belongs to a specified user group

The automations then export the timelog entries as Excel sheets and store them in locations available to the finance department.

As it is, the accuracy of our reporting depends on admins remembering to do the locking manually in each space each month. If locking dates was available via the Wrike API, we could improve accuracy by including it in our automations.

I would imagine any automated Wrike invoicing solution would benefit from a mechanism that takes care of locking the dates of the reported timespan, either via Wrike Automation or the Wrike API.

Thank you Tuomo Suominen, I've sent your feedback to Igor 👍

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Thank you Tuomo Suominen! It totally make sense. I wonder what level of granularity you need. For example, if you could automate date locking for an entire account, would that be enough?

Hi Igor Ziuzin, date locking for the entire account might be doable, but in our case, we have several operating companies in our Wrike account, each company has their own their own financial workflow, and projects are managed in company-specific spaces. We would prefer automating date locking on space level, which would allow each company to set up time reporting (incl. locking) from their relevant sources.

Hi - I'd be happy to take part - we are looking for a feature that allows us to either invoice from Wrike, or at the very least to flag which timeless have been invoiced. Thanks 

We would be delighted to take part.  We are a professional service organization that relies on multiple different types of invoicing from multiple different methodologies.  I have created some work around, however, if I were able to live in the space within Wrike. I would do cartwheels.

Has there been any progress in releasing invoicing capabilities?

Hi folks, huge thanks for your interest! 

We're not currently looking for more participants, but we'll let you know when we have any updates for invoicing 👍

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover