How to Bill Maintenance Costs to a Customer?
Sometimes a repair isn’t on you — a customer damaged the gear, or your contract passes servicing costs through. Instead of retyping every part and labor charge into a fresh invoice, Rentablez lets you generate a customer invoice straight from the costs already logged on a service job. Pick a customer, review the amount, and Rentablez builds a standalone invoice from your recorded expenses.
Before You Start
A few things need to be in place before the billing option appears:
- The job must be started. The Costs tab only shows once a service job has moved past Scheduled into In Progress (or beyond). If the job is still Scheduled, start it first — see How to Complete Maintenance? for the Start → In Progress → Complete flow.
- There must be costs to bill. The billing section appears only after at least one expense (Parts, Labor, External Service, Transport, or Other) has been logged. See How to Log and Track Service Costs?.
- You need write access. Generating an invoice requires the
maintenance.writepermission. If your organization uses branches, you’ll also be asked to select a branch first.
Tip: Log all of a job’s costs before you generate the invoice. You can always sync new costs later, but it’s cleaner to bill once everything is captured.
Open the Costs Tab
- Go to Service & Repair from the main menu (the
/maintenancepage). - Find the job in the List view and click its row (or its action button) to open the job detail drawer.
- Select the Costs tab.
The tab has two parts: Service Costs at the top (the expenses you’ve recorded, with a running total) and a Bill to Customer card below it once costs exist.
Generate the Invoice
In the Bill to Customer card:
- Use the Customer search box to find and select the customer you want to charge. Start typing a name to search.
- Click Generate Invoice — the button shows the total that will be billed.
Rentablez creates a standalone invoice from every cost currently logged on the job and links it to the service record. You’ll see a success message, and the card updates to show the new invoice.
The first time you generate, all logged costs are billed together. To bill only some of them, or to set a billing address or 3PL client, use Change after the invoice is created (see below).
After the Invoice Is Created
Once an invoice is linked, the card becomes a Customer Invoice summary showing:
| Element | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Status badge | The invoice’s current state — Draft, Sent, Paid, Overdue, or Cancelled |
| Customer name | Who the invoice is billed to |
| Invoice number | The generated standalone invoice’s reference |
| Total amount | The billed total, in your organization’s currency |
| Version chip | Appears as v2, v3, etc. once the invoice has been re-synced |
You also get three actions:
- View — open the invoice in the standalone invoice preview.
- Edit — open the invoice in the standalone invoice editor to adjust line items, tax, notes, and more.
- Sync Changes — re-bill the job after you’ve added or removed costs, updating the invoice’s amount and bumping its version.
Both View and Edit take you into the standalone invoice, where you can finalize, send, and manage the document like any other. See Standalone Invoices.
Adjusting the Bill (Change)
Click Change on the Customer Invoice card to open the Generate Invoice dialog, which gives you finer control:
- Customer — re-select or switch the customer being billed.
- Billing Address — choose a saved address (shown only when the customer has addresses on file; the default billing address is picked automatically).
- Client ID — select a linked 3PL end client to bill on the customer’s behalf (shown only when the customer has end clients linked).
- Select Expenses — tick exactly which logged expenses to include. All are selected by default; the Selected Total updates as you check and uncheck items.
Click Generate Invoice in the dialog to apply your choices.
Keeping the Invoice in Sync
If you add or remove service costs after generating the invoice, the linked invoice won’t change on its own. Use Sync Changes on the Customer Invoice card to push the updated total to the invoice — its version number increments so you can tell it was refreshed.
Costs on a job are only editable while it is In Progress. Once a job is completed, its expenses lock, so make sure everything is captured and billed the way you want before completing it.