Moving Client Charges to a Different Fiscal Period

Sometimes a billable expense lands in one fiscal period but needs to appear on an invoice for a later period. Rather than editing vendor invoice fiscal periods to force charges into the right bucket, Discovery now lets you include previous-period unbilled expenses directly when creating a single client invoice.

Watch the video below and continue reading to learn more.

When to Use This

Use this when:

• A billable expense was extracted in an earlier fiscal period but you want it to appear on a current or future period invoice
• A client prefers to see prior-period expenses consolidated onto a single monthly invoice rather than billed separately

How It Works

When creating a single client invoice (not batch), the invoice line item selection screen now includes unbilled, marked-up billable expenses from previous fiscal periods alongside the current period's charges. You choose which of those previous-period items to include on the invoice being created.

Once included, the charge is billed in the period you selected — it will not appear again in a future period's invoice run.

Before You Begin

Enable the Setting

This feature is controlled by your settings. It is not on by default.

1. Navigate to Settings.
2. Scroll to the Client Invoice Settings section at the bottom.
3. Enable the Allow Previous Period Charges toggle.  

4. Save.

Once enabled, prior-period unbilled expenses will appear in the line item selection screen the next time you create a single invoice for this client.

Ensure Billable Expenses Are Marked Up

Only expenses that have been marked up (status: Ready to Bill) will appear. Expenses that are still in an unreviewed or unpriced state will not show up on the invoice creation screen.

Step-by-Step: Including a Previous-Period Expense on a Client Invoice

1. Navigate to Revenue and select the current fiscal period (the period whose invoice you are creating).
2. Click Create Invoice for the client account.
3. Choose the Fiscal Period and Client Account in the invoice creation dialog.

4. On the line item selection screen, you will see:

• Current period charges in the main list

• Previous-period unbilled expenses listed below, each showing its Fiscal Period (far-left column) and its Line Item Date

5. Select the previous-period expenses you want to include alongside the current period charges.

6. Click Create Invoice and proceed through the normal invoice creation steps.

The resulting invoice will contain both current-period and prior-period line items. The Fiscal Period column on the invoice identifies which period each charge originated from.

Accounting Adjustments (Tenants with Accounting Integration)

If your tenant has an active accounting system integration, moving a charge between fiscal periods can misalign revenue recognition — the expense was recorded in one period but billed in another. Discovery can create adjusting journal entries to keep the books balanced.

> This setting is only available when your tenant has an accounting integration configured and the Sync Client Invoices setting is turned off. If Sync Client Invoices is on, this option will not appear.

Configure the Adjusting Journal Entry Setting

1. Navigate to Accounting Integration Settings.
2. Locate the Create adjusting journal entries toggle.
3. Enable the toggle.

4. Select the required GL accounts:
   1. Accrued Revenue — used when a charge is moved forward (billed in a later period than it originated)
   2. Deferred Revenue - used when a charge is moved backward (billed in an earlier period than it orginated)
5. Save.

What the Adjusting Entries Look Like

When an invoice or credit memo containing a moved charge is sent, Discovery creates an adjusting journal entry in the origin period of that charge:

On the invoice journal entry itself, moved charge lines use the Accrued Revenue or Deferred Revenue GL code instead of the normal revenue GL code.

If the toggle is off, no adjusting entries are created and all invoice/credit memo journal entries use the standard revenue GL code — the same behavior as before this feature was available.

Relationship to the Old Approach

Previously, the only way to move extraneous charges to a different fiscal period was to manually edit the vendor invoice's fiscal period before approving it. That approach required:

• Editing the vendor invoice fiscal period before approval (not possible after)
• Rolling back and re-approving if you missed the window
• Moving all charges on that vendor invoice, not just the ones you wanted

The new single-invoice workflow allows you to pick individual billable expenses across periods without touching the vendor invoices at all.

If you have additional questions or need more in depth information, please feel free to send us a message using the help beacon in the lower right-hand corner.