Searching posted billing items and un-posting transactions

SECURITY  Security level with Admin permission to configure Contracts & Un-Posting. Refer to Admin security settings.

NAVIGATION   > Admin > Features & Settings > Contracts & Un-Posting > Un-Post

NAVIGATION   > Contracts > Search > Posted Billing Items

BEFORE YOU BEGIN  If you are going to un-post transactions that have already been invoiced, you must void the invoice before proceeding. Refer to Voiding an invoice.

IMPORTANT  Un-posting is an administrative function that does not respect Line of Business security, whereas the Posted Billing Item widgets on the dashboard do respect it!

SECURITY  Permission to view contracts and Can view Posted Billing Items Search enabled. Refer to Can view Posted Billing Items Search.

On this page, all users with Can view Posted Billing Items Search permissions can search posted billing items, and users with Contract admin permissions can also un-post them.

Un-posting reverses the Approve & Post step and returns the un-posted billing items to Approve & Post, where, with the exception of canceled charges, they can be modified and re-posted.  If a posted contract, project, or ticket charge is canceled and then un-posted, it does not appear in Approve & Post.

  • Users with access to Contracts can un-post items from the Invoicing / Items to Invoice page. All items that appear on the Invoice Preview will be unposted.
  • Administrators can un-post individual transactions from the Admin module.

Unposting cannot be undone.  Manual changes and adjustments made to billing items before they were posted the first time will have to be manually entered again.

  • To display a list of all records of a given entity in your Autotask instance, click Search without applying any filters.

Search results containing more than 25, 50, or 100 records (depending on your Records per page setting) are paginated. Use page navigation to view additional results. At most, 5,000 data record will be retrieved at any one time.

The Active filter defaults to Active on the Organization Search, Contact Search, My Organizations, and My Contacts pages, as well as on the global Search by Organization, Contact (First Name), Contact (Last Name), and Contact (Email). The counters in the My menu also reflect only active entities.

NOTE  There are several options for phone number filters. The Phone filter will look for a contains match that includes any characters (such as - or () ) entered in the filter box. The Organization Search and Contact Search pages have a Phone (numbers only) option that will ignore special characters in the filter and the results. It will do a contains search for just the numbers entered in the filter box. The Contact Search page also allows you to do a Phone (Starts With) search. It will search for phone numbers that start with the value entered in the filter box.

Tool Button Description

(Contract administrators only)

On the > Admin > Features & Settings > Contracts & Un-Posting > Un-post page, click this button to un-post up to 500 selected transactions.

The Column Chooser allows you to customize search results tables throughout Autotask. It determines the following:

  • Which columns are displayed on the table
  • The left-to-right display order of the columns

NOTE   Column Chooser settings on search results tables and some standard reports are part of the user settings stored on the Autotask server. You can log in from any computer and have your column chooser settings applied to your Autotask session. To clear the data stored in your Autotask instance and reset the column chooser settings to the Autotask default settings, click Reset Settings in My >  Miscellaneous > Settings.

To customize the table, do the following:

  1. Click the column chooser icon above the search results. The Column Chooser page opens.

Columns appear either in the Available Columns or the Selected Columns panel.

  1. Double-click a column name or select one or multiple columns and click the left or right arrow to move columns to the other panel.
  2. To change the display order of the columns, select one or multiple columns in the Selected Columns panel and click the up or down arrows.

NOTE  Top-to-bottom order in the Selected Columns list becomes left-to-right order on the Search Results list.

  1. Click Save & Close.

NOTE  If the characters + # appear after the column name, then that column may have multiple items returned for some rows. If that occurs, the first item will appear in the row followed by + and the number of additional items returned. To display the list of additional items, hover over the item in the column.

SECURITY  By default, Export is available to users with Admin security level and disabled for all others. It can be enabled for other security levels. Refer to Can export Grid Data.

NOTE  When exporting to CSV: To ensure consistent date/time formatting in the CSV output, we strongly recommend that the user’s date/time format settings in Autotask be identical to the Windows date/time format settings of the computer performing the export. This will prevent conflicts in how the software that generates the report interprets the date/time format.

  1. Click the Export as CSV icon.
  2. A window opens that allows you to download and open the exported file.

NOTE  Note that only the selected columns of the first 5,000 records will be exported.

IMPORTANT  The export file does not contain all fields that are required to re-import the data using the data import templates, and the data headers do not match.

Click the refresh icon to execute the search on the current table again, using the same search criteria to find new records that were added since you first performed the search.

NOTE  To print the list, use the Export button and then print from the exported file.

  1. To open the page, use the path(s) in the Security and navigation section above.
  2. Click a tab to select a billing item type.
  1. Apply filters and search for the items you want to un-post. Matching transactions will appear on the search results table.

NOTE  The Department filter on this page returns posted billing items whose resource's default department is selected item, and posted billing items whose task's department is the selected item.

NOTE  Unless you set the "Has Been Invoiced" filter to No, search results may contain transactions that have already been invoiced. Invoiced transactions cannot be unposted, and the selection check boxes for them are disabled.
If you need to un-post invoiced items, you must first void the invoice. Refer to Voiding an invoice.

NOTE  By default the table displays 25 items per page but, if your search returns a large number of transactions, you can use the Records per Page option to display 50 or 100 items per page.

  1. Select the check boxes on the left for all transactions you would like to un-post. You can un-post up to 500 transactions at a time.
  2. Click Un-post. 

NOTE  If you un-post labor entries with a setting of "On timesheet approval", they will appear on the Approve & Post page so they can be modified and re-posted, even though they were not approved and posted there initially. You do not have to change the contract's billing setting to "Manually" to make them visible. You will not be able to un-post these items from a billing widget drill-in table!

IMPORTANT  If a labor entry has been deducted from multiple block or retainer purchases (using Move deduction), Autotask will force you to un-post all or none of the deductions relating to the labor entry. If a deduction has already been invoiced, that invoice must be voided first before you can proceed.

The page will refresh and any un-posted items will have been returned to the Contracts > Approve & Post page.  You will be able to make changes and re-post them in the usual manner.

NOTE   If the invoice was exported, you must manually change the items in your accounting software.

You can also un-post invoices during the batch invoice process. This un-posts all billable transactions on an individual invoice. Refer to Un-posting invoices.