Why this matters

When you bill time from a work journal, every hour has to land on a product line so it can be priced, taxed, and invoiced. NexerIQ does this for you by matching each journal line to a billing product — the service that represents the work being charged. You don't pick the product by hand on every entry; instead, NexerIQ walks through a clear order of places where a product can be set and uses the first one it finds. Don't worry if that sounds technical — once you've set things up, it just works in the background.

The matching order

For each journal line it will put on an invoice, NexerIQ looks for a billing product in this order and stops at the first match:

1. Work project — a product set directly on the project always wins.
2. Project group — if the project belongs to a group that has a product, that's used next.
3. Employee — the product set on the person who logged the time.
4. Employee group — a product set on a group the employee belongs to.
5. Company defaults — the fallback product for your whole company.

Think of it as most specific wins: a product chosen for one project beats a group setting, which beats a per-person setting, which beats your company-wide default. If none of these has a product, the line can't be billed and NexerIQ tells you so — which is exactly why a company default is worth setting (see the tip at the end).

Day-time and overtime are matched separately

At every level above you can set two products: one for ordinary day-time hours and one for overtime. NexerIQ looks at the work type on the journal line and follows the matching order for that type on its own. So you can, for example, bill overtime against a higher-rate service while day-time hours fall back to your company default — they're resolved independently.

Where to set each product

• On a work project — open the project, go to the Billing tab, and set Billing product and Overtime billing product.
• On a project group — go to Settings → Work projects, open the Project Groups tab, and set each group's Day-time service product and Overtime service product.
• On an employee — open the employee record and, on the Overview tab, set Day-time service product and Overtime service product.
• On an employee group — go to Settings → People, open the Employee Groups tab, and set each group's Day-time service product and Overtime service product.
• Company defaults — go to Settings → Work projects, and on the General tab set Default billing product and Default overtime billing product.

How groups are matched

A project — and an employee — can carry more than one group tag. When NexerIQ reaches the group step, it checks the tags in the order they're listed and uses the first group that actually has a product set, skipping any that don't. Only tags that match a group you've set up under settings count toward matching; a free-text tag that isn't a real group is simply ignored for this purpose.

A quick example

Say an employee logs 8 day-time hours and 2 overtime hours to a project:

• The project has a Billing product but no overtime product. The 8 day-time hours bill against the project's product.
• For the 2 overtime hours, NexerIQ keeps looking: no project overtime product, so it checks the project's group, then the employee, then the employee's group, then the Default overtime billing product on your company settings — and bills against the first one it finds.

Non-billable time on the invoice

By default, time marked non-billable still appears on the invoice as a complimentary line: NexerIQ matches a billing product the same way described above, shows the quantity (the line's rounded billable hours), and applies a 100% discount so the line totals zero. This way the customer can see the work you did for them at no charge. You can turn this off under Settings → Work projects on the General tab with Show complimentary work on invoices — when it's off, non-billable lines are simply left off the invoice.

Good to know

• The products you choose are service products, and the matched product must be active — an archived or inactive product will stop the line from billing.
• The work project also needs a bill-to customer before its time can be invoiced.
• Existing, already-invoiced lines are never changed when you update these settings — matching only applies as new time is billed.

Tip: set a company default billing product (and an overtime one) as your safety net. That way every billable hour always has something to bill against, and you can override it for specific projects, groups, or people only where it matters. For the wider billing workflow, see Billing time from work journals.