An invoice stuck in draft with a line showing no rate means one thing: for those hours, on those days, no rate could be found.
Why the invoice is held
Because the alternative is worse. Pricing unresolvable hours at zero would produce a confident-looking total that quietly bills a client too little, or pays a member nothing for work they did. Holding the invoice makes somebody look.
Find the real cause first
- No rate has ever been set. The project has no bill rate, or the member has no pay rate and the project has no pay per hour.
- The rate starts too late. A rate effective from the 15th does not price work done on the 3rd. This is the commonest cause by far.
- The wrong rate was set. A member's pay rate was entered where the project's pay per hour was meant, or the other way round.
Open the rate history and compare its effective dates against the invoice period. The mismatch is usually obvious once you look at both.
The proper fix
Add the rate with an effective date on or before the earliest unpriced day. The invoice re-prices itself and moves out of draft, and every other invoice with the same gap is fixed at the same time.
The quick fix, for one invoice
Where a rate is still being negotiated and you need to send this invoice now, open Edit and type a rate override.
An override is kept narrow:
- It fills only lines that could not resolve a rate. A real rate always wins, and the override goes inert once one exists.
- It affects this invoice and nothing else. No rate history is written, no effective date moves, no other invoice or payslip changes.
- It is fully reversible. Clear it and the invoice returns to exactly what it was.
Lines priced this way are marked as a manual rate on the document, with a footnote, so nobody later mistakes it for an agreed rate.
Which to use
If the rate is known, set it properly, because that fixes the cause. Use the override only where the rate does not exist yet and the invoice cannot wait. Then set the real rate when it is agreed, and the override steps aside on its own.