Editing sent invoices and approved estimates

You can enable or disable edits to sent invoices and approved estimates at Settings -> Preferences.
If you check ‘Allow editing sent invoices’ – you will be able to review invoices that have been sent to clients and will be able to update them.
If you check ‘Allow editing approved estimates’ – you will be able to review approved estimates and be able to update them.

Invoice/estimate title & number

When you create a new estimate or invoice – you’ll see an ‘Estimate Title’ or ‘Invoice Title’ field.

This can be just a note for the Invoice/Estimate. It will be displayed on the Invoice/Estimate grid.

It can also be displayed as a title on the Invoice/Estimate.

If you would like to use titles on invoice and estimate documents – mark check-box ‘Show invoice/estimate title in preview‘ at Settings ➝ Preferences.
You can also enable or disable the function to edit the invoice/estimate numbers. Check ‘Allow editing invoice/estimate number‘ (Settings ➝ Preferences). This gives you the opportunity to edit and change the invoice and estimate number as your preferred one.

Delivery Note & Packing Slip tasks and items

You can print delivery notes and packing slips for all your invoices.
These can only include items from the invoice or items and tasks.
If you check ‘Tasks and Items on the Delivery Note’ and ‘Tasks and Items on the Packing Slip’ – items and tasks will be included.
If you uncheck this box – only items will be displayed.
These parameters can be found at Settings ➝ Preferences

Check the boxes below if you’d like to get a Copy of the emails sent, don’t forget to Save Changes:

The checkbox ‘Allow editing for Invoices generated through the Invoice Wizard‘ will allow you to edit the Invoice generated through the project (more about Project Invoice Wizard here).

Enable the format editor on item/task descriptions checkbox will allow you to edit your items/tasks descriptions. More about it here

Draft/ProForma Invoices have a separate number – when this checkbox is checked then your drafts will have separate numbering and your sent invoices will be enumerated separately.
Please Note: This option will not apply to reccuring invoices. 

Change Unit Hour option will allow you to change the Invoice Unit by default:

And now when creating an Invoice instead of ‘Hour’ you’ll see the ‘Piece’ as a default Item (or any other you choose):

About ‘Hide zistemo watermark‘ and ‘Show the download link for the mobile app‘ please read here.

Use different templates for estimates

If you enable this option, you can use different default templates for estimates and invoices (retainers, etc.). This is an option, if you want to use an estimate or invoice, which is not based on the settings of the invoice/estimate template which you created. So you can create different estimates and invoice templates separated from the style and settings.

Go to your Templates (Settings -> Templates) and choose the default invoice/estimate template: You can use the template as default “estimate” or “invoice” template.

NOTE: Each client can have his own template. More HERE. So if you set the “estimate default” template to your client, it will has it’s settings for the client only based on the estimate if you did not edit the template. So you better create a separated template for your client/s

You can create welcome messages for your clients and staff members accounts at, Settings ➝ Preferences

When your clients or staff login to their accounts – they will see your welcome message.

Just go to Settings ➝ Preferences and scroll down for a Client Address Block.

On the address block you can manage via placeholders which information will be shown on the invoice/estimate. The format you choose will be stored on your zistemo account and available for your estimates and invoices. You can edit it anytime, but consider that further changes will not have any effect on existing invoices/estimates.

Besides, you also have the option to customize the address block for the specific clients by inserting only the fields you find relevant under the following categories:

– Customer/company (client city, client reg. number, client tax number, client zip code, etc.);
– Contact (client salutation, client first name, client position, client department, etc.);
– Custom fields: add up to ten custom fields to fully capture your client’s specificity.

If you want to return to the zistemo default view of the Client Address Block, you can click on the “Reset to default” link:

These are the placeholders that are available for the client address block

And these are the placeholders that are available for vendors address block

Of course you can write anything into the address block what you want. Everything you will be enter there will be on all invoices. So we would recommend you to work with the dynamic placeholders.

Also, you can edit the address block for each invoice you will send. Remember, this is only the default which can be changed and edited anytime.

This customized address format will be used on invoices and estimates by default. However, you are also able to change it immediately on the ‘create invoice/estimate’ page, enter the client’s address manually or use placeholders:

Also, you can easily go back to the customized address (from “Settings” -> “Preferences”) or to the zistemo Default Address. To do so you can use two buttons: “Reload client address block” or “Reset to the default block”.

The “Reload client address block” option returns the address format to the one which is customized in “Preferences” -> “Client Address Block”:

The “Reset to the default block” button returns address to the zistemo Default Client Address block:

Please, keep in mind: if you are on the “Create Invoice/Estimate” page and you delete everything from the Address Block, the client address will be displayed on the invoice/estimate preview anyway. In this case, it will be the zistemo Default Address Format.

Remove the “powered by zistemo” watermark

Subscribers on a paid plan are able to remove the “powered by zistemo” watermark from:
* estimates and invoices;
* the zistemo branded footer in our automated emails.
In order to hide the “powered by zistemo” watermark on invoices or estimates, go to Settings ➝ Preferences and mark the checkbox ‘Hide “Powered by zistemo watermark” ’. Then press ‘Save Changes’.

If this box is unchecked – then you will have the watermark featured on your invoices/estimates

Once you check it, then it will be hidden!

Hide the zistemo email footer

If you want to remove the zistemo footer from outgoing emails sent from our platform, (estimates, invoices, payment reminders), go to ‘Settings’ ➝ ‘Emails’ and mark the checkbox ‘Disable zistemo branded email footer’. Press ‘Save Changes’.

Hide zistemo Footer

If you don’t want to see the page footer:

you can switch it off in Settings -> Preferences -> uncheck ‘Show the download link for the mobile app’ and press Save changes:

Click ‘Save changes’ and then you will see:

Remember: these ‘Hide’ feature options are available only if you’re on a paid zistemo plan.

Default Font

With zistemo, you can choose a default font for all your documents in Settings/Preferences/Defaults.

By default the default font is Open Sans. Please not that Open Sans don’t support all languages, for e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew characters you might choose another font. Same is for currency symbols.

It might be that documents using not Open Sans font are quite big. This is because we embed the font into the file since it is not supported on all operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, Ubuntu) but you client should be able to read the invoice/estimate you sent.

Template Fonts

Also, you can support several different fonts in one account – just change the font of your custom template. Do it in “Settings” -> “Stationery templates” -> open template (click the “Edit” button) and change the font in the right menu.

This font will be applied to all Invoices or Estimates where you use this template.

zistemo Default Fonts

On zistemo we have the most common used fonts already in the system. If you have an enterprise subscription you can also import own fonts and use them on documents. More here

Below you can find the zistemo default fonts and which languages/characters they support. Might be that your language is not listed here. If you are unsure if your language is supported by a font, please contact our customer support.

Open Sans

Belarusian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Macedonian, Maltese, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

Ubuntu

Belarusian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Latvia, Macedonian, Maltese, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Serbia, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian. Also supports Indian Rupees Symbol.

Helvetica

Arabic, Belarusian, Catalan, Cyrillic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greenlandic, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Somali, Tahitian, Turkish, Thai,

Dejavu Sans

Afrikaans, Armenian, Azerbaijani (Cyrillic), Belarusian, Breton, Catalan, Croatian, Cyrillic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French,  German, Greek, Greenlandic, Georgian, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Latvia, Macadonia, Malay (Latinized), Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swazi, Swedish, Tahitian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

We recommend this font for Hebrew language.

AR PL New Sung

Chinese (Fantizi/Traditional Han Ideographs or Jiantizi/Simplified), Cyrillic (Russian), Greek, Japanese (Hiragana and Katakana only), Latin

We recommend this font for Chinese language.

IPAP Gothic

Latin, Japanese (Hiragana and Katakana)

We recommend this font for Japanese language.

Beakmuk Gulim

Korean (Hangul), Japanese (Hiragana)

We recommend this font for Korean language.

DIN 2014

Afrikaans, Belarusian, Catalan, Croatia, Czech, Danish, German, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Spanish, French, Finnish,  Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Macedonian, Maltese, Durch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian

Slack is a cloud-based team collaboration tool. It brings all your communication together in one place by including real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams. More infos about slack

Integrate your zistemo account with Slack

If you have a Slack account, you can integrate your zistemo account with it, so you can easily receive live updates about your business, such as:

– staff member start/pause/stop work
– client has opened your invoice/estimate email, has reviewed or invoice/estimate in his zistemo account or has added a note (reply) to invoice/estimate you’ve sent
– new client was created
– invoices/estimate are send;
– clients accept estimates
– payments drop in and whether the payment is full, partial or with a cash discount;
– item is at reorder level;
– whenever if you want to receive a reminder for the validity of your estimates.

To integrate zistemo with Slack, just go to “Settings” -> “Reminders & Notification” -> “Slack Integration” block ->  turn on “Slack Integration” and press “add channel”:

Next, choose which kind of notifications from zistemo you would like to see in your Slack room and click “Connect to Slack”.

Enter your workspaces URL and “continue”

After the successful integration, you can change and update the “Slack notifications” settings at any time by clicking the pencil icon to edit.

If you wish to change some integration details, just change them as you wish and press update:

Also, you can add as many channels as you want by clicking “Add channel”. You are also able to delete each channel by clicking on the trashcan icon:

Add Projects to Slack

Zistemo allows to integrate projects with Slack. To do so go to update/create a project.

In this case, you will be able to view in the Slack room when staff members assigned to a project start/pause/stop working (timer) on their tasks. On every project that’s integrated with Slack, you can see the name of the Slack channel where that project’s activities are shown:

Direct messages to Slack

You also have the option to ‘Sign in with Slack’ on your profile –  available for each staff members.

If the user chooses his direct Slack channel here – then you, as an account owner (or admin) will be able to send messages from zistemo to this user via Slack. This will be very useful if you are using the timesheet approval feature, if you want to use Project Escalation Messages or if you want to use the Flex-time Escalation Rules from the Attendance Time Module.

The user should click ‘Sign in with Slack’, choose his personal channel or group channel and click ‘Authorize’.

As Account Owner and Admin you able to see at the “staff” page, which of your staff-members are connected to slack (Grey = Slack integration is disable, Color Logo = Slack integration is enable). You can add or delete the slack connection by just clicking on the slack symbol:

How does it work?

If you are using the timesheet approvals (more here) – on the approvals page you can send a direct message to the staff member

or on the weekly timesheet of the member (where you can approve his hours):

On the popup window write your message to the user and check ‘Send to Slack’.
Click ‘Send’, and this message will appear in the Slack channel chosen by the member on his profile.

You can also get Vacation requests sent for approval into Slack. Just click the link and it will get you directly to the vacation request.

Flex time Escalation Rule

If you are using the Attendance Time Module you can set up escalation messages for the staff. Doing so, you can decide on which channel they receive these escalation messages. On of them is slack. If you want your staff members receiving flex-time escalation messages via slack, please make sure that 1) the direct messaging though slack is active for that user and 2) the option Messenger is selected on the Flex-time Escalation Rules Settings:

Learn more about Flex-time Escalation Rules →

Project Escalation Rules

If you are using Project Escalation Rules you can send the messages via slack. Just select slack as a channel and the messages will be sent via slack:

Learn more about Project Escalation Rules →

1. Create an invoice
2. Below the invoice intro, you can find the button “show more options”, push it
3. Now you can choose the display hours in time format instead of decimal format

As well you can do it in the settings. Go to preferences than invoices and estimates. There you can find the option “display hours in time format instead of decimal format on invoices/estimates”.

How to attach timesheets to the invoice

In zistemo you have to ways to attach the timesheet to the invoice

1. You can create an invoice based on the project (will include all the time your staff spent working on a specific project) (Time & Projects ➝ Projects ➝Click the box next to the needed project ➝ Click ‘Generate Invoice’ button):

2. Or you can add staff hours to the invoice during the invoice creation step. In order to do so, first, choose the client (Sales ➝ Invoices ➝ Create Invoice):

If this client has the projects with unbilled time, you will see a link to attach these hours to the invoice:

Invoice Wizard

The next step to succesfully attaching timesheets to the invoice is via the Invoice Wizard

– Client

In the first drop-down field, you can pick the client that should be invoiced:

– Slider ‘use the new invoice wizard’.

If it’s switched on (green), then you can group time entries logged to the timesheet by using the ‘long’, ‘medium’ or ‘short’ format read (more about it below).

If it’s switched off (gray), this tool doesn’t group the information and your invoice will include all time entries logged to the timesheet:

– Limitation

You can choose all the time logged to timesheet or filter the time logged by selecting a specific date range:

Also, you can pick only the time logged on some tasks:

– Projects

Here you can choose one, several or all the projects related to a client – its’ logged time will be included on the invoice:

– Invoice Format

Here you can see three options ‘Long’, ‘Medium’ and ‘Short’:

Choose the ‘Long’ format if you want to see time entries displayed on separate lines (without grouping).
Here you can also uncheck ‘Project Name’, ‘Team Member’ and ‘Notes’ if you don’t want to have this information on the invoice. How will the invoice item table look in this case? Please, see the sample shown below:

Choose the ‘Medium’ format if you want to group information. If there are time entries logged by one member to an open task and project, then this info will be displayed in one invoice line (as summary).
Also, you can uncheck ‘Task Name’, ‘Project Name’ and ‘Team Member’. When you uncheck, for example, ‘Team Member’, then all the time logged by any members to one project and task will be grouped in one line. The same happens if you uncheck ‘Project Name’ (all the time logged by one member to one task will be grouped, regardless of the project it belongs to) or ‘Task Name’ (all time logged by one member to one project will be grouped, regardless of the tasks).

Choose the ‘Short’ format if you want to have only one summary line per project – all time entries logged to one project will be grouped in one line:

Timesheet Details attached to the Invoice

If you wish you can attach the Timesheet Details Report with the detailed information about all time entries logged to your invoice  by all staff members to all projects (which are chosen on the wizard page) – just check ‘Attach a detailed timesheet report’

In this case, you will have this report as a PDF attachment to the generated invoice.
This feature is especially helpful if you don’t want to have all time entries featured in invoice item table (if you group this information and only display a summary) but your client needs the detailed timesheet report. After clicking ‘Generate’ on the Invoice Wizard, you will see this report attachment below the invoice items table:

Or below the invoice document on Invoice Preview page:

Just click this green link to open and review the timesheet report.

You can also set up that for specific clients the detailed timesheet should be added by default, so the checkbox is already checked. Learn more about add detailed timesheet by default →

Invoice and Timesheet Details as One PDF File

When sending the invoice with the timesheet details you can send the invoice and the timesheet details as one PDF File. Just select “Attach the invoice and timesheet as one PDF file”.

Change file type of attached timesheet details attached to the invoice

You can change the file-type your client receives, if you send an invoice with attached timesheet details. You can choose between ZIP or PDF. ZIP is always set as default.

Custom name on detailed Timesheet

You can either change the name of detailed timesheet manually when attaching to an invoice, or you can set up a custom name on the preferences.

Change name manually when attaching to invoice

You can change the name of the “detailed Timesheet” which will be attached to the invoices. Simply create your invoice as always and mark “attach a detail timesheet report” first:

Afterwards scroll down in the Invoice creation overview and click the pencil to edit the timesheet name:

Edit the name to your preferred name and press “save”:

NOTE: zistemo only changes the name, if you send the invoice to the client. Also the name in the document space doesn’t change.

Change name on preferences

Go to Settings/preferences/defaults at the document names. There you can customize the file name of the detailed timesheets. You can use the shown placeholder (you can copy&paste them) but also enter your text to it. Please note that “hard text” doesn’t change as placeholders and will for all timesheets the same.

Even you set up on the preferences a custom name, you can change the file name manually when attaching it to the invoice again.

In the “Default” settings you can set some iptions, which you would love to have on default how you want them.

Default Fonts

The choosen font  will be use as the default font for all templates. You are able to change it when customizing a template.

SUPPORTS ENGLISH, GERMAN, SPANISH, FRENCH, ITALIAN, DUTCH, POLISH, PORTUGUESE, SWEDISH, CATALAN, CZECH, MALTESE, RUSSIAN AND SLOVENIAN LANGUAGE CHARACTERS.

Variable Strings

Enter your text for a reverse charge notice that will be displayed on the invoice for your client.
Also, you can enter a custom text that will be shown on the balanced invoice that was cleared with a down payment (retainer). Make sure that you are using the placeholder for the retainer (::retainer number::) so, that you cleint know exactly with retainer/down payment you referring to.

Document Names

Create your own naming scheme for documents. Use the placeholder input field to generate your own document names. It will work for all system related documents.

NOTE: Zistemo uses webbased (latin) characters, therefore Zistemo ignores non-latin characters when customizing document names.

For example: If you use the placeholder “%DOX-%CONTACT-%m%YY”, it will be shown as:

If you save as pdf, print or send the document to the client, it will include your individuell document name. Your documents will show up like this system-wide.

Note: If the format field is empty then we print our default file names

Welcome Messages

Create personal welcome messages that will appear on your clients’ and staff-members’ dashboards.

Client/Vendor numbers for datev export

If you activate this function you will see on the client/vendor export for DATEV the client/vendor number from zistemo.

If you want to change the “DATEV Number”, you have to import the Client/Vendor Number via the DATEV import. More infos HERE.

Cancel invoice

Change the word that will be added when creating a cancel invoice. Choose if it should be added in the beginning of the invoice number (prefix) or at the end of the invoice number (suffix).

If you choose “Prefix”, your Invoice “text” will be shown IN FRONT of the IV-Number:

You can also choose “suffix”:

If you choose “Suffix”, your Invoice “text” will be shown AFTER the IV-Number:

Staff Email

If active, staff members can no longer change their own email address by themself. This has effect to non-admin users. All Admins and Account Owner can change their own email address and others.

Notify if user is assigned to a project

You can set up notification for user who are assigned to projects. Learn more

Note: ZIP is always set as default.