External costs

Whenever you buy something for a project — a freelancer, stock photos, printing, hosting — that supplier invoice is an external cost. Recording it in docket keeps project margins honest: Controlling shows not just the hours you booked, but also the money that went out.

External costs live under Accounting → External costs and are visible to Project Managers and Admins only (deleting is Admin-only).

Recording a supplier invoice

Every external cost needs:

• a supplier — pick one or create it on the fly; the invoice number must be unique per supplier, so the same bill can't sneak in twice,
• the invoice number and invoice date,
• the amount and tax,
• the invoice file itself (PDF) — attaching the document is required, so the original is always one click away.

Optionally set a responsible person — they're notified by email when the cost is assigned to them (and whenever the responsibility changes hands).

KSK

If a supplier is subject to the German Künstlersozialkasse, flag it on the supplier. docket then shows the KSK levy for each of their invoices automatically, using the official rate for the invoice year.

Assigning costs to projects and quotes

An external cost only becomes useful once you say which project (and which quotation) it belongs to. That assignment is what makes the cost show up in the project's Controlling and count against its budget.

• A cost can be split across multiple projects/quotes.
• With partial amounts you assign only part of the invoice to each target — and mark the matching region directly on the PDF, so everyone can later see which line items went where. docket shows the unassigned remainder so nothing silently falls through.
• Per assignment you decide whether the cost is chargeable — i.e. whether you will pass it on to the customer.
• Partial bill marks an invoice that is one of several from the supplier for the same job.

A cost may stay unassigned only while it's a draft — every other status requires at least one assignment.

The status workflow

External costs move through four statuses:

1. Draft — just captured, not yet checked or assigned.
2. To clarify — something's off (wrong amount, unclear project) and needs a decision.
3. OK — checked and correctly assigned.
4. Processed — handled downstream (e.g. paid / passed on); done.

docket records when the status last changed, and the list can be filtered by status, supplier, project, quote, responsible person and date — so "show me everything still to clarify from last month" is one filter away.

Where the numbers surface

• Project → Controlling shows the project's external costs and their total — next to booked time, so you see the full cost side of the project.
• Costs marked chargeable are the ones to remember when writing the customer's invoice.

The external-costs PDF — ready to send to the customer

When you pass costs on, the customer usually wants proof. docket prepares that for you: in the project's Accounting tab, every quotation offers a downloadable external-costs PDF containing

• a summary page — one line per supplier invoice (date, invoice number, supplier, the amount assigned to this quote), KSK levies where they apply, and the total,
• followed by the supplier invoices themselves — the attached PDFs, and for costs with partial amounts only the relevant pages, with the assigned regions marked.

Only costs that are chargeable, assigned to this quotation and past the draft status make it in — so the bundle is exactly what the customer should see, in the quotation's language (German or English), ready to attach to your invoice without any manual PDF stitching.

Suppliers

Suppliers are managed under Admin → Suppliers — just a name (and the KSK flag where it applies). A supplier that has invoices can't be deleted, so your records stay consistent.