Why does my invoice have a different total than my proposal?

In very rare cases, your invoice may have a different total than your signed proposal. This happens when ALL THREE of the following are true:

• Your customer has selected multiple options
• A discount is applied to any number of options
• AND your line items have different tax rates set to them

Here is an example of a proposal where this may happen:

In this case, your original combined totals would be:

Instead, when your invoice is created, you’ll see the following new totals:

You’ll notice that the difference in these totals is coming from tax.

This is because discounts are applied to your pre-tax subtotal and the discounts from each option are now being applied to all line items in your invoice. This was done to maintain consistency and compliance with Quickbooks and other accounting systems. For more details on the exact calculations, check out the section below.

If you would like to have the exact same totals appear in your invoices, each proposal option should be converted to its own invoice.

Learn more about the exact math:

To calculate taxes, we go through the following order of operations:

1. Calculate each line item's subtotal based on the cost, adjusted quantity, and profitability. This is called the line item subtotal
2. Combine all line item subtotals to get the proposal option subtotal
3. Calculate the proposal option discount based on either a percentage or your provided dollar amount
4. Calculate the line item post discount subtotal based on the line item subtotal - (proposal option discount÷proposal option subtotal)
5. Now we can calculate the line item tax amount based off of each line item’s tax rate.
6. Calculate the proposal option tax amount

In step 4 of this calculation, we apply the total proposal option discount proportionally across each line item. When you are combining multiple options of a proposal — each line item subtotal will have a different proportion of the combined proposal options subtotals. This means that their line item post discount subtotal will change when combining your proposal options.

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