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From a logged hour to a draft invoice

Every hour your engineers log against a ticket is already the raw material of an invoice. Helios prices it, rolls it up per client, and pushes it into QuickBooks Online or Xero as a draft you approve. Here is the whole path.

The hour is logged where the work happened

Time goes on the ticket, in the two seconds after an engineer finishes a reply. Quick buttons cover the common cases, because a form with a date picker is a form nobody fills in. Each entry carries a note and a billable flag, and the non-billable ones stay visible rather than quietly disappearing.

Time on this ticket2h 45m logged, 2h 15m billable
45mRemote triage: server unreachable after the overnight patchBillable
1h 30mOn site: replaced the failed switch and confirmed all links upBillable
30mWrote up the root cause for the client's recordsNot billed
+15m+30m+1hOther

Two billable entries and one written up as non-billable, from a real ticket.

It rolls up per client, priced at that client's rate

The Billing page is the month's money view. Every client's billable time, their hourly rate, and what that comes to. Set a rate inline. Clients with no rate are flagged rather than silently billed at zero, and the total only appears when every row shares a currency, because a mixed-currency total is a number that lies.

The CSV export is the artefact of record. Line rounding matches, so the invoice total always equals the figure your client was shown.

ClientBillableRateAmount
Brightwater Logistics5.92h£95£562.08CSVQuickBooksXero
Halewood & Grey Solicitors11.42h£110£1,255.83CSVMap to QBMap to Xero
Kestrel Marketing16.50h£85£1,402.50CSVInvoiced in QBXero
Pennine Accountancy19.17h£95£1,820.83CSVInvoiced in QBInvoiced in Xero
Riverside Dental18.17h£85£1,544.17CSVQuickBooksMap to Xero
August, five clients71.17h£6,585.41

One month on the Billing page. The right-hand actions are the accounting sync, and a row that has gone across says so.

One click raises a draft invoice

Press QuickBooks or Xero on a row and Helios creates a draft invoice for that client and that month: one line per time entry, billed against the service item or revenue account you chose, carrying your tax code or tax rate.

The row then reads Invoiced, so you can see at a glance what has gone across and what has not. Ask for the same client and month twice and Helios stops and asks, rather than quietly raising a second invoice.

Draft invoiceKestrel Marketing, August 2026
Unsent
04 Aug, ticket 1184: printer queue stuck on reception PC0.75h£63.75
11 Aug, ticket 1197: VPN drops for remote staff2.50h£212.50
19 Aug, ticket 1212: new starter laptop build3.25h£276.25
Nine more lines, one per time entry10.00h£850.00
IT Support, VAT 20%16.50h£1,402.50

What lands in your package: a draft, itemised from the time entries, waiting for you.

You approve and send it, in your own package

Helios leaves the invoice as an unsent draft. You open it in QuickBooks or Xero, check it, and send it yourself. A platform should not be finalising an invoice to a real client on your behalf, so this one does not.

What Helios does, and does not do

The full extent of the permission you are granting.

ActionIn your accounting package
Read your customers or contactsYes, to map them to your Helios clients
Read service items, revenue accounts and tax codesYes, so invoice lines are coded correctly
Create a draft invoiceYes, and this is the only thing it writes
Send an invoice to your clientNever. You send it
Edit or delete anything you already hadNever
Read your bank feeds, bills or payrollNever. It does not ask for those permissions
Use your accounting data to train AINever. No AI feature touches it

Setting it up takes about a minute

Connect under Settings, then Accounting. It is the standard Intuit or Xero sign-in, so your credentials never touch Helios. Pick the service item or revenue account your support time bills against, pick your tax treatment, then map each client to a customer or contact once from the Billing page.

Connection tokens are encrypted at rest with the same scheme as the credential vault, and disconnecting keeps your client mappings so a reconnect does not mean doing the whole thing again.

QuickBooks OnlineConnected to Ravensbourne Systems Ltd
Service itemIT Support
Tax code20.0% S
XeroConnected to Ravensbourne Systems Ltd
Revenue account200 Sales
Tax rate20% (VAT on Income)

Each card speaks its own package's language: a service item and tax code in QuickBooks, a revenue account and tax rate in Xero.

Stop retyping timesheets into your accounts

Helios is a full RMM and service desk with this built in. Start free, log some time, and push a month across when you are ready.

QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online are trademarks of Intuit Inc. Xero is a trademark of Xero Limited. Helios is not affiliated with or endorsed by either company. The figures shown are from a Helios demonstration account with fictional client names.