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How to invoice an APA commercial job
The shoot has wrapped. The last thing standing between you and being paid is the invoice, and it is the one part of the job nobody trained you for. This is how to raise one on an APA commercial (a TVC), get the figures right, and actually get the money, whether you do it in TimeMachine or with a spreadsheet and a steady hand.
An invoice is a small legal document. It says who owes what, for what work, by when. Get the day rates and the overtime right and the rest is mostly admin. Get them wrong and you either short yourself or spend the following week in email.
Before you start
Two things have to exist before you can bill anything. The first is you: your name or trading name, your address, the bank details you want paying into, and whether you are VAT registered. In TimeMachine these live in your settings and carry onto every invoice, so you fill them in once and forget them.
The second is the job itself, built day by day, each day with its real call and wrap. The invoice is only ever as right as the days behind it, so that is where the actual work is. Everything below assumes the days are in.
Who you are billing
An invoice needs a recipient: the production company that pays it, the email it goes to, the postal address, and the job number or reference they want quoted so it gets matched to a purchase order. On a commercial these are usually somewhere on the call sheet, in the small print nobody reads.
On an iPhone, TimeMachine can read them off it for you. Share a call sheet PDF to the app and, on a device that supports it, it pulls six invoicing fields straight from the sheet: the job title, the production company invoices are addressed to, the job reference, the invoicing email, a second cc email when the sheet names one, and the invoicing postal address. Those six, and nothing else: it does not read the schedule, the crew list or the unit times. The six are the details that repeat every day of the job and are tedious to retype; it leaves your call time, which is often individual and changes, and the wrap, which on a call sheet is only an estimate, because importing either would import something likely to be wrong. The reading happens entirely on your phone using Apple's on-device models, so the call sheet never leaves the device and nothing is uploaded. It needs iOS 26 on an Apple-Intelligence-capable iPhone, and it is an iPhone feature only. On the web app it does not exist, so there you type the four or five details in yourself, once per job.
Get the day right first
The figure on the invoice is the sum of your days, so the days have to be right before anything else is worth doing. Each day is a basic day rate, an hourly rate that is a tenth of it, and overtime once you pass the eleven hour day, at a multiplier set by your role's grade. TimeMachine works this out from your call and wrap, applies the grade, and adds the penalties, a late lunch, a broken turnaround, a missed break, that push the total up. If you want to check the logic rather than take its word, how APA rates actually work covers the rate side and what a late lunch is actually worth covers the penalties. Your role's own rate, and which grade it sits in, is on the APA rates page.
From the timesheet to the invoice
The timesheet is the day-by-day: each day, its hours, its total. The invoice carries those day totals across as its line items, the one place they all add up. In TimeMachine the invoice is built from the same day calculation as the timesheet, so the two cannot disagree, and it keeps a day-by-day breakdown on the invoice itself, so the person paying can see how the total was reached rather than being handed a single number to trust.
Kit, mileage and expenses
Not everything you are owed is a day rate. Kit hire, mileage and out-of-pocket expenses each go on as their own lines, itemised rather than folded into the fee. Mileage on an APA job is 50p a mile, calculated from a fixed central London origin and only outside the M25; when you can claim it, and when you can't has the detail. TimeMachine carries these through from the day records onto the invoice as separate lines, so a client querying the total can see exactly what each part is for.
VAT, if it applies to you
If you are VAT registered, your invoice adds VAT on top of the subtotal, at your rate, with your VAT number shown on the document. TimeMachine only does this when you have marked yourself as VAT registered; if you are not, there is no VAT line and nothing to think about. The default rate is 20%, the standard UK rate, and you can change it if you need to.
Numbering, terms and the due date
Every invoice needs a unique number, and they should run in sequence so both you and HMRC can account for them. TimeMachine numbers them for you, from INV-001 upward, stepping the number on with each new one, and you can set your own prefix if you invoice under a company name.
Then the terms. The APA Recommended Crew Terms say production companies pay crew they contract directly within seven days of receipt. Seven, not thirty, even though thirty is what the industry drifted to and what most productions will assume. TimeMachine sets a due date by counting your payment terms forward from the invoice date, and it defaults to thirty days because that is what you will usually be held to in practice, but you can set it to seven, or to whatever you actually agreed. When they miss it, late payment is a statutory entitlement worth knowing, and the app tracks it for you.
Sending it
How the invoice actually leaves depends on which version of TimeMachine you are on, and this is the part worth getting right, because the two behave differently.
On an iPhone, the app renders the invoice to a PDF and attaches it to an email, pre-addressed and subject-lined, ready for you to review and send. On the web app there is no attachment: it opens a pre-addressed email draft with the recipient, subject and body filled in, but the PDF is not on it. You save the PDF from the print view and attach it yourself before sending. If you are on the web and expecting the invoice to arrive attached, it will not, so add the file first. That one difference is the easiest way to send a client an empty email.
Draft, sent, paid
An invoice starts as a draft you can edit as much as you like. When you send it, it locks: TimeMachine freezes it as a record of exactly what you claimed, on which days, at which rates. A sent invoice does not drift afterwards, not when you edit the production, not when the rate card changes, which is the whole point of a record. From there it tracks as sent, then paid once the money lands, and it flags itself overdue once the due date passes, with a reminder the next morning, so the moment to chase finds you rather than the other way round.
The short version
- Set your own details and bank details once; build the job's days right, because the invoice is only as good as they are.
- On iPhone, the call sheet reader fills the six invoicing fields on device; on the web, you enter them.
- Kit, mileage and expenses go on as their own lines. VAT is added only if you are registered.
- Numbers run in sequence. The APA term is seven days, not the thirty everyone assumes.
- iPhone attaches the PDF to the email; the web opens a draft with no attachment, so add it yourself.
- Sent invoices freeze, track to paid, and flag themselves overdue so you know when to chase.
TimeMachine is an independent tool for UK film and television crew. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Advertising Producers Association (APA). It references the publicly available APA Recommended Crew Terms as a rate reference only. This article is general information, not legal or financial advice.