Empower your business with prospect management software in United Kingdom

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[Music] hello jordan here from artisan electrics welcome to my office we're here today because i'm filming a video for you that hopefully will be of interest and benefit to those of you who own or run your own business i'm going to talk to you about tradify today which is the job management platform that we use to keep our business running smoothly it's been a massive help to our business helping us to get organized keep track of things and just make it quicker and easier to produce quotes invoices and everything else we're going to do kind of a deep dive today i've never really done this before and actually show you inside tradify how it all works how to set it up some of the features that hopefully will make you see whether it's going to benefit you as a business or not and then there's a link in the description of this video where you can get fifty percent off tradify for your first three months so hopefully that'll benefit you guys let's jump into the video this is the dashboard of tradify and what i'm going to do is i'm going to just walk you through setting up a new account on tradify right from scratch that way i figured it will help you to see all the features how easy it is to set up and how easy it is to get rolling with your business so we've created this as a demo account obviously this isn't the account that we use on a day-to-day basis because there's loads of personal data of customers that we can't show so we've created our account it's super simple just go to tradifyhq.com sign up for the 14-day free trial you create an account and that's it it's really easy they text message you a verification code and you're up and running and as i say if you use the code artisan you will get 30 off for your first three months as well off of the whole of tradify connect to your accounting app so the first and one of the most amazing features of this is that it will synchronize with your accounting app so whether you use xero or quickbooks or sage1 which is what we use what happens is when you create documents in tradify like if you create an invoice in tradify you can send it to your accounting package so that it will have everything there and you don't need to do double work creating separate invoices within your accounting software so that's a really cool feature first of all and to do that you can just click this button connect to your accounting app you can choose xero sage or quickbooks here and then you just have to put your login details and sync that over so like for sage you just click login to sage and it'll take me over to sage and then i'll have to put in my username and password for sage which obviously i'm not going to do now but that just gives you the idea if we go back to the dashboard um add your vat number so right brilliant okay so i've just clicked connected sage it's actually connected me to sage already and it's put my vat number in here let's put my company name it's selected pound sterling already and the time zone so that's great all we have to do is put in the delivery address so that's good next step set up a billing rate so this is important right you can set up your billing rates of how much you charge per hour and you can set up how much that labor actually costs your business to be able to provide that service and tradeify will then allow you to keep track of your profit margins so that on a job-by-job basis you can actually see how much profit you're making on each job on both the labor and materials so you get total gross profit figure for each and every job which is so important as a business because you need to know whether you're profitable or not and if you're not then you can put your prices up ingly so here we've got new billing rate we've got our standard hourly cost so standard labor and then you put your estimated hourly cost so that is if we look at the information it's what rate this costs the company per hour including tax so that is you've got to figure that out you've got to work out how much does it cost me to provide one hour of service to my customers and that is quite a challenge because you've got to kind of take into account all your overheads divide your all of your business costs basically by the number of hours that you work and then that will give you your hourly cost per person so if i put this down as say 50 pounds per hour that's how much it costs our business to provide an hour of service with all the overheads and labor and wages and bills and tax and all that stuff included you've got your vat rate there then you can choose the account that you want to put into so these accounts all come in from my sage now so i can see that labor i will usually charge it to um general electrical work i think so it puts it into a specific ledger account billing rounding so you can choose if you want to round up your work so say the guys do like 45 minutes you can choose that you round it up to an hour or if they do like only 10 minutes on the job or you might have a minimum charge of one hour so you might choose to round everything up to 60 minutes anyway or you might choose to charge in half hourly increments so you might say well if they're there for 15 minutes we still charge for half an hour or if they're there for an hour and a half we charge for an hour and a half rather than for one hour or two hours hopefully that makes sense so again it helps you as a business owner to think about all these policies and things that you might not have thought about before and it can help you to actually become more profitable as well billing minimum so this is what i was talking about with that as well you've got a minimum charge so we have a minimum charge of one hour and then we round up to an hour after that so if corey was on a job and he was there for an hour and ten minutes we would round that up to two hours because the thing is you've got to charge for travelling time you've got to cover all those things as well and then you can choose whether these amounts include tax or not whether you want to put the price in later etc and then you put the actual charge of how much you charge per hour so we charge 80 pounds per hour plus v80 so we can do we can save that and then that gives us our cost and our standard so every hour that we book then we can see that you know we make a gross profit of 30 pounds per hour for example on on our labor that's just a rough figure but it gives you an idea and you've got to obviously work out for your own business so let me go back to our dashboard and create a customer create a job add a staff member so let's just create a job first of all um and by the way the great thing about tradify as well is that they're really good with customer service so you can book a call with them and they can talk you through all this as well if you're not sure about it after this video and they will you know do a video call with you they'll show you all the features and they'll answer your questions so they're really good like that and they've got little videos as well instructional videos of how to do these kind of things so to create a job this is it the job screen i'm going to create a new job first of all you've got to add your customer in i have no customers at the moment so i'll click add new customer and i'll call him bob geldoff good old bob he's one of our regular customers and contact name is the same as customer name that's fine if you had you know working for a big company you might choose to have a separate contact name from customer name or it might be the customer names the business and the contact name is the business owner or something but most of the time if it's domestic work contact name customer name are the same and then find address so we can put um 10 at downing street london there we go and that pops up and that will automatically work out the postcode for you and everything and pops that in then we can do bob at guild guildoff.com for his email address i hope that's not the actual one because he'll be getting flooded with emails from our subscribers soon um and then we can just put 07767 for his phone number you can add obviously a mobile landline and then if you want to you can add financial information about this particular customer so for example um you can track the invoices so you can send them a link with tracking so that you can see if they've clicked on the invoice if they've actually opened it same with quotes same with job service reports if you choose to send those and then you've got a few custom fields that you can add as well so if you want to add some custom information about them you can so we click save and that is our customer added now for this particular job it's automatically put the job address in now because we've put the customer in there we can choose a site address now this is important if your site is different to your customer address for example if you're working for a landlord and they have several rental properties the landlord will have their billing address but the site address will be different so you can add in a new site and put the address in ingly but for most customers the site address is the same as a customer address so you can leave that blank you can choose to put a reference if you want you can choose a pricing level so you might have different customers who have different pricing levels and you can just create new pricing levels you can add a markup so you know if certain customers you charge a bit more than others you can do that this is very very flexible this system and then you can add like categories like the priority so if this is a high priority customer you can put that in you can put if this job is a call out or installation or service you can choose that as well and then the job description so i would say for example called out to check why the sockets were sockets were tripping um fault finding two hours something like that and then you can create a task within that job so you can put a new task fault finding description trace and a repair fault you can choose your staff so in this case i've only got myself down um due date so obviously if this is a job that you're doing in the future you can put it in like that estimated cost i'll just leave that blank for the moment you get the idea so you've got your job details in there and then if you've got subcontractors you can put their email address in you can assign it to a subcontractor as well which is quite cool save and continue um and then if i want to i can create a quote for this job so i can create a new quote and then i'll just see it's inputted the details of the job already i can just add a line item for time and i can say you know we'll allow two hours for this job so i can just put two hours um and then click ok and that will automatically create a quote for the total amount for two hours of labor the great thing about this as well is that if you do price list item you can import price lists uh which oh it's done it okay so i i get sent every month by cef i get their sent their price catalog as like a like an excel document type thing anyway that you can import into tradify so if you've got a regular supplier that you use you can get them to send their up-to-date price list every month import it into tradify and you've got all the stuff there so if i want a consumer unit like this i can click and it will automatically import the price for that consumer unit i've not set up my pricing yet for my material so i'll show you that next but that's a great way to just add in your materials for the job super easily and super quickly so that's a sort of a brief overview of how to do quotes now if you go into settings and you do um where are we pricing levels so standard it would be for the materials so i do a 20 markup on all my materials to cover the time and energy that it takes to go and get them and deal with the wholesalers and all that stuff so i put 20 markup standard in there now if i go back to that quote but basically this is your cost price how much it costs you to buy from the wholesaler and then you can put your sale price in there which is different and then tell you what your gross profit is as well on that particular item so it's very handy for tracking your profits and then if you click enable reminders on this quote it will actually email the customer seven days after you've sent it to send them a reminder 14 days after you've sent it send them another reminder and three days before it expires it sends them another reminder there so it gives them a little nudge for you and it just just saves you hassle and time you know if i do a preview of the quote i can see here exactly what comes up on the quote so it's got the various line items you can see two hours labor the price total amount the consumer unit the quantity total amount now if i want to i can reduce that so that it doesn't show a breakdown so for us we prefer to not show a breakdown of exactly how much it costs per hour and how much we're charging for individual items of materials we just price for the whole job so we can do that in tradify in the settings for the quotes if we go to settings and quotes we can do um document themes here we go we can check on standard themes quotes we can just get rid of show line items and then that will change it so that now we don't actually see the line items we just see the total so that's a great thing that you can do you can add as much detail as you want or as little detail depending on how your custom your your company is set up then if you want to print you can and download it you can email it so this has now created an email i can set up a standard template email as well obviously it's not done it yet but i can set up exactly what it says in this email the standard so if you have a nice fancy email that you sent to your customer saying dear future customer thank you for your inquiry we're proud to have produced this amazing quote for you it is attached to this email whatever you want to say is your little sales pitch and your email with your quotes then you can do that and it just automatically fills that out every time you send a quote and then all you do is click send and that's it you know it sends it off to the customer and then it puts it in if i do so you click approve first of all if you're happy with the quote then you approve it then you email it and i'll just do that and then that's sent now so if i go back to quotes now it's in awaiting acceptance so i can see that i've approved it but it's not been accepted yet as soon as bob actually accepts the quote it will appear and accepted and i'll get an email notification to say bob gerdoff has accepted your quote and then i can contact him to book the job in i can also manually do that so if i click accept now we'll pretend that bob has has been very impressed with our quote and he's decided to accept it now the quote has moved to accepted section so i can see i've got this job that's accepted now i need to actually book the job in to the schedule and potentially i need to send an invoice for the deposit so i can do that if i click on that job again copy to invoice i can choose to actually do an invoice for a percentage of that quote so if i do like we do normally we do a 50 deposit up front for any jobs over a thousand pounds i can create an invoice for 50 create draft invoice and there we go it's made an invoice i can just approve it and then i can um email that over to bob you can see the preview see what the invoice looks like so that's the the invoice um i've accidentally sent it to sage so i'm gonna have to delete that sage but that's fine um you can see how it looks looks really nice and smart and you can put your company logo and all this at the top as well i'll show you how to do that in a minute all the stuff is there ready to go and you can synchronize this with stripe as well so that you can take stripe payments via card directly through tradify as well and then if you click email invoice it will just email the invoice over to the customer they'll have a button in there where they can click pay and they can just pay it using their credit card online or you can put your bank details on there and they can do a transfer or whatever so that's another brilliant thing so then we've got that the quote's been accepted now what we want to do is book it in so we click on the job all the job details are there click schedule and it's not scheduled yet so we can click open schedule and then we can assign it to one of our guys in this case me i'll assign it to myself for tomorrow choose how long you're going to assign it for so in this case it'll be two hours choose your staff member which is me click save and it puts it into the calendar there and that will automatically now appear on my mobile phone with the address so that in the morning when i start out for work i can see exactly where my first job of the day is i can click on directions and it will automatically put into google maps or apple maps or whatever and then i can get the directions to the job so it's super easy and this is a system that can work if you're just a one-man band or if you've got 100 staff or more on site it's scalable which is really great so once you get the systems in place it's easy to just grow it add new users and you know just scale it up and you can have admin people then who do the invoices and quotes and things for you and it enables you to really grow your business without having to then implement loads of systems afterwards so for us now we've got seven employees and we've got three people in the office so they all know how to use tradify they've been through the training and they're able to do the scheduling they're able to create quotes and invoices in tradify and it just means that i don't spend my whole life just doing quotes and you know sorting out and paperwork and stuff so that's the job booked in for tomorrow so now if i go to the job then what i can do is it's now down as scheduled when i get to the job it can be in progress and on my mobile phone i literally just click start time and it will it'll start like the clock basically on the job i can and add time in manually as well using this timesheet entry section but the idea behind that is you can track the number of hours that your employees are on the jobs for and then you can bill ingly if you charge on an hourly rate basis rather than on a job basis so that's really handy too and then back in the scheduler you can see the job is in progress if i then have completed the job i can set it as to invoice and then that tells the people in the office that it needs to be invoiced so in the job list they can see um they can see that this one is to invoice so then they can go in there and create an invoice for the job which in this case we've already sent one but we can create another new invoice percentage of quote again we can select the quote that we sent and we can do the final 50 or in this case we can just do remaining amount and there it does it like that and it just bills them for the for the remaining amount create draft invoice and then approve and send to sage again and it's exactly the same and here's the button where you can accept credit card payments on this invoice so you can do that and then connect with stripe you can also set payment reminders on the invoice so if you want to do that you can do it so that it sends a reminder eight days after the invoice is sent three days before the due date on the due date three days after the due date and so on obviously you need to set your terms anyway for your customers so we set our terms as just like due on receipt of the invoice but some people have 30 days payment terms some people have 14 days seven days whatever you might want to do so that's kind of a brief overview of how to create quotes book jobs turn them into invoices how to schedule them can you see how beneficial this software is for a business owner to be able to just manage everything through the one platform it's really really handy and there are other things you can do as well so in the map for example um i can see now that this is the job that's been booked in i can see it on the map as a little purple hammer so that's a job to invoice but once i've booked hundreds of jobs i can see pins all over the place of where all the jobs have been and i can also click staff and i can see where my staff are at any one time so if they've got tradify app open on their phone you can see where they are you can see if they're at a job or if they're on route so it's really really really handy you can also manage your inquiries in here so in order to start using inquiries you can sync this with your inquiry form on your website for example and every time someone fills that out it will send their details straight into tradify and then you can deal with the inquiries so if i click it and do a demo inquiry for example for bob geldof we can see how it works it's amazing that bob gildoff is now the prime minister who'd have thought it so we can see i need a fault repairing on my lights we can save that um if we do save and exit then we can see this inquiry has come in you see one minute ago so we're like we're really hot on customer service so we don't leave it more than five minutes before we deal with an inquiry so the team comes in and they're like oh we've got a new inquiry let's deal with that right now so they go to enquiry actions and what they'll do is probably they'll phone the customer they'll give him a price over the phone or they'll say we'll send you a quote and then they copy this to a quote and it automatically copies bob's details straight into the quote fill out a few extra bits put in the price ready to go or if the customer wants to go ahead say they give him a price over the phone and he just wants to go ahead they can copy it straight to a job and book that job into the schedule they can copy it to an invoice they can schedule appointment they can mark it as rejected or mark it as actions so there are quite a few options there and you can create your own options there as well if you want to so in settings again all of this is very flexible under inquiries if you do start using inquiries you can see how how that's all set up you can have it so that you've got different actions and stuff as well in in your inquiries section um company details this is what i wanted to show you so if you do document themes standard i think it yes in here you can put your logo so you can put your company address like that and then you can put your logo in and then if you do that it will put your logo onto the invoices and quotes etc so you just choose a file you put that in there and it puts it on all your documentation which is really really handy as well and you can choose whether it goes on the right or on the left or in the center of your documents and then your invoices you can put your terms and payment information in there those will always appear as standard in your invoices same with your quotes you can put terms in for the quotes which is really important and bills and purchases so you can do all your purchase orders here as well so once you've created a quote with a materials list you can convert that materials list into a purchase order send it to cef for example and then they will do the order for you and get your materials booked out and then you can also do a job service report so that during you know once the job's complete you've got an example here of exactly what happened on the job who did it and how long it took and what materials were involved so if you've got some big customers and they want those kind of reports you can provide them and in this case you can even put photos you can see and put notes about the photos in the job report so yeah pretty impressive bit of software this you've got the tax section so you can put whether you're that registered or not and obviously some invoices will be exempt from that for whatever reason you can add staff members so i can put a new staff member and i can show which sections of tradify they will have access to all i do is put their name and email address and it will send them an email they put in their password and then they've got an account and they can have access so that they can get the jobs up on their phone and stuff like that so that's really cool what else is there so timesheets then you can see the timesheets for each of your staff members so you can see how many hours they've worked each week for example which is useful to know kits this is a cool feature so you can create kits of materials so we use it for like electric vehicle charging installations we can create a kit for the standard materials that we use to a hypervolt charge point for example we will put the hypervolt in there we'll put a standard length of ev ultra cable some compression glands a circuit breaker some clips and we make that into a kit and then all we have to do when we create a quote for a hypervolt is add that kit add the number of hours labor we think it's going to take and we can alter things in the kit slightly like if it's 20 meters of cable we can change that amount if it's 50 clips instead of 40 then we can change that and it just makes it super easy to actually produce a quote that is accurate but also it's very quick and easy to produce once you get regular types of jobs that you keep getting in like eicrs or consumer unit changes you can create quote template and you can name that the particular type of job that you want so for example consumer unit change we can put that in and then i can put in the hager consumer unit that we usually use maybe a 12 way or an 18 way the breakers the blanks the tails gland the tails i can put all that into a standard um quote template and then every time we do a quote for a consumer unit we just use that template change a few little details and send it out and it just makes it so much quicker than having to write a quote from scratch every single time so that is a really useful bit of software in there as well and obviously with the scheduler as you start to build up jobs and it gets full it helps your team to see the the team's calendar to see when there are gaps so they can book in jobs in the gaps see how far ahead you're booked and all that kind of stuff so it's really really useful so i think i've pretty much covered everything but if you are a tradify user and you think i've missed something leave it all down below in the comments i know that a lot of my viewers have already got on board with tradify and they're finding it really beneficial and if you've not tried it out yet why not give it a go you get a 14 day free trial then you get 50 off for your first three months using our discount code so it's really worth giving it a go it could save you a lot of time evenings weekends doing paperwork why not invest time and a little bit of money getting systems in place for your business that are going to save you huge amounts of time and effort going forward it really is worth that investment and as you grow as well like we are growing very rapidly at the moment what we're finding is that having systems in place is so important because what you can keep track of as a one-man band you can't keep track of when you've got five six seven people working for you you need to have systems in place and if you get them in early if you get everything set up in place early then it just makes it so much easier as you grow naturally to just scale up so if you've enjoyed this video don't forget to hit a thumbs up it helps the youtube algorithm to promote it out to other people if you haven't subscribed already to the channel think about doing so we post videos about how we use software and stuff but we post lots of videos about just the life of an electrician as well and some of the jobs that we do you might find them enjoyable educational or entertaining either way thanks for watching this video and have a great day [Music]