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Account invoice for Support

hello sorry how are you today good leo how are you perfect so what are we going to do today uh so i've been thinking about this a lot and i think the topic of discussion today should be about recurring invoices and generally just about the whole process behind recurring invoices how to set it up properly um what businesses can benefit from this and uh we'll go from start to finish to just show you know the viewers how to do this properly and then we'll do a little bonus at the end okay sounds interesting now what kind of businesses can benefit from this video so generally speaking any company that has some sort of schedule for invoicing whether that's weekly monthly quarterly um you know you can have um contract customers so people who need to pay on a monthly basis a specific set amount of money this could be beneficial for companies that technically could be using zoho subscriptions but don't need all the extra bells and whistles so they just need to charge customers a flat fee on a monthly basis kind of like a subscription but that way they don't require that other piece of this whole puzzle okay so if my business will have some kind of a subscription service or maintenance plans exactly cleaning services everything bookkeeping services basically i will set up everything in the system that you're going to show me and i'm golden yeah a lot of companies that and it's exactly where you said servicing so you know pest control companies cleaning any property management companies that do things on a monthly basis all of that can be done through here so we'll walk through it all okay beautiful share your screen so we're back in to the same set of books this is uh technically an accounting test database right so this is an accounting company books instance okay so we already know where the invoices are right this yeah we talked about it last week yeah the classic invoice button here and we can create an invoice now your recurring invoices are right below it so it's uh it's another button it's a separate module that just keeps track of all your contracts let's just call it contracts for now okay so in here is where you set up your recurring invoices and there are two ways of getting to the same area so you can either create new recurring invoice here by just pressing that button or you can go to an original invoice and then over here you can do make recurring and it takes you to the same location more or less but with this one everything is already pre-filled from the original invoice so it could save you a couple minutes so for the purpose of this example we'll just start fresh just to make it nice and clean yes so we'll create a new one now this is a typical setup so you just go based off of the account let's just say it's a great account count will be the company or the person that you supposed to invoice yeah yeah exactly the customer exactly um so yeah so this one's fine the profile name is really just an internal um text field where you can set this up so that you can filter things later so i always like to start these fields with something that you can filter down the road make it very consistent and move on from it so for example if this is a pest control company you can start with service agreement right so monthly servicing uh schedule that will run and then i could put you know the customer name okay and i'll show you the benefit of doing it this way just uh later on you could do servicing agreement and if you're in different regions you can even put you know canada us for example so we can do um us service agreement something like that okay so now let's just say you picked the schedule to go on a monthly but again you have many many many options right okay so you can go monthly this will probably be the the most common option yeah this is generally speaking this is the most used field for sure okay um and the start on is actually going to be your first invoice date so make sure that when you pick this you know that this is the date that the invoice is going to be generated and it's also that the date that they is going to be there on the invoice so um if we start this new customer in august this would be august 15th and you have options to have it never expire or you can have it you know let's just say that we renew our agreements it's a yearly agreement yeah and that's pretty common right to have a yearly agreement absolutely yeah so let's just go to august of 22 and last time this one now if you select the 15th that means that on august 15 2022 there will be the last invoice that's correct yeah okay okay yeah okay so and then you got the payment terms that will be selected uh typically it's due on receipt just because it's a contract and then you can put the sales person so then you do your services we'll just do you know whatever it might be and you select the salesperson just in order to know to allocate commissions later on right yeah yeah exactly exactly okay we do 250 a month okay now this is the piece that's really interesting if you have any payment portals or any payment gateways that are connected and integrated into zoho books you can actually have these uh posted in different ways so this is something that a lot of systems still don't have where you can actually create the recurring invoice send it to the client and then also charge the client so you have different steps you can go along the way you can save the invoices draft you can create and send the invoice and again if you have an approval process it will kick in as well and this is interesting too because if you create the invoice you can actually apply any of the prepayments that the customer might have so let's just say the customer prepays for six months ahead of schedule right agreement assignment retain their invoice or credit yeah okay exactly you can have it so that you know for the first six months the system automatically applies the payment for the invoice i see it because of the checkbox that you have there exactly okay perfect okay or you can obviously do create charge and send the invoices and this charge piece is if you have the integration set up for stripe authorized.net paypal i think only a few of them can do uh recurring and you have to just double check them when you have a moment because it'll stay there if you can or can't so this is super useful let's just say this 250 the cut we say a thousand dollars upon signing you have four months pretty much that are prepaid the customer or you or the accountant don't have to do anything once this is set up properly so the importance here is that a you're generating the invoices and and recording them properly in the system so your financials are up to date month to month the second piece is we can utilize this and this is kind of the bonus to take this a little bit further because this is what everybody understands recurring invoices fine it's it's pretty straightforward but you know the the piece here is really nice where you can customize the preferences but before i proceed to the to the bonus quote-unquote talk that we're going to have um do you have any questions about this anything that in particular of course i do shoot okay so in a in a perfect world all my invoices are getting paid on time and i have zero account receivables what happens if for example one of those invoices are not paid like credit card declines credit card decline is there any way that the system will bug my client hey josh your credit card declined you know take few days and please pay the invoice hey josh it's me again so just something to try to get paid yeah so once you choose this option first of all in the in the bell area over here at the top right you yourself as the business owner gets notified if something gets declined okay so if a recurring invoice gets is is failed and it doesn't go through you'll see a notification saying that a payment has been you know unsuccessful okay you can also send notifications on failure and this is where they can can be configured so that they can help you as well as the customer um and this is this is beautiful because again you can keep track of everything that's there and make sure that nothing is missed you can send extra notices through some workflows um and you could set that up on on your own just to play around with it and have it running so that in case the customer is really not paying you know a month after then you get an email or some sort of an app notification exactly bring out the base bring out the guns depending on the region that you're in um yeah exactly um but but the good thing is here is um you can actually set up those notifications to go to the owner of this account or for example the sales person on the x x and let's go to the settings so we can show them where to do it sure and here you will have the notification section on the left side yeah exactly um yeah yeah so you could do reminders um on invoices okay and you can turn those on and configure those and again this is just to get the customer to pay on time right so if if the customer doesn't think about about this uh reminder so all the zoo books notifications are pure crap they look horrible and what i did if you see there you have a section in html on the right side so what i did i just went to a graphic designer and i asked him to create me beautiful emails and all the notifications that's coming from my system are awesome they look great for example when someone is paying i have a picture of me saying thank you and it says you know big thank you for your payment and it's more personally nice but you do using the html section you can do this magic and you can have personalized beautiful emails using this system don't use the default it's not i agree and even you know even some of the verbage like we've talked about this before it's it's it's very basic and some of it even doesn't make any grammatical sense sometimes yeah it's okay like you can even go through emails and just change the templates here right so you can have some other templates over here for payment thank yous and things like that but like you said if you want to take it to the next level use html yeah we have beautiful template that we created and you can do it as well that's awesome okay so okay so we can create multiple notification based on time let's say that if you are not the the card is declined multiple times we can sell multiple notifications both to the customer or myself as the business owner yeah and you can pick you can do business owner as in the owner of the account the business owners in the admin person you can select a specific user if you have like a front desk you can even select accounting you can even do the sales person so the sales person that's assigned to the actual sale can get the notification if the sales team is dealing with the actual customers so that's the benefit right there okay now another problem it's a huge problem not sure if you have a solution for it but it's a huge problem that uh i see it all the time so let's say that right now you signed with me an agreement the agreement is running last invoice was paid and now the business owner thinks that he continue on getting payment while the contract is out you continue to provide services or not but the other side is not paying you anything and you have no clue that your agreement is over this is so funny because it actually ties into the bonus and it's a great question we this is a problem it is i completely agree with you and there is there is a solution and this is where a system like this can actually benefit you quite a bit when you have quickbooks or any of those other softwares they don't ever give you notice that something is done the recurring postings are done the journal entries are completed the invoicing is completed right that's it you fall off the face of the earth it will be also nice i don't know if if it can be done but to get let's say a notification even 60 days before it ends so i can negotiate a new agreement or something like that yeah actually so we like i i played around with the test here to see if we can develop something like that because it's a it's funny that you ask us because it's such a typical question using the automation section with the workflow rules you can create something like this so wait are you going going to show us how to do it or you just talking eye level i think high level would be the easiest to explain it because if i show you how to do it it'll take a little bit more time but again you'll be able to see all the steps throughout just by me clicking on this and seeing how to do it so you started by clicking on the settings on the top right and then you went to the automation yep automation yeah okay and then you got workflow rules okay well okay beautiful yeah and again this is a super easy thing to set up you first need to set up an email alert if you want this to be an email that's configured so wait so you go to email alerts and you click on new email alert yeah and then it's asking you for a name the name the module which is recurring invoices i assume yep okay the from email makes sense the email template that you want to to have makes sense and the email template is going to be in the template section under context and if you click on add new email template it's doing it automatically for you exactly beautiful okay and here is also the same part that you can have a nice html template versus crop exactly yeah yeah you want to spice things up you don't want to be bored at work right yes yes so people also you know they pay you money or they owe you money if you know to use emotions in the right way you can get the result that you want also saying saying thank you it's it's a big thing right yeah it goes a long way because companies typically don't right you're just getting a crappy research remittance yeah exactly yes thank you for the wire yeah exactly i agree um so the email for this specific example we chose the sales person of the actual recurring invoice okay and then who created the recurring invoice so if that the main created the recurring invoice it will be sent to the admin and the salesperson that is assigned to the deal yeah and you can add a bunch of other test you know emails oh perfect and then just put a comma and then it'll it'll add as many as you can okay okay so we click save now we go back to the workflow rules and this is where we create the actual rule and you just click the red button at the top right and you kind of it's the same idea you navigate through this form step by step basically they're asking you questions you just need to answer yeah and so we we created the workflow rule name contract expired you can keep it whatever you want and we attach it to the module of recurring invoices yep so when a recurring invoice is created upon creation we're filtering through the trigger okay and the trigger here is exactly what you talked about but here we put 30 days after execution date but before end date so you can do also 60 days will be the same same result yeah and we we spice things up a little bit because we can be boring but we're not going to be born we're going to be exciting accountants who take our financials seriously says nobody yes you are taking it seriously in the customer there are rumors that even in your free time you you enjoy a good textbook or something like that yeah the software yeah i learned i learned big block software in my spare time it's i keep it under the pillow it is what it is so we're gonna go this is just you know the customer master database okay so this is the master for the customer we created a custom field that just says contract schedule it's a simple drop down okay the reason why we do this in the customers we can use this pretty much anywhere else in the system whether that's reporting on the sales whether that's reporting on the customer types that you have and then the good thing is we can then filter through because you can have recurring invoices that are on a quarterly on a monthly we don't want this to happen every single time yes so we're going to go based off of annual contract and when the end date is less or equal to 30 days after execution date and the end date was the date of the last invoice exactly yeah so when the last invoice basically the 30 days is your last invoice yeah when the last invoice kicks in this is when you're being notified the salesperson and that mean that this contract is dead and you need to renegotiate or negotiate a new deal exactly and if you know bed mass like the mathematical equations the pattern stuff is really cool to play around with like if you have a bunch of different rules no don't do it don't do it you're killing people right now no let's keep it simple and nice okay okay so let's just continue so we've set up the triggers and now we're gonna figure out what the action can be and you have a bunch of different stuff that you can do so you can go as as you know has very very professional and do web hooks or you could just do the simple email alert that we've created which is the contract renewal and that's it okay and if if it was me because i have little bit more tools in the system and i know coding so i will probably create a some kind of an alert that will go back to those crm and it will flag the deal yeah and then the deal will tell say hey we have a problem here wake up and then someone will check it out yeah because that's me personally and and this is where a lot of companies can benefit from something like that because you you you might only want to have a specific number of people in the books right financials are a little bit more sensitive crm is a beautiful tool to use for the entire company so you can have certain limitations on who can access this but get the alerts in crm you can have the sales people in the crm get the exact same notification it might be beneficial to segregate it for sure that's a smart move okay so then we click save and then this is just going to be running on its own yeah that's uh that's pretty much in a nutshell what recurring invoices can do and again this can get pretty complicated and complex but the idea is that simple is best right to keep things clean keep the system clean and you know we we like to code things the profile names in a specific way because after that once you have a bunch of contracts you can then create a custom view right and you can filter through them to see which ones need some attention all day yeah yeah exactly when the profile name starts this might be useful for the actual owner or some management that might need some special reporting yep or you can have some custom fields which you can filter on them as well yeah yeah exactly awesome simon you always have those easy cool solutions which very cool very cool i'm very very impressed from your knowledge of the system very very impressive thank you very good so what do you want to do next week it's a good question um i think we can discuss the document section potentially um and and things that we can use to make the document section work for us because it's it's a really nice tool that's embedded into the actual software okay we have a deal fantastic thank you very very much again for your time really appreciate it see you next week yep pleasure is all mine thanks bye bye