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Alto invoice for Technical Support

[Music] alright hello everybody thanks again for joining us for another installation of our best practices webinars today where we focusing on invoicing in Excel it my name is Adam so I'm going to be the host of today's webinar and I work in the implementation team here at Excel and I'm joined by John the service design I will be taking us through invoicing so respect the session stage take about 40 minutes in total and we're going to be looking at a couple of different areas so we're looking at the different integrations we do with accounting systems we're going to be going to detail about the templates you can use for different types of billing and whether that's including invoicing for one-off pieces of work or recurring and we're going through you know the payment process and finally some how to deal with servicing material items at the end we're going to have time for Q&A so throughout the whole session if you can send through your questions as they come up that'll be Gregg's we'll get to at the end I'm now going to hand off to John to take us through it alright awesome thanks Adam so to kick it off we want to give you a sense on where we see excel fitting into all the different software you might use to run your business and especially for those who haven't yet hooked up their accounting integration with Xero quickbooks online or desktop so we're where we believe excel assets is just further down from where marketing automation and sales automation might sit in the HubSpot to the marcado's of the world and then right above the billing and accounting systems like zero in QuickBooks suite we think they do a really good job of keeping track of all the financials like payroll and the general Ledger's and account information and what that does is it opens us up to be able to focus on budgets automation how to keep track of client work and communicate with them the things that Excel does really well and this is where we differ a bit from other PSAs or ERP s if you're you're newer to Excel or just watching this as someone who is considering excel o is we really want to focus on on workloads and invoicing out of the system and then have accounting software focus on more the deeper level financials so today we'll be focusing on the invoice sink and how it connects to those deeper financial systems the way that we integrate with Xero QuickBooks desktop and online first and foremost is a two-way client sync so what you can see here with contact name and company address email and phone number we have a two-way integration so let's say that you added Paris and just sent her a recent invoice for a website from Excel we would have that automatically sync over to zero and vice versa we have ability to import all of your contacts from the other side going on to that though the way that the financials integrate is through an invoice sync so what you will see here with the income general ledger in the amount tax code tax amount and description these might be one item on an overall invoice like we're only invoicing for a specific ticket or just for design or it might be many lines like it's a very large invoice for all of my work and it might be designed QA and development in it regardless where you sync with the the income general Ledger's that go over to the Xero side and we have ability to import those general Ledger's when you're just starting off to make it easy to to start the sync the other way around after the invoice is recording the payments and we'll touch a bit more on this later but you can record a payment on Xero QuickBooks excel o or through one of our third-party integrations with someone like stripe for authorized.net and those payments will integrate both ways as well because they're going through that invoicing so what we want to start off with is the building blocks of how invoices are treated within Excel o and those would be through what we call templates and there's there's three components that we're going to dive into all the templates the type of billing what to include on the invoice and then visually how do we display that so we'll look at first a fixed-price project and 30% upfront in voice down deposit invoice and then a bit later in the call we'll focus on a time materials temper all the templates for invoices and mostly all the settings that we'll go through today is through configuration and the way that I find that is through the cog on the bottom left-hand screen and right now if you go down the lift on the left-hand side most of our configuration will be in the invoice and rate section and right now I'm in invoice templates so like I said on that down deposit fixed price template what I've done is I've set up some defaults so that every time we invoice for any of these different objects we can then have pre default settings for for what's included in this case on project work I want to invoice for 30% upfront whereas maybe ad-hoc work like a ticket I might invoice for 50% up front there are three different ways that you can include billing or work information on an invoice there's the fixed bid approach or value-based pricing approach of a percent budget similar to a down deposit like 30 percent or maybe you're just trying to wrap up at the end of the project and you want to invoice for all the remaining budget those are our two options for the fixed side and then on the time materials and expense side as we will cover on the ticketing what we can do is work done and what we're done does is it takes all the work that we've done usually that's the time and it multiplies it by a billable rate to get an eventual time materials invoices but we will find the settings for the three different objects or areas that we can invoice from the projects tickets and retainers here and most of them have similar settings so for example markets invoice if I want to mark the time that I've logged as invoice I can say all it approved same on the ticket side where projects differs a little bit is how much I want to include on the invoice and most of the times we're finding on six price or especially down the positive that will show the milestones that are involved and how much but let's say that it was a very small like a server upgrade or maybe a little WordPress site what I would do is probably just show project as a line item and then on some of those more complicated later projects we're finding customers showing everything else milestones tasks there's just busy flexibility on making sure that I'm not having to make this decision every single time it's just easy I drop in this template and invoice for the work especially for that smaller work going down to the next section on materials and expenses that leave some fixed side I do want to include everything to pass it through to the customer and then the last part of the the settings here at least the structure is be the email template that gets sent down and what I can do is I can pull in merge fields on the right-hand side to include more information than just a quick hello as you can see here so those are the components that drive the invoice that the next section is more around the visuals in the layout so what I have on the left hand side is ways to change the style like the font and the themes to more line with maybe your brand and then what to include and it's the most common area that we see what to include is around the services so in this case on a fixed bid project I'm not invoicing for time so I'm not showing any hourly rate or the number of hours that I've walked and same goes on the work detail side I'm not showing any of the work detail here only really high level of what I've done and that's because I'm not again invoicing explicitly for all the work that I'm doing it's more the value of the website that I'm building or the consultation that I'm engaging it the last part of the structure to bring into the visuals is merge fields so what you're finding here with things like account phone email even invoice information we can drag in more merge fields to give more context to the customer or we can start taking some away to make it really simple the black part is in here if we can move things around so account tress count phone maybe the the size of the logo we can change the size if we wanted to make this smaller maybe I make it a heading number five and in voice notes perhaps I want to make it bullet point it so there's a lot of options and if you don't like what you see or you want to do a bit more we have the opportunity for you to go into HTML and you'll have the option to edit in line here if you know HTML or lightweight CSS so those are the building blocks on top and then the last option is down below where you can enter in more subtotals or again change the font information there [Music] so those are the three different ways that we can change what we see on a template now what I want to hop into are the the two examples that we're discussing and especially the first one that we're mentioning around the fixed-price project this brings us into one-off invoicing for specific work like a specific website that we want to invoice for 30 percent up front and while we've already looked into the template and more or less built it out what I want to review is a bit of the progression on how we build invoicing into a process so that we don't forget about it the ball doesn't get dropped things like that that tend to hurt our cash flow and our process within our organization so what we can do is we can take something like a website I'm just going to move it back into the plan phase because it's already active and as we move it from one phase to another we can automate some actions that help us in the invoice process for example we move from plan to move to active and invoiced it can drop us into a workflow one common one that we're finding and this is more if there's a controller CFO or maybe an L sized bookkeeper who's involved is we can build in an automated internal alert or a note to someone who's involved in invoicing process and this is more often than not if that person is not involved in the project process so as we're moving to an active project we kick it off and we have another team to the invoice the second option that we see and this might be the next step in another process would be dropping directly into an invoice and this is what we see when there's a lead consultant who is really the project owner and has a relationship with a client sending the invoice if there the project manager an account manager managing it and also keeping an eye on the invoice and has been paid building this invoice in the process has been really helpful saving time and just make sure they don't forget when they kick off the project so what I want to do is just briefly show you how to build that into the process and that would be through projects and we call them status progressions so you'll find it under here in progressions and fields so every time I create a new fixed-price website project and I move it from plans to active I want to do two things and like I mentioned before it's likely that we'll just do one of the two things depending on how we want the workflow to go one being this internal alert that's getting sent off and then the other is what we call an action and it's a special process you'll find it under here and you can do things like assign now create sign-offs and another important thing is we're finding here is building and invoicing into the process so that's how I built it out going from active or plan to an active stage now what I'll do since it's a down deposit and if the project is it's referencing all the information that I set up for project template percent budget at 30 percent I would love to show my different milestones and it's now pulling in the design and development milestones where you'll see is the total milestone value is two thousand and it's saying I would like to invoice for 30 percent of that budget that's why we have 600 dollars here's the amount that's going to sync over to zero QuickBooks and then something that we'll touch on later is you can pre template service codes and the right general Ledger's that will connect up on your accounting software side so like I said it's a bit more advanced feature that will show I can edit it on the fly here as well but that's basically how they'd the integration works we can see this server and testing environment that we're setting up for them to no expenses to be included and on the visual side we'll have all the account information invoice numbers the two different line items and no information about any time that has been logged because we're not invoicing for time we're invoicing for a fixed amount or a fixed value so now how I start the integration and how I send the invoice out to the customers through here anytime you save an invoice in Excel oh and have the integration setup it's automatically going to sync over to your accounting software and then the same function would send an email to the PDF to the customer using that template email that we had set up on the template button so now what we'll see on the project is we have an invoice we've sent it out and we currently have a little more than 15,000 outstanding because we haven't recorded the payment either in Excel or on Xero side another scenario that we find often is how do we both invoice for all work I don't want to go into every single project or every tail ticket what happens if it's end of the month and I would like to invoice for all two ad hoc tickets or break six tickets that have been resolved in this past month or really ever and what we can do is poke invoicing is just not for ticket work but that's example that we'll talk about today is I can run a report across all work all statuses all time that's logged and it's a really nice way to save a lot of time instead of having to dig into each to send out emails and it also gives us the ability to group up pieces of work to send to the client and set it inundating them with a bunch of invoices so the first thing that I want to show is the work that we are eventually invoicing for and what we see here is we have a few tickets one that's open one that's waiting and a few other that are resolved and what I'll do is I don't want the report from here but I just wanted to show that these are the tickets that were eventually invoicing for and on top of that within them we can see all the billable work that we have yet to invoice so the way that I do bulk invoicing or in your account might be called company billing is through here so the template that I want to select is time materials and expenses I'll pull report little acts companies I don't want to include projects or retainers and then on the ticket side I'm selecting all the tickets that have been resolved if you are invoicing across a few different types you might be invoicing for all closed and resolved tickets rather than just salt in this case we're invoicing for only one and then you have some more options to drill down even more so what's pulled up are the three tickets that are rigged six meaning that they're sitting alone they're outside of a contract and we want to invoice for them in this case at the end of the month and all I have to do is select all them and I can jump into an invoice wizard this will be Murray duty to the companies and it's really easy way to group those tickets and quickly send them off so what I'll see now is this invoice is going to look a little bit different from the fixed 'add or the down deposit invoices that I sent out for a project because I'm using a different template some of the thoughts here are different size you'll find that on I'm using time and the cost on the line items now as well as including the work detail so this is something that I've set up on the template or I can edit it on the fly you'll find here the ability to take away or include things like the subject in the body what we found as the best practice is if we're invoicing time of materials we probably want to include at least the subject on what's involved and probably who's working unless if I have a general support room that they did work with rather than an individual engineer or consultant on my team and then sometimes our customers like to include the body to let them know exactly what we did and how we solved it this is one of the things that helps have transparency and in illuminate does the value in the time that you're putting into the customer where they look at an invoice and it's just not a line item for work it's a lot of work that we did with them or for them throughout them so when I create it it will sync over to our accounting software like Xero or QuickBooks and when I email it it's going to automatically send off to our billing contact there in this case it's Edward and now we go right to the second company that needs to be invoiced for Fairmont San Francisco with a website for a for an update logo ad hoc similar thing on the Edit preview now it's just two tickets with the two line items as well as the the different work logs for the two different tickets and sometimes what we're seeing instead of grouping them by the ticket type we want to group them by the staff who is working on it if it's more of a account manager role model rather than a general ticket or a like a support queue so now I'm done with all the bulk and voicing I've gone through all the tickets that need to be invoiced for the end of the month then I've pretty quickly gone through everything good stuff the last way that we can invoice with an excel or at least cover today is on the the recurring automated invoice through a ongoing revenue model we call those retainers and some of our customers call them on going with the bookkeeping support contracts this may be ongoing project work within SEO or PPC maybe I'm keeping track of a social media campaign over a few months and I just want to invoice upfront Elmont for that all those can be achieved through what we call retainers and setting up these recurring automated invoice so what I want to do is just set up a critic example as a retainer and show you what that looks like so let's set this up for Delta it might be an SEO retainer what I can do is I can select types and what's really powerful about retainer types is they're similar to project templates and that they pull in all the tasks that need to be done every month so as well as the materials that I find it invoice for every month they're also in some ways a retainer template because they can define the invoice structure that comes out of it for example in this case every month so it's a fixed duration otherwise if it is unlimited I would probably be invoicing when it tops up through the bulk invoice and I just showed prepaid for $2,000 every month for 10 hours otherwise again it might be through bulk invoicing that would do a time materials post page and then more often than not I'm keeping track of the fixed hours whether it's explicitly said in the digital agency to the client or it's just implicit we're trying to track how many hours the monthly bookkeeping run payroll takes [Music] and in this case I want to at the vend of every month renew it and then send an invoice for the upcoming period either on the first or the very end of the month so this would create the invoice and any time I create invoice and Excel is automatically going to sync over to zero so we don't have to run a larger pour or manually send invoices now for all our ongoing work we can just have it automatically sent and sync over to zero and then taking it one step further we can automate by sending that PDF off to the client and letting them know that they don't contract with us for another month or year and the next part of the invoicing side is if we go over our 10 hours we can't have an access rate and that's invoice for time materials at the end of every period in this case a month so if they use 15 hours we'll just invoice them for 115 hour and and top them off otherwise if they use 8 hours what we can do is we can take that credit of two hours and instead of them losing it we can roll it over to the next period so now they all have 12 hours and the next month before we go to an access rate so that's been really helpful for people who are overusing and we say fine it's okay if you ever use order to send you a quick invoice using for invoicing no big deal and then the other way around we can track and not really overcharge or at least have value continue to the next month and sometimes we're seeing people at the end of the year plan larger projects within that retainer so that they're still delivering value for the price that they're paying and you can keep them on retainer and prepaid price because it's a lot easier to retain then try to find new project clients over and over again the last part about the retainer is we can differentiate your ongoing contact for maybe it's marketing or maybe it's the support manager over at the client and then differentiate that from the billing contact that we always send maybe it's there at Cal State and what this looks like lies months over months if we were to create that retainer for up front invoicing is that we would see the usage in all the previous months and then I didn't automate this yet but there would be an invoice that has already been created from the previous month sitting here so those are the three different modes of invoicing from a very high level what I want to switch into is great we've sent the invoices out now how do we actually get paid for the work that we're doing so we're really briefly talked about the mention or the methods in which we get paid and then we'll talk a bit about keeping our eye on when money is coming back into our [Music] so most of the methods again would be under invoices and rates and receipt methods would give you all the different ways in which they can pay or have options on the invoice that we sent out so you can add as many options and put some detail into how they can pay and then secondly under settings is where we can put a bit more description so here we have custom payment methods we can write out things like wire transfer or to get the business information and how we we transact with them and then the second part of it is our integrations so we have a credit card or ization integration with stripe which integrates really well with with Xero authorized.net and then the last one isn't really a credit card integration and that's through PayPal so all three of these would create a little credit card or in this case PayPal link on the invoice and the email and they can easily click on it and pay or through the client portal they will be able to click on it in pay from my portal so what I want to do is I'm going to pretend that the customer has paid heceta through the client portal or they send it a check it we just recorded it so what I did was just pull a list of all the invoices in the system we can see here that there's still three hundred and ninety six dollars outstanding and now there's no payment entered and regardless of where I report this either on the Excel side or the zero side all the payments can be recorded maybe I'll put the check number and they paid in full so now we can see here that the debt is zero and that the full credit came in meaning that we have zero dollars outstanding if we are to pull a list of all invoices now we will see that that for I believe two tickets were paid for zero days after and we still have outstanding payments but because of the template we set up contract terms of 14 day or at net 14 so they're not owing us anything because it's still outstanding I'm just going to quickly receive a payment for this website down deposit as well let's pretend that came from zero other ways that you might keep your eye on on payments is from the company will be able to see high-level KPIs like how our revenue is trending and from invoices all the invoices for work whether it's retainer project or ticket would roll up here and I can quickly see what's outstanding and not this tends to be more of that see our CEO CFO of you where the calc managers and project managers might be spending more time in the project and keeping their eye on the invoice from here so we can see the invoice sitting as well as discount amount and the last piece of it is taking a look through the insides area and what this will do is it will give us a sense on how much says an invoice 30% and how much earned value or work has been logged and what the Delta or difference in it is and this isn't really helpful for seeing on Don deposits how much that we've eaten up or or burned into that initial money that we got you can almost think of these as taking a retainer up front for the work and then the other way around we're always keeping an eye on time and materials how much works that'd be a person in voice and making sure that the Delta isn't too big again so that I'm getting paid for the work that I'm logging hopefully it's not more than one or two weeks after the work that I'm inviting for it and getting paid for it then the last piece of it is a high-level report and honestly most people who are really into the finance side of it would have access to the accounting system and be able to pull the exact same report but what this allows you to do is open it up if you want an account manager a.m. to have their eyes on it you can see what's outstanding what's in terms and then the the 30-60-90 of accounts receivable and aging and again that was through reports and invoice statements the last piece on the set up is around service and material items so service items tend to be on the the work side like tasks and what general ledger I'll avenge like to point to then materials allow you to give somewhat of an inventory list of what you can sell and again looping it back to general ledger or income codes on the zero or cookbook side [Music] so what we'll sign here with service list I'll have to pay this one is a few different codes and inflections that we have and what I want to add is a development service list so I can tie it back to a specific general ledger code [Music] putting a note that it's used for really any tasks that involve this and then I want to relate it back to the development code and I'm not going to tax for this work and now what I can do is within project templates in my project plan like website I can connect services to tasks and this is going to make it really easy for us to invoice for the work knowing that it's going to go back to the right general ledger [Music] select development and same goes for the the CSS and the testing side I would go into the task template budget and then select the right service item that eventually points back to the right general ledger code similar workflow on the material side I can create a new material like a laptop or a MacBook can include its code and then the only thing that's difference between this and the service is that materials are actual tangible goods they're not a task that out later put a billable right on so that's what we see here with revenue price and cost price cost how much do I get it from the vendor or how much does it cost me to make it and then revenue how much we're eventually invoicing the client and similar to the the service left side being able to automatically relate it back to the right channel ledger for financials that's everything that's in Excel oh now on the invoicing side well not everything but at least for a short overview of what our invoicing can do what I want to talk a bit about is our vision for where the invoicing billing and accounting integration will go and one of those is around purchase orders so if you didn't have a chance to watch our purchase sneak peek our recording is on our blog at Xcel com+ resources slash blog they like to watch it and to read a bit about what we're planning to design out it from a nutshell from a very high level it's a way to incorporate expenses that come from our accounting system and relate it back to either vendor purchases or contractors maybe I'm outsourcing to a film crew and need to keep track of that on the project side or really on any work side honestly this will be a way to allocate those if you look at our invoicing integration and think about it they're all income codes will then open up the ability for all expense codes and integration on that side so it's really fully a two-way integration now with the invoicing or at least the count side the other aspect of it is we have really good automatic recurring invoicing but the last step for a lot of our customers is being able to automatically fill and those would be things for anywhere from hosting and the small things that we get often to even larger on SEO or ongoing monthly bookkeeping it we've had a lot of customers that now that they seem to automated invoicing taking it to the next step in getting paid automatically at the beginning or at the very end of every month has been something really desirable and something that we've started investigating and that's not a specific timeline but we get the question a lot and that's something that we're currently working at we would love to have it come out this year but I can't make any promises and then the last part of it is around the invoicing API we we've in-house worked with Intuit which is the owner and creator of QuickBooks as well as the zero team to build really deep integrations but for some of our customers who are using other accounting packages like impact or sage 50 or who are in regions that we don't support like Africa or the Middle East there might be a specific accounting package that only works in that country and has all the right information and tax and laws and regulations that wouldn't make sense for us to to build out but we still really want you to use the invoicing & Accounting integration get the value out of that so what we're doing is we're currently working on our invoicing API to build it out it already exists it would just be for helping you work with developers or if you're developing yourself to be able to build those custom integrations with the economy packages that you love and have have come to work with [Music]