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Busy invoice format for Finance

hello and welcome to another zero how to where we're going to be looking at invoice templates so with the whole invoice template concept actually Xero will tell you how to do it but it won't necessarily tell you why you should do and how to apply it to business so that's what we're gonna look at now so I'm just going to share my screen with you guys so you can see the demo company and I am going to go into demo company let me minimize this let me minimize my Finder window come in to that shortly I'll show you how that comes into play so we'll go into settings and we're going to go to invoice settings and from here we can see the various templates we have set up so when you see this layout this is representative of zeroes default and this view down here is representative of docx so basically a custom-made document more complicated to do our name but not to be afraid of they just take a little more setup yeah now both have very useful applications both can be used in different instances so here we've got a couple of different templates set up but you might just have the one if you're new to 0 so what we're going to do is look into the standard template and we're gonna select options we're going to go into edit so the first thing to say here is there are a few things which people do with invoicing where they perhaps miss out on opportunities and they miss out on some of the setup opportunities which we can take advantage of so the first one is missing out on terms and your payment advice so this one is really really crucial to make sure people know how to pay you and also you can add your terms into your quotes and you can add separate terms into your invoice and statements so really really useful to make use of down here now the other section I would recommend taking advantage of is this section one we can see draft invoice titles so if you're issuing quotes and you're issuing invoices and if you're doing a three step process where in the middle wheel issuing performer invoices I would recommend using your draft invoice workflow and simply renaming this rather than being draft invoice you can rename your former invoice or order summary something along the lines of which custom or find useful and actually it just confirms the customer that this is their pre-emptive invoice and loss of the 80 invoice which of course applies if you're about registered that's correct and we use performance quite a lot if your customer insists that you issue an invoice beforehand but you want to you might need to change it you might have you know the pricing might not quite be agreed or it might just be that you don't want to commit it to yourselves there G yet and because it's not a sale it's like if you're in the building train for example people do a default bill of materials or a demand or an application for payment you can use those again in this pro forma invoice stage so call it your pro forma or your application of a payment or whatever you want to call it and then you haven't quite committed it to your sales ledger yet it's a very handy way to get purchase invoice for a supplier as well and so if they if customers are sent you a purchase order you can send them a performer to request it and then they've got the actual figures they they need you generate the performer the other thing I would do on the side here is I would take away the payment advice cut away so you almost never need payment advice cut aways now most people pay by backs rather than by cheque so you don't really need that anymore yeah if you don't want people to pay by cheques remove the option to do so that's the simplest way to resolve that issue so massively evaluating on that one and as for the rest it's basically just making sure you've got all of the relevant information included so it's worth just having a review to make sure this is set up as you would expect and what I'm gonna do is just click Save so nice and easy to edit the default branding now you can actually add a new branding theme so you can add a new standard template or we can add a custom template or likewise you can simply copy a previous template and an edit it so you might actually copy this standard template because this might be for one specific type of customer maybe you have multiple currency accounts and actually you want someone else to pay you in u.s. dollars to a u.s. dollar bank account so you might actually copy this invoice go in and edit it and then simply change the terms and the payment advice so actually they can see that they need to pay with different bank details so it's a really useful tip on getting people to pay you in different ways one firewall says when do actually raise an invoice you will have a setting for branding settings within the invoice template and you just need to change it to your various templates within here now we're gonna look into the docx a little bit so for the face net you can't really see much and if you go in to edit it you don't get as much to edit you can of course still train to the draft invoice types also recommend doing this if you have done with the other one now in here as set as mentioned you don't get a massive amount of functionality to change all you instead have to do is you have to download the file as a zip file so here's one I have downloaded oh yeah so what we have over here is a new zip file now if I click into the folder I have various components and these five are the ones you'll see now the one thing I will say before editing any of these is as I've done here duplicate the file or copy and paste it and then rename it and give it a name they are so easy to break if you delete one of the table fields one of the core table fields by accident it's so easy to break and then much harder to reinstate if you get it wrong yep so basically if you make a change you can always revert back to the previous version so that's the step in the process there it just means that if you do accidentally break something no harm done just reset the previous version and start again so here's one I've started setting up earlier so as you can see this is the very orange avoid anything very they are not kidding when they say that well so this is the to show you know what's capable in zero isn't it you can have different colors different schemes bigger branding you could have a branding at the top in the bottom so some of our clients have hold invoice headers and footers that are branded to meet their particular organization that works really really well but you can't do that in the standard 0 invoice you have to do that in this docx customized invoice template this is quite handy if you change systems as well so your invoicing from one system and this and to a new one you want the formatting slightly different door 0 offers because some people just do this do you want that consistent so that's absolutely fine now what you find in here is you've got these double arrows and then of course you've got text in between nn-never double arrows so these are the merge fields which serie has generated now the one thing I will say with these is you can add more merge fields you can take some away if you want to just make sure that you're keeping the critical pieces of information when reviewing these say obviously you want all your registration details you want the quantity you want the customer to understand everything so please do just check if you are removing these just check it how it remove something that you didn't want to remove but as with many many of these fields you can always save this template import it to zero preview it and test it which I'll recommend doing before actually ever issuing one hour always preview you talked X and then just check that you've got things as they should be now one of the areas where the docx template is easy to break is if you go into this line item description for example you've got a table start line item and a table end line item and anything that has table starting in table end do not touch your table and it needs to be all your description your quantity your merge fields need to be within the table start line items and table end line items or down below you can see on the tax totals you've got table end and table starts yeah don't mess around with any of those because they set up the course structure of the tables within the docx invoice so to run one or the other it all breaks yeah and essentially what it's saying is this is one item yeah to a certain degree so it expands as you need to now the best part about docx is that I'm not going to stand the template you basically get given one page and in anything over spills it just simply goes over to pages we can't really add extra documentation to it if you need to unless you attach to the invoice which we can all forget so I'm just going to show you down here I originally had a cut off footer so you can simply go into the first to remove it as I've done here because I did have one which said if you can pay my checks can't watch it so I've removed that but what I've also done is I've added another page here so I've added my terms and conditions of sale so you can use this to add say terms and conditions you had a supporting document some sort and this is your way to ensure that they 100% guess at every single time and I may actually include something say in the footer here which says please refer to our Terms and Conditions as highlighted on page piloted in the following pages so it's a point of reference to say by the way this document is not by itself it's got extra information that you need to review please make sure you're done because by accepting these quotes accepting this invoice you are agreeing to our terms and conditions so it's really handy to take advantage of this and the best part about it is if your terms and conditions are quite long and considerably compared to say the standard default template you can add multiple pages as there is no limit on this they do run into two or three pages don't they and what you can do is insert a PDF image here so if you've got your terms of conditions in PDF you could insert those into the document you don't have to write them all out yeah so once you've edited your file what I would say is how don't play around with the formatting and whenever you've done it saying it and just make sure that you say that as the new format we've set up so when we originally copied it make sure you've got the version control so that you can always refer back to it if you do need to add extra fields as with the actual merge fields if you go to 0 comma so much I'll show you how I got here so if you go to zeroes help center and go to the zero central support you can actually search and what I would do is search for simply search with docx and search for merge fields or something along those lines you'll know we're talking about and then all you need to do is when it comes in to customizing the docx what we're looking for is we are looking for the one which is fields you can assert into a custom template and you can see from here the various merge fields you can use so you can if you accidentally remove one this how you'd add it back in and likewise if you wanted to add another one that's not there this is also how you would add it in so imagine I've saved my dog X and I've imported it I would make sure I've actually uploaded it into here so I've got my format in here and then like I said whenever you set up any invoice term invoice settings please do go to your invoices and just any audience would and have a look at how it's actually being presented so at the moment I can change my branding across my various formatting and of course I can preview these as well so please do check they are looking how you would like them to and this is how you would see if of course your very orange invoice which you've been playing around with is doing the job as you would expect well there's two types of preview isn't there so there's previewing what it looks like in an electronic email so that's the overview there's also preview and how it looks on the document itself so if you go into the PDF that's how to view how it looks exactly as it would be produced as a PDF document so it's a slightly different view of how it would be produced if you did the preview yeah and the best part about this is if you haven't playing around docx and you're not entirely sure if it's kind of work you'll know very quickly from here and then you can just revert that to the previous version if anything is going wrong and this also you can see from here week productions the address is not picking up so go and check for example whether the address is missing and you haven't put it in the system or whether it's the merge field that's broken and it's not bringing in the correct details yeah and I always say as Lisa mentioned chapter zero first yeah then check the docx yeah it's easier to check what's in zero first has a code so lovely that's a that's our invoices so please do have a look at the invoice templates and apply these in business because actually they make a massive difference and you might need more than one template just remember that you can only set one default template so if you do ever need to change the branding for you just remember if you're changing customers new changing invoice templates and invoice branding you do need to change the default if you're changing between customers so just a point to remember I hope you found this video useful if you have any questions please do let us know and if you did like this video please do let us know in the comments take care guys thank you very much bye