Effortlessly Manage Your Computer Bill Format for NPOs

Computer bill format for NPOs

Hi, I am Ufuoma Ogaga from ... Goshen Bookkeeping and Consulting. In this video, I am going to answer a question I received from a subscriber demonstrating how to convert ... an estimate to progress invoicing using the ... percentage method. I am also going to clarify some of the QuickBooks Online labels that you are seeing in your file whenever you set it up, such as the pledges versus the invoices, and also answer that question as to does that label really matter? And how does it impact your invoices that you send out to your customers? Music Intro So here's a question receive from John. John is actually a treasurer for a nonprofit organization ... that is currently using QuickBooks Online. His first question is, he's already set up the file and based on how he set up the file. His invoice buttons are showing as pledge, and he wants to know, does this really matter? Now, I will say yes and no. If you are a nonprofit organization that deals with different types of customers, so let's say you have donors, you have retail customers, building usage people renting out your facilities, or if you have like students ... where you collecting to tuition or if you have like educators ... where you're charging fees, etc, etc. You want to make sure you choose the generic customer label when you're setting up your QuickBooks Online file. If you don't choose that and you choose the donors label, you're going to end up with the word pledge for invoices. When you are not necessarily sending out a pledge or ... doing pledges for all of your customer base. Those are the areas that the word labels in QuickBooks Online matters, it matters which your sales forms. The sales forms that are ... going out of the system to your different stakeholders. Now in terms of the function, the function behind the label is still the same. So regardless of whether it's ... called a pledge, or whether it's called an ... invoice, the function is still the same. So let's jump right into QuickBooks Online and I'll ... show you how to change your labels. If you change the label and the system does not take those changes, I will show you a quick walk ... around that I tend to do myself in my clients file. So this is my QuickBooks ... Online sample company file. I'm actually using the QuickBooks Online Advanced version, which is very similar to the ... plus version for nonprofit organization. This is the highest level of version. So my interface might look a little bit different from what you are seeing on your end. But the function behind the stuff I'm about to show you ... are still the same. Now I want to pause here and say, if you have not watched my estimates video, on my progress, invoice and video, click the link in the ... description field to go watch this videos and also check out my blog to follow the transcript that accompanies those different videos. So in QuickBooks Online, if you come in here and you click the plus new, Quick Create button, you see pledges this listed on the customers. Now this also means invoices. So if you're seeing this as pledges in your own QuickBooks Online file, what you can do is come in and click on the gear icon here, go to account and settings. And, in here, there couple of things that ... you want to do. First, you want to make sure that you have selected the correct tax ... form for your nonprofit entity. You want to make sure that the tax form that is displayed here actually says the Form 990. Regardless of whether you're filing a return or not, you want to make sure if your church you still want to make sure you pick this form 990 so that the system gives you the correct labels and it gives you the correct ... the correct names for your financial reports. So you want to make sure you test from the selected and, industry type, depending on how you ... purchase your QuickBooks Online file. So if you purchase a through ... Techsoup, you can always change the industry type to whatever makes ... sense for your type of entity. But make sure the driving force is always the nonprofit organization part that I tell my clients to always have as a default. So once you select the right company type and company tax form, the next place that you need ... to go to is the Advanced tab. So under the Advanced tab, your company tax on the you chosen the company tab will show up here. Then, when you scroll all the way ... down, you're going to see this other preferences section here. And you see the stuff that ... says customer label. Now most people and most nonprofits organizations ... when they set up their QuickBooks file, tend to go happy clicking and usually just come in here and select the donors. If you have different customer types, where your stakeholders are not just donors, maybe you have grantors or maybe you have students that you're collecting tuition fees from, or maybe you have building tenants that you renting out your facilities to. You don't want to choose any of these other labels, you need to keep the label at the customer level, keep it as generic as possible, you need to choose the customer version. Now, if you have chosen the donor ... version the first time, you can come in here and I'm going to repeat what I just did. So you can under other preferences, you can come in here, click the customer label and ... change it to say customers. You also want to make sure you have all these three boxes checks want to get some warning for check number bill number in journal entry number, and you can always extend the timeline of how QuickBooks should keep you logged in. So once you've changed that label, QuickBooks will automatically refresh itself and bring you back into the screen. Now, here is a lovely caveat to all of this. So let's say when you first initially set up your ... QuickBooks file, you chose donors here. And all of your reports, everything to show in pledge, everything is showing all ... custom nonprofit terminology. That is fine. Sometimes QuickBooks will refuse to change that regardless of what you do here. And I have a quick walk around tip to help fix that issue. So once you have made this change back to customers, you need to log out of QuickBooks, clear your browser cache and cookies. So you could just click on ... your browser little icon, am using Chrome browser. So you can click on your inside of the Chrome browser, go to more tools, and then clear your browser data clear cache and cookies in your browser. And then once you've done that closer Chrome, log back into Chrome and then log back into ... QuickBooks Online, is see if the system accepts ... the changes that you have made. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't work. Now, if you've gone through that ... process and you like Ufuoma, it still did not take any of my changes that I've made, I'm seeing pledges in my ... customer and sales center. What you can do, this is also another ... workaround, because again, as I mentioned before, the function behind the label is still the same regardless of what the label is called. However, what your end users, your stakeholders, your customers, what they see is where that label of pledge really matters. So what I mean by that is when you go to the sales tab, we come into the sales tab and you go to the section that says messages. This is where all of your sales forms will show up where you can type up the message that's your source from should have. As you can see here, you will see that there's some instances where the system is actually doing the conversion to tell to change the labels of invoices, but then you look at an instance at the top here, you'll see that hey, it's still calling it pledge. Even though I've already ... made the change to customers, it's still showing sales form as a pledge. My quick tip walk around is change this label here. So let's say this was I change this earlier. So let's say this was pledge, you want to change it to ... actually say invoice. So you want to change this to say invoice. Do not change this pledge number box. Because if you try to change it and change the word pledge there to say it was the system would not recognize your numbering sequence, your cells form numbers, it would never recognize it, you're going to have multiple errors. So what I recommend is the only thing you have to change in the subject line. Ignore all of the labels. If you system is still saying pledge after you've changed the customer label to say customers, all you have to do is come in ... here and delete the word in the subject line, change it to say invoice, update your message at the bottom here to see invoice and you know add all your lovely marketing branding message that you you should have and you should add as I tend to recommend ... for my clients. You know, customize that to what you'd ... want your stakeholders to receive when they get an invoice from you. Customize that, you can repeat the same process go to all of the sales form make sure the correct names are listed in statements. So you go through all of that make sure they you know all of your labels are saying the correct language that you wanted to say. Don't forget to email yourself ... copy of any invoice in any sales form, you will center the system. I highly recommend checking that box to say email me a copy. Or you can always add a copy of maybe a generic email address that you tend to use for your nonprofits in the copy box or in the blind, BCC blind copy box. So once you've made those changes, and again, you see how you know the system is to showing pledges in some areas, and it's showing invoices in other areas. That's fine. So once you've made all those changes, and you can always read about the different messages that you know goes along with all of this stuff so you can make changes to everything that you need, at the top and at the bottom. And then just Click save. Coming here for reminders, you want to do the same thing again. When I clicked on reminders, you will see that it's showing the word pledge, despite the fact that did change my customer to customers. So here, I'm going to manually change this to say invoice. And you will see my language says invoice here, but he was showing pledges there before. So you have to do this for all of the messages that you're customizing in this particular field in your QuickBooks file, if the system did not accept your changes that you made previously, so you just click save. And I'm just going to verify that everything else again is to show an online pledge. Now with this particular ... version, the system my still show the word pledge on there but ... again, you have to clear your cache and cookies and try to make sure do that first step that I mentioned earlier. If it's still showing pledge, don't worry about it. Don't stress about it. It is just the cosmestic naming the QuickBooks tends to tends to do and I would encourage you to submit feedback to them, just be mindful of that. The key thing is to make sure that you've changed the messages to ... say what you wanted to say, for your nonprofits. You've made all the changes just click done so that the system can accept your changes. And I like to usually refresh, I am not going to log out in the system. So I've already done all the refreshing that I need, and yes, my stuff is to show me as pledges, but that's, as I already stated, this is fine. It gets to show pledge, because know pledge means invoices, the function is to the same behind the scenes. Okay, so that's answer to your ... question number one. The other question that you had in number two was, how do you create an estimate and convert that estimates or bill portions of those estimates to a customer using the progress invoicing feature. And you want to build it using ... each line item that you have created an estimates and I highly recommend watch my estimates video, I'll link the video down in the ... description field or you can click the icon. You want to create an estimate first, in order to do partial billing and do progress billing in QuickBooks Online, you need to create an estimate first. So when you create an estimate, your key question is you've created an estimate, use time for you to invoice the customer. You want to know how the percentage of each line works, how that looks like, and I'm going to show you that in a minute. So in terms of your other ... videos on estimates and invoicing, feel free to check the rest of my channel. There's a playlist of QuickBooks Online for ... nonprofits so you can check that you can also visit my blog and check out some of those resources to answer some of your questions about invoicing and doing estimates in QuickBooks Online. So your question here, I'm going to go into sales center. Now I already created all my test customers and everything, the couple of ways that you can create estimates in the system. So if you go into this all sales tab, you go into the sales tab, you can click on new transaction, and then do estimate here. Or you can click on the plus ... new icon and go to estimate here. So you have two different ... ways to create estimates in a system. So here, I'm going to create an ... estimate. And when I create the estimate, I want to make sure that the ... status is either showing us pending and send it to the ... customer to accept it. Once the customer accepted, it will switch to accepted. So I'm going to create the estimate. I've already created an estimate before the system. So let's say we are doing construction work. And I'm just using this as an ... example. So you can see what's happening. When you're creating the ... esimate, you go through the process of adding your products and services give a description, new property work, add your quantity, add your rates, add your amount, pick a class, make sure to you you've picked your location tracking which is also known as the division also known as departments in QuickBooks Online. If this is not a donation that is ... restricted, you always use the without donor restriction location option. So let's say we want to add more line items so that we do have building materials here and I'm just coming up with random numbers to just give you show you an example of how ... this looks like. We're doing construction work with buying materials and we are also probably going to rent out some part of the facility at ... sometime in the future. The whole purpose of using estimates is for you to be ... able to build your customer in different installment plans. So if you have a customer that you're working with what is a government entity, a grant or a funder, whatever, you want to build them in increments of, you know, 50% down, 20%, you know, after the fact, you want to build them in ... increments. That is the whole purpose of ... using an estimate in QuickBooks Online. So now that I've created all of my estimate, there's my total amount. You can also add any ... attachment like contracts or anything else so you want to add there. Normally, you will have an email ... address here that you can send this estimate to the customer to accept the estimate. You have an email address there, you can do that. I'm going to save this estimate so I can show you ... how it looks like. This is how the estimate looks like and you can customize this whole entire form. Watch my custom souls form video to understand how to customize this form. So this is how our estimate looks like. When the customer accepts the estimate. Your name will be shown here and the data was shown there. So I'm going to pretend that hey, this customer has accepted this estimate. I am going to change the ... status from pending to accept it. In order for you to be able to send out an invoice with this estimate, you need to change the status from pending to accepted. I'm just gonna say customer accepted the invoice. Perfect! As soon as I changed it to accepted the creates a pledge or creates an invoice button will automatically show up for me. So again, I'm going to click save on ... this. And I'm going to give you a quick preview of how the estimate looks like now that we've accepted it. So once the estimate is ... accepted, you will see accepted by the ... name of the person, and then the date that the person accepted the estimate. That's how that looks like. So I'm done creating all of my estimate. It is now time and I already click save. I'm going to click save and close, so you see where the estimate is showing. So my estimate tab here, this is known as the money bar. My estimates tab here is now showing that I have $12,000 under John Doe, which is what we created. This is the one that I created before. So I'm going to open that up again. Now, to create an invoice from this particular estimate. You can click on this button to do it here or you can click on new transactions here and then do pledge. If you're if the system has ... accepted your changes you'll see that as invoice so you have two different options of creating an invoice from that particular estimate. And where you want to create an invoice from that estimate if you did this second option, you can type the customer ... name. As soon as you type the customer name the system is going to give you the estimates at the side here and ask you do you want to add the estimate into this particular invoice to send to the customer. I am going to click the option that says add. Now when I click that option, it says add the system is going to ask me how much of this invoice "do you want to build lots to discuss for now"?. You can do total of all the estimate lines which is the entire 12,000. You can do a percentage of each line so you can set the system hey, I want to do 50% I want to do 20%, 30%, you can do that option, and the system will automatically do the ... calculation of the total amount for you. Or you can do the custom amount for each line. So whatever option you choose here, if you choose the second ... option, the system will take the percentage of the total ... amount for you. Or you can do it manually yourself by using the custom amount for each line and I will show you how both of them work in two ... different invoices. So we're going to do the second option. And let's say we want to do instead of 50% I want to do 30% of the invoice. So when I enter the ... percentage here, the system automatically takes 30% of the 12,000 is this total ... amount. So now I'm going to click copy to invoice. As soon as I click copy to invoice, the system is going to automatically calculate 30% of each line amount for me in put it in the system here to ... send out to the customer. So this is an invoice. And again, you can email this out to the customer, I'm not going to do that because again, I'm just doing a test follow this. So there's an invoice so I'm going to click save and close. That is how you create an invoice using that second method percentage from an estimate to an invoice part, okay. Let's say you want to choose the third option. So if you wanted to do the third option, we're going to repeat what we just stated again, I'm going to click on the third ... option. I'm going to click on pledge ... again, which is also invoice and I'm going to do John Doe. And again, the system will bring back that estimates. It's always going to give you ... the full estimate amount and then you do the calculations yourself or allow the system to do it for you. So if I click Add again, it's showing me the remaining total of my estimate is only 8400 out of that 12,000 that I build before. Instead of doing the second ... method, I want to do third method, I want to do the third option ... and show you how you can still achieve the percentage stuff. Let's say you want some of the lines to be billed 50% and other lines to be Bill 20%. You can use the third option to do that. So I'm going to do the third option. And here in the third option is show me all the full amounts that I previously had. What I'm going to do here is click on, again I clicked on the line on the do click on the line, it showed it showing it as an amount. So I'm going to change this ... as a percentage and tell the system Hmm, I want you to actually do 50% of that line amount. I'm going to tell the system ... that I wanted to do for that first one and then the second one, I want the system to do 20% of that amount. And then the third line, I want the system to do 80. Let's do 15% of that line. So as you type your percentages, the system automatically calculates the amount from the major total amounts for each line. So you've done the estimate ... and let's give this different dates to keep it different from the other one. You've done all the estimates, everything checks out, you have a class tracking, you have your location tracking. Now, tags as a brand new future ... that is still somewhat in beta mode. So I won't really focus on or ... stress about that. And you can always at the top here under the customer name you always see this stuff this is linked, it you always link it back to the estimates. You can always go back to the estimate to figure out how much was built and how much is still left over. So here I've done on my estimate. So I'm just going to click save ... and close. Now the system is to showing the full estimate that tab will always ... show the estimate amount. A perfect way to find that and see what else is left over to ... bill out for particular stakeholder or customer is to go into the report center. In in the search bar here you ... want to type estimates. And we type estimates to bring up the estimates and progress invoicing summary by customer. Now you can also find that report if you scroll all the way ... down to the sales and customer section. The report is here. If you tend to do a lot of ... progress. It wasn't I will recommend ... starring in this, so that this shows up on to your favorites. And it's more easier and ... quicker for you to get access to that reports. But I usually tend to just do search for the report in my search bar and the system ... will come up with the report. So here is this estimate report. So, this estimate report shows me ... this is the amount of the estimate. This is the amount that are invoiced out. This is the percentage total I have invoiced out and here's my balances leftover from the estimate. So this is pretty much in a nutshell the quick easy way to use estimates and progress invoicing in QuickBooks Online. Feel free to leave a comment below letting me know if you have further questions about this or if you want to see me ... do other types of videos, clarifying some things and QuickBooks Online. Feel free to leave a comment ... in the comment section. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and also hit ... the notification bell icon that will you get an update of when tend to post different content, technology tips and tricks and finance tips and tricks to help you manage nonprofits ... organization and actually build sustainable profits. Music Outro.