Effortlessly Manage Your Consulting Invoice for Planning

Consulting invoice for Planning

in this video you're going to learn what's new in monograph all right welcome everybody thank you so much for joining in I can see lots of customers coming in this is the big topic what's new in monograph end of 2022 and we're bringing discussion with customers to make this whole conversation a little bit more interesting so what we're going to be talking about is both what's new in the product and also the conversation with these four fine customers at monograph so if you haven't gotten the email or the app notification or any other messaging that we've shared today in over the past couple weeks three really big things are coming to monograph and they're already here today that's a new project planner so that you can budget your projects faster and plan Consultants at a phase level we've got new changes to client invoicing so that you can invoice your consultant fees to your clients with more flexibility and in Project financials track your consultant fees by phase from plan to paid we're going to get into all this in more detail in just a moment and so we're going to have three sections of conversation with these four monograph customers Adam James Sean and Rachel I'll do a little intro before we lead into the questions but this is going to be the format today so we're going to be moving between conversation and then quick tours by Helen of the new product updates so what are the big ideas for this conversation today really really big ideas that are you know challenges in practice preventing budgeting risks across your team architecture projects are complex client budgets are limited how do you create uh Happy clients but healthy projects reducing client disputes and slow payments cash flow may come up in this conversation in terms of how to make that part of your business more healthy and then overall bigger picture questions about adopting Better Business habits in your firm going out into practice not really having learned about the business of architecture outside of architecture school you have to learn it on your own and by developing career-long relationships with people from school or your colleagues you assemble your own sense for how to do business as an architect so we're going to talk about that and then finally growing your firm with smarter operations uh we have a business professional here not from architecture Rachel Ebner uh who Sean brought into the firm and has been a activating Force for business growth at Carbon design and architecture so really excited to reveal more of Rachel and Sean's story at Carbon today big big picture of monograph you don't really get to see it this way but this is really helpful and I hope will become more clear in this in these new releases the tracking of value across your complex architecture projects from planned logged invoice to paid is an issue that we call budgeting risk and whether you start in planner see your projects in project overview track and schedule your workload across your team in resource log again log your activity across your team against your plans in timesheets forecast out and look historically at how you've done in terms of overall fees in your practice in reports invoice your clients out for the work you've done and getting and get paid for your work as a firm and then finally looking and analyzing that big picture across those four stages and then delegating that management to your project management team is the big question that monograph helps firms like yours solve to track and grow your business and monograph and the big thing about monograph is that it's designed for Architects by architects what we have here and those who have joined today are part of a big community of firm leaders that are trying to change their trajectory in business and what we've heard from firm leaders across different roles in the office is that principles can engage their clients more confidently architecture teams can become more efficient and that doesn't mean losing creativity it actually means increasing creativity because time can be spent on more valuable questions monograph is activating across the entire team more financial awareness and what that can mean to firms is cutting out the intensity of meeting time by half for invoicing meetings or by 80 percent in resourcing meetings on a weekly basis or a monthly basis and the reason why we can create these Solutions is because we're so invested in listening to Architects listening to small to mid-size firm leaders and the business managers and project managers that contribute to Great firms our product team has done over 200 customer interviews since this in this year and we are listening intently and some of the releases that you're going to see are driven from those customer research interviews so here's the format um I'm going to quickly go through what we've seen with these new releases you can help your project teams work within phase budgets with the new project planner it's much more clear Sean called it a executive summary where you can jump in jump out and know what's going on we have heard this so many times from different firm leaders that want to connect what they communicate in their contracts whether it be with residential clients or government clients more control over how you communicate your consultant fees in your invoices so that you prevent unnecessary questions from your clients which will slow your payments and put your projects at risks for increased write-offs or other issues in cash flow that happen in the payment side and the invoicing side of your projects lastly tracking how your phases are performing across those four stages planned logged build and invoiced and making it so that your project managers now have the awareness not just you as a principal but you can start delegating Financial awareness for projects to your project managers this is all more clear in the new project financials page and not only that you now have the granularity of phase level Consultants so your project managers can be aware of where Consultants have been budgeted four phases so you don't over bill for their fees or pay them too aggressively in the beginning without realizing what the effect that is going to have on your budget so all together this plan logged invoice paid story is more clear in monograph today to help your firm and you delegate across your firm reducing and preventing budgeting risks across your business all right so that's all that we're going to get more into the details about that Helen is going to do a quick tour but let's move into some interesting conversation with Adam Gail James Blythe both principles at level architecture and interiors and Sean Williams and Rachel Ebner of carbon design and architecture I'm going to do a really quick intro to these fine people uh James uh James is a very design oriented architect with a strong interest in sustainability and emerging green technologies always willing to listen and work with ideas presented by the client and the Builder he enjoys having the chance to take the project to the next level and constantly seeks new ways of improving not only as firm but like today also our profession as a whole Adam is a firm believer in the 80 20 rule so what is a fundamental often repeatable uh 20 of work that gets us 80 percent to the finish line so that we can conversely spend eighty percent of our time resolving the 20 of true design challenges the fun stuff we've done a webinar in the past with Adam and he shared some great insights on what they found when they were started working in monograph some of the issues they discovered for example in SD phases in terms of their Tendencies as a design firm before they didn't have that awareness Sean is founder and principal at Carbon design and architecture Sean is an enthusiastic and accomplished architect with many years of progressive design experience and comprehensive expertise and Lead the living building challenge Consulting biomimicry principles and design sustainable design and Architectural design partner and director of development at Carbon design and architecture is Rachel Ebner her main responsibilities include strategic growth and client development prior to carbon she spent time in an engineering firm and as a general contractor and and which gives her a broad perspective on the construction industry so we got a really interesting group today I'm going to start us off with a conversation with a question what has happened because you have this career long relationship discussing the practice of architecture even though you don't work in the same firm what what has happened as a result of keeping that career-long relationship in trying to figure out the business side of architecture oh so much trouble James gets me in more trouble than I can I can tell you here um no I I would say it's been a blessing actually you know James myself and and two other friends have a monthly call where we we discussed some of the issues actually some of the results of our conversations and monograph have come out of those conversations like the Consultants you know what what happens when we get over our skis and and we still owe the Consultants because they have an invoices yet for the SD phase or the DD phase but um you know this this was I you know James correct me I think me you and Eric were having that issue last year Eric um mainly because he got to the end of the year in this consultant through this massive invoice on them right it's a big challenge I think the you know the Crux of it was that we became kind of friends in school we all had a shared sort of suffering I guess in design school together you know Chris you mentioned that we we really aren't trained professionally in school you know we're trained to do very good problem solvers to do other things but we really aren't trained in the business too much so I think we realized that um maybe not right away but after a little while we actually had shared stories that could kind of complement each other's you know Shawna spent some times in bigger firms I've worked in kind of medium and small firms so you can share a lot of information and I think historically Architects are just in these invisible silos for whatever reason and I think there's a new generation of folks that are out that just kind of want to make change in the in the broad profession you know for the better and so this was a great you know example of one of those you know maybe over the last like decade kind of conversations you know we got a chance to share that you know we were using it and how we're using it what we were getting out of it and why we feel like it's a lot better solution than others we've tried in the past so I think sharing that kind of information helps the practice you know it's not really a competitive Advantage necessarily um when we all win yeah it's cheaper than therapy and um as alcohol so that it works well it works well I'd love to hear how y'all uh discovered and kind of considered monograph or what made you kind of share it out with your other friends well this one I'd like to turn over to Adam so Adam's in charge of a lot of that research and uh how to make our firm function better sure I mean this we we discovered monograph um is actually just after the the birth of my first son listening to a lot of podcasts on walks and I think it was Rob who came on a podcast with Evelyn Lee and um Janine Chastain practice were disrupted is this whole episode about you know the software created for Architects by Architects to help us overcome the challenges we face you know just like James was describing on all the stuff we didn't go to school for and so you know of course as a a new father trying to capture back every piece of time I possibly could and knowing that we were running into some of these issues it's like all right let's go let's go do the trial and um I mean everyone was really responsive I think I was able to get on the call with Rob I think I had like a private one hour tutorial and you know just everything to kind of get set up and running and really quickly you know we realized that oh my gosh this time Contracting software if nothing else is light years ahead of where we're at and then oh my goodness they have they're software developers who are listening to us as we as we you know have needs and they're building out the program and so it was really just just kind of a perfect match and you know like James said a giant win and you know from from the get-go we were like everybody used to be checking this out so that's that's kind of how we fell into it yeah Helen we were uh right around the same time that they had discovered it was kind of interesting um you know my other business partner and I were struggling to find a a software that could show us all of the project in in one window um mainly because we you know we'll have a lot of small projects that that have short fuses and then you have longer projects the short projects will get hidden sometimes in the in the list of project numbers and it didn't really have uh that visual connection with us um until we saw this software where we could literally put the whole thing on on the TV screen and show everybody okay this is when everything is due see these things coming up so you know we were you know I think we were all searching for Solutions at the same time and it just kind of uh jammed myself ended up uh walking into this with you know looking for two different options but coming up with uh the same solution which I thought was interesting now as an architect as the firm leader as a as a firm owner in an Architecture Firm you have hundreds of problems you have so many issues that you're dealing with why why did you prioritize what was going on that made you prioritize this action on this problem uh when you did so I think for us it had to do with we felt like we we just had too many steps to do the same thing so we were looking for like what is the least amount of things we can do in the least amount of programs and have the same end result work better and we were also struggling with this idea of constantly keeping up with project hours and where we were forecasting budgets so you know some people are going to cringe here but we were tracking everything individually with Excel sheets I think and then having to have that data updated as everyone's aware the data is only as good as how often it's being updated so without it being any kind of intelligent entity it just sits there waiting for you to input it and hopefully that's right and then there's hours and hours that go by and it just honestly we we got to the point where like there's got to be a better way to do this and also we were finding that you know there was a lot of like having to send that out and there was all these steps and having to send different reports to different project managers and then reviewing it so when Adam presented it to me I mean it was like immediately just yes this is a great solution because of what Sean said you know you could visualize everything and so you've got your project managers and everybody you know and they're opening that up there's no question as to where the timeline bar is and where the dollar sign bar is and that's a huge deal because you get that kind of like whenever you need it not on some Cadence that you know your reports come out report yeah it can be more trying to find your whip where's that whip where do I put it from exactly yeah just you know to have that live data that's that's smart that's up to date that's accurate that doesn't take you know all those steps you know Jake says some people are going to cringe just probably pointing to me um but yeah you know we we have a lot of young project managers in our office and I think just having the information is so accessible you know especially at a glance you have to be able to just very quickly kind of run down the list and say this one's fine this one's fine we need to spend a little bit more attention here it's such a useful tool for I mean a firm owner or a project manager just to be able to have that information yeah and frankly people on the team so the project manager doesn't even have to be the one cracking the web you know anybody on the team sees it yeah we're doing great we're not doing great you know exactly James let me talk about the same thing too our staff you know we remind them they have to manage up the same way that we manage down um and and across so that way you know we're all productive um and and having that is is sort of a peripheral um information that they don't even have to think about they can just say hey you know this is getting kind of close do I need to worry about this how much more time should I spend on it um and you know we'll constantly say hey have you looked at your timesheet and seen how many hours we gave you this week on it because we want you to look at the First on Monday you know we go with it and say hey this is what we have this is what's going on does this look right and by Friday you know we're looking at completely different hours and like okay what happened here oh the client called they made a change here okay did we ask them for an ad service right so now we're talking about what an ad service is they can start to rep uh recognize the ad Services when they come out from the client you know some things where oh they want to change the color of this you know we don't really worry about but when they're making big moves now our staff are asking hey is this a legitimate ad service or can I just do this in hours that you've given me um and and that's a huge help you know that's why it's one less thing you know when as an owner and a manager you know your balance in so many different things and it just depends on which fire you have to put out today and if you have one last piece of software that you have to think about um and you're getting the information quicker when that client calls you're like uh you're right we're behind a little bit yeah we'll get somebody on this right away and you can really allocate that that that's huge um and allows us to Pivot very quickly that's great I'm going to transition us now to seeing what has changed and improved in the project planner because everything about what you're talking about is all driven from easily being able to centralize your budgets your budgets between your architecture team and your consultants and then you're across your phases and then across your roles so everyone is working understanding that there are limited resources so I'm going to pass this over to Helen to give us a quick tour of the newest project planner available right now for everybody all right awesome yeah give me one second let me get this teed up for everyone here we've got some good questions that will relate to uh Rachel's story as well I'm really excited to get into in just a moment as well also thank you everybody for participating and coming in we have some interesting other programming coming up in the future that I'm going to talk about at the end of this call where we'll have more opportunities for everyone to chime in uh today is just a selection of four customers but we know we have a lot more stories in this group so stay tuned for or later in the call to see a preview of what's next there hi everyone this is Helen lummis with monograph and I'm so excited to be here today in this webinar showing you all some of the great new features that we've been working on you can see here we've got a holiday theme going on in our example account here so just want to say thank you all so much for a wonderful year and happy holidays looking forward to a new year with all of y'all and hoping that some of these new things we're going to show you here in a second are going to bring a little bit of joy to you and your firm alright so let's just take it off from the top here we're going to go ahead and select new project and that's we're going to see some of our first changes so new project in light of our little holiday theme we're going to say Santa's Workshop project number as you need to following your own typical nomenclature we're going to select this nice icy blue for um for today for the Santa's Workshop feels like the North Pole template's not going to touch on those today feed type we're going to go with Bilbo and now you can already see we've got some changes here so we're looking at a more additive method versus a subtractive method we were kind of doing earlier to total up to our project budget so ten thousand dollars architectural fee two thousand dollars as our consultant fee quick note tool tips throughout there's a lot of great tool tips we've put in for this um really encourage you all to take a moment especially as you're getting used to this pause read about them if there is a really helpful article it's specific to that tooltip that will be linked there as well this is essentially saying this ten thousand dollars in architectural fee is only counting towards fixed fee phases hourly phases are going to kind of not count towards that overall architectural fee we'll go ahead and click create now you can see we've got a whole new look so we have our total project budget in the top left our architectural fee is here we haven't allocated anything yet so let's go ahead and start doing that for the purposes of today I'm keeping this very very simple similar functionality that we had previously phase we can link the phase date range feed type budget percent budget and percent continue to work in tandem meaning we could say I only want to work a thousand dollars in schematic and therefore it's ten percent or I could say I want to work 20 of my fee in schematic we'll go ahead and click save next we'll add one more phase in so we'll say design development in this case we will link to schematic design we've got our date range and we'll go ahead and say we're going to work the rest of this 80 on design development and hit save you have the same drag and drop functionality that you did and as we add in our phases you're going to see a nice list here populate on the left if you ever need to edit these again you can jump back in and edit those there by clicking on that pencil icon all right let's go ahead and assign in our team so we're going to say we're going to have buddy on this one the intern is pre-populating here because buddy has a default role same thing with Rudolph Rudolph also has a default role as the project designer that's the role he always works at and then in case you don't have a default role this is what you would see so here I would want to select the role and then the bill will rate that's of course all pulling from our settings so some really fun things is over here we have the ability now to assign to All Phases we can also assign Rudolph to all of our phases as well a really nice time saver for y'all I'm going to go ahead and put in 50 50 here again just keeping everything very very simple today design development you can see I've already brought in buddy and Rudolph they're here they're ready to go one other thing is if Rudolph needs to go off and do some special training it's very easy now to change that team member so I can jump in and assign Ralphie woof if you know Rudolph needs to go do some training jump to another project we know some of your projects can go on for a while so it's nice to have that easy flexibility to change things so those are some of our our big changes really nice time savers for y'all another thing that I want to highlight here is the ability to essentially if we change our architectural fee more easily distribute out whatever that extra amount is so for this I'm going to just show you the kind of Maximum there's some options in between but I'll just go ahead and say here again we have our tool tips I'm going to say we're going to go up to 20 20 000 so we're gonna double I am going to select update phase budgets you can see here what this means I'm also going to select this update hours on roles essentially what both of these mean is that we're going to be using the percent amount distribution that you already selected and kind of Distributing proportional so what this means is with twenty thousand dollars we had a 2080 split between schematic and design development updating phase budgets will hold that likewise we had 50 50 splits between Rudolph and Buddy on each of those phases so clicking this will also take those hours as a result of this increase and keep that split so I'll go ahead and click save and now you can see we've got four thousand and sixteen thousand so I don't have to go back and redo anything we maintained that 50 split between these two folks and just up their hours ingly with this higher project fee so a really nice way as we change things as things change to be able to control that other things to note you know you don't have to do that there's other ways that you could don't have to press update phase budgets so I encourage um you know going to our knowledge base learning about this and hovering on those tool tips maybe trying around with a project just right off the bat to kind of understand how you can toggle those things off and on select or not select as you need up next we're going to go to Consultants before I dive in here similar we've got project budget Consultants fee and then we need to allocate I want to highlight this purple box so you might be already asking how is this going to show up on my invoices and the answer is that you're in control of that in our next little video we will be going over that you have three options you can hide itemize or separate your Consultants by phase so you're in control that's controlled within our invoice designer here we're focusing more on our amounts for both the consultants and the planner we recommend having your contracts close by just to make things go quickly with this we have phase consultants and project Consultants those descriptions are written out nicely here phase Consultants are going to be those included in your face fees or doing work during a phase examples might be your MEP or Structural Engineers project Consultants or Consultants who will be working on this project but are not associated with a phase so those might be more like your surveyor or your geotechnical engineer so with that being said we're going to go ahead and add in our Consultants this list is customizable from your settings section of the app we're going to select MEP engineer I'm going to say they're going to work with us just on schematic design 500 hit save and then maybe my structural engineer they're going to work with us on both schematic and design development so we'll say let's do 250 and we'll do 250 here as well and then hit save so now I just wanted to show you that function where you can have some Engineers that work with you on All Phases some just work on one or two again you can select that here within the Consultants tab up here too I can see I have a thousand dollars unallocated so now I'm going to add in my project Consultants I'm going to go with my surveyor 500 hit save and last but not least my geotechnical engineer for 500 as well hit save that save button is a big change from our previous planner so do make sure whether you're in the planner or the Consultants tab as you're adding information and you hit save all right all that being said this looks great next we're going to jump into General I just want to show one or two other things here which is Project size you can now add in your square footage and just wanted to highlight that as a great way we have some reports that are now using that as well so with that I'll go ahead and click done and now Santa's Workshop is ready to be billed to log time to buy buddy and Rudolph all right I hope you all enjoy all these great new features thanks a lot Helen so yeah um we just ended or we just saw a preview of how planning has an effect on invoicing now a lot of customers haven't been able to get into monograph invoicing yet and a lot of the time it's actually been held up around this issue with Consultants for both of you in your firms so all four of you what makes invoicing so important about the whole picture in monograph what is it about that that is so critical for you to be able to do in this system well I can tell you you know when Adam and I uh so right now we don't have an office manager and actually there's been a lot of things we've been able to do without an office manager role and actually having this software has been one of the more critical pieces of it so this change having now done invoicing you know over a year now so each month they sit down and work through it this is going to be a huge deal because we're still having to use kind of another software to augment this and back check things yeah I mean it I think it goes to the end user or client of you know how they want to see their invoices what they want to see what they don't want to see um you know I think you mentioned it earlier Chris about what helps get these things processed faster so that we can keep going and you know to kind of directly answer the first half of your question question without invoicing we don't have a fern and so you know we could be the best designers in the world but if we don't have funds coming in to keep everything going and to keep our Consultants going and keep talented staff on board it really doesn't matter so you know this is kind of the Crux of it and then like James said it's you know how much can all this be done within one software as opposed to QuickBooks in Excel and the third one and some time tracking and so you know the fact that the monograph has all of these features built in and now you know kind of the extreme level of customization where you can craft exactly what those invoices look like and who shows up and who doesn't what's above the line what's below it you know what it looks like when you add in that additional service um that's incredible I mean that that really does kind of check off every box for for what we need in order to get those invoices out and then communicate that information back to our staff for what we have built for what deliverables are upcoming and whether or not we need to kind of ramp up our marketing effort or dial it back so um it's awesome to have all of that Under One Roof and then have it so accessible what about for you Sean and Rachel yeah I totally agree it really comes down to that time and transparency and everyone bear with me I lost my voice and I'm going to try to make it through without cracking too much but it's time on our side I can hop in the software and see what have we built where are we on projects why haven't we built is it that we waiting on the consultant to send us an invoice so we can build completely now we can send that invoice to a client like hey this is gesture architectural and there's no confusion of Oh I thought that was everything for this phase so that transparency helps us save time and I think that's really what we're all trying to do is because that's one thing that we can't get back is our time as these principles jump into these projects you know it saves all of us and it saves our firm well it's it's about the the velocity of invoicing right the the faster the invoices go out the quicker you get paid well give it another quicker I mean we we we try not we we try to avoid all the hey by the way you didn't put the period here or that's not the right PO number or it went to the wrong person or you got to copy this person um what this has helped us do is essentially you know every we have an answer for each one of their excuses now and every time they change it we just keep adding it in in the monograph so that you know the next invoice that they get there's you know they have a really hard time of saying well okay yeah it's all here there's nothing else I can say um and then you know we've also started using um the stripe uh for the ACH and the in the credit card payments which we're starting to see clients leverage too which is helping us a lot so you know giving clients opportunities to pay differently you know we're finding helps um the ability that that Rachel can jump in whether she understands the project or not and see where we're at in the project uh from time and where we should be for billing uh is extremely helpful because that takes a load off of my plate and I can focus on dealing with the architecture fires and then she can help with some of the the COO functions uh that I've taken on so we kind of split that role between she and I and and I can't tell you how much that helps when I don't have to sit here and think every single month all right who do we invoice how far we have to go how far did we get on that project how many hours do we have left foreign big things to save time on things that don't keep you up at night it's always uh nice to get that list as small as we can yeah um I love to know kind of like the three biggest successes y'all have had if you have three maybe just like one big one um and using uh monograph with your business so far I think for us I would say um combining it with better processes in the office allowed it so it's not like it's its own Silver Bullet but when combined with better processes with better you know this is what we deliver at each phase this is how long it should take the whole team being accountable throughout the process it really gives our project managers the tools that they need to successfully kind of run a project you know we we've seen a huge change this year with better processes because we had monographs before but we were able to implement starting I guess last December some better internal processes for how we do things how we communicate where handoffs happen so this was a huge tool that visualized a lot of that and allowed us to in the first quarter go through kind of a report card of how it was working and then we have the data kind of accessible yeah and just to quickly expound on that I mean you know three three real specifics one is just time vlogging you know that's something that's so much faster more accessible now you don't have to spend enough to create the one hour to log time you know it's just it just happens and it's super quick so that was one Chrissy mentioned it earlier this this discovery that we constantly ate up our budget in schematic design and so this kind of concerted effort to you know push the stop button when we need to or budget more on in that phase and so that was really useful and then I think what James said is just it's this tool that allowed our young project managers to really see the full scope of a project and so you know it went from being just kind of like we have a mythical budget with you know these phases that have some hours that go to them and you know well we just log our time and that that kind of goes behind the curtain too everything is on Full display and so you know you've got the road map on how to succeed you know how many hours something should be taken and if it's not you know you know who you need to talk to to figure out the solution for that so it just it just became this tool that really was kind of the project map to get us from you know writing the contract all the way through delivering the project and having a successful job yeah and for me in my role something that maybe not a lot of people use monograph for but Sean and I have definitely started using it is targeting so when we look at those projects and we look at which phases and stuff and the time put there it's like wow we're really profitable on these types of jobs wow we're really not profitable on these and we thought those were the jobs that we should be chasing because that was our bread and butter when really we need to be over here chasing these more profitable jobs and monograph really allows us to visually see that in a way that we couldn't see before and it's kind of changed at times part of our strategy and our marketing and some of our clients as well of like wow we need to go after more of this and you know it's great for project management it's great for visuals but it's actually really good for looking at that big picture and next steps and growth as well yeah and and for me it will the enlightenment that aside from being able to see all the projects in one place which I found important um it was also the ability to be able to have a conversation with Rachel as she's going out and doing business development saying hey you know we're we're doing really well in this market you know we we seem to be fairly efficient in that you know how big is that market looking like what can we start to approach who do you need to talk to um and then on the ones where we're not efficient you know is it is it the market it's not efficient is it the client is it the fees it's allowed us to ask those really tricky questions and and go back and look you know it why was our you know how do we know that our team is efficient you know maybe we build them out 100 and it was fine but we didn't realize that they had actually gone over the hours by 2x um previous to monograph we wouldn't have known that um other than if we you know printed out a whip report and uh told us you know what how many hours were allocated to that you know based on the staff and unfortunately we're not accountants and we don't think like accountants but we are running a business so we need to understand how the business works and one of those things is efficiency in the staff and whether or not they're able to get the job done right and if we're in the right Market great stuff so we're gonna switch over to uh Helen is going to do a second tour of the Consultants by phase invoicing flexibility that is going to bring a lot of customers who've been looking at monograph and been stuck on not being able to handle invoicing consultant fees the way they want it's all different now and so Helen is going to do a quick tour and then we're going to continue the conversation after that so stick around uh Helen's going to try we got some comments that um and this is the thing we love your comments we love your feedback thank you for sharing it with us so a few of you had a blurry screen with Helen we're going to be sending recording after this that is very clear so you can follow along and we still have cool stuff coming up after and you will get a great clear shot with the recording hey everyone this is Helen and now we're going to demo the building of invoices using all that great new functionality from the project project planner including the Consultants by phase so before we get there we are going to jump into our invoices index and I'm going to go ahead and Shrink this down a little bit so we have a little more room on our screen if you thought we'd escaped Winter Wonderland you thought wrong we're still there so um here within our overview we have a couple of different filters status client and project you can use all of these to kind of keep yourself organized have a good idea of where things might be standing with certain clients or projects Etc we also have a totals column here so what we can do for example is if I want to see the total of my invoices I've been paid I can select by paid and now I'll see that total here something to note about this is that if you have pages and pages and pages of paid invoices which we hope you do this total here will show the total across all those pages it's not just totaling on that one page so whatever filter you select if you have all those great pages of paid invoices you know this total is going to be showing all of those I'm going to clear that out here over here too I want to share with you this button here we have multiple different options you are now in control of what columns you want to see or hide within this overview we also have payment type and service fee really helpful for those of you using monograph payments and you can also export all this information as you need to up next we're going to jump into the unbilled report this will automatically pre-filter to show unbilled balances there's other ways to filter and sort here I'll let you play around with that on your own but this unbilled balance is super handy we can also come over here and kind of use our arrows to show us you know lowest amount of unbilled all the way to highest probably might want to send a invoice for Elf University coming up here pretty soon from this also I want to show you that you can directly go to building an invoice from here you can also use this button up here this is also available to be exported one great thing about this report is that it'll shortcut you to the time log of the project so for this project we're going to say we're going to build an invoice together for North Pole offices I'm going to jump directly in there to my time log here I can check and see what the teams logged so far not too many hours just yet pre-designed small project looking good so we're going to go ahead and build an invoice for this for this I'm going to jump into the invoices section here and we're going to hit new invoice all right this is our first invoice for this project you can see that monograph automatically adds that 001 so we encourage you to have a chronological framework for your invoices again this is the first one so it'll be 001 the next one we open it'll go to 002 our services through date this is the date range that you want to select what you're billing for so we'll go October to today's date and then one other thing to note if this is your not your first invoice then this Services through date would also include the previous service period so that you can just pick up see what day that ended and start with that next day I'll click create and now within our invoices we have three areas the Builder the designer and preview So within the Builder this is where you'll notice a nice little change we now have this consultant Services tab here we're going to get to that I will go a little bit fast through this through the interest of time today but for those of you you know interested curious want to learn more our knowledge base is ready showing all the functionality within that consultant services within invoices and we'll take you through a little bit slower all the different things within the invoices so here within pre-design I can see the status is completed we'd planned 800 we have 725 unbilled we completed both of our Milestones here way to go team so similar to the project planner where we have the budget and the dollar amount working in tandem similar here so I could say I only want to bill for that 725 dollars it'll auto fill that current complete in this example the team did a great job came in a little bit under we're going to Bill 100 and then here in schematic design you can see we've just started uh working our way through those tasks and Milestones so we're going to just say for this we're only going to build what we have worked thus far so you are in in control of what you want to build for here up next we're going to go to hourly services so here I can see this is my one phase that's an hourly it's construction Administration clicking on this down here it shows me a bit of extra information who logged those times what what was that so we're going to go ahead and click add and up next we're going to go to consultant services so here is the spot where we see some nice changes we have of course our phase consultants and project Consultants broken out similar to what we built out on that project and again keep in mind within the designer that's where we're going to control how we want these consultant information to display this is really a focus on what amounts we want to be billing for so we have our MEP engineer click the down carrot here I can see the phases that MEP is working on with me here is pre-design and I'm going to say that they are also 100 complete that will calculate that current due which of course is coming from planned which we set up in the planner go ahead and hide that so we can focus on our project consultants in this example I'm going to go ahead and say that both of these folks are completely done with their scope of work so we're going to build them both 100 as well now this is our first invoice so previously build amounts and previously build percentages are not displaying here because this is our first invoice however as you move through your project this information will populate ingly so keep that in mind so you can always kind of keep an eye on on things so if you hit you know construction Administration you can see that you've paid out everything but maybe that CA phase for the MEP and that would you know show ingly here all right up next we're going to go to expenses so expenses are logged in your timesheet entry if you have questions about this we recommend watching our team orientation video or go into our knowledge base as well but here we have two tickets to The Polar Express that's what's been logged uh twenty dollars worth we can add all or just add one if you have a bunch of expenses add all buttons a nice time saver we're going to go with ADD here now we've got that in there up next we're going to go to other items so other items is our catch-all location for things such as maybe some discounts additional service taxes things like that so we're going to go ahead and give a discount and say um you know MVP at the reindeer game something fun like that quantity of one and then you put in the rate as well so I'm going to do a minus 250 as it's a discount so up next we're going to jump into the designer again encourage you all to go to our knowledge base check out some of these other options in a little more detail there so lots of options here within our invoice in terms of how this is going to display before I get to that we're going to focus on this piece pieces of information that need to be completed here we can see who we're billing from who we're billing to you can edit both of these within this we're going to select our issue date we'll go with Friday terms these can be customized within settings as well we're going to go for a Net 30 on this and you can see that that already populated for us reference number a field for you or your bookkeeper to decide if you want to use or not use notes this is a nice little spot to put a note here whatever that might be so we'll do happy holidays and thank you short and sweet and now we're going to get into these display options so what we have automatically showing is I forgot to mention our logo and then our brand colors those are decided or set up as well in settings so what we see here is all of our fixed fee Services then we have our hourly services consultant Services expenses and also those other items So within this couple of different options when we have show all fixed Speedline items turned on which we do now this is going to show all of the fixed fee phases including those you are not billing for if I turn that off you will see that that information of those other phases goes away we also have the option of showing previously billed amounts or not so I can toggle that off for a much more minimal type of a look we also down here have our expense receipts so these are our Polar Express tickets I can turn that off as well if we don't want to share those receipts something to note receipts are done at a global basis here so it's either all or nothing you're going to show all your receipts or none of them all right now we're going to get into how we can display our consultant services so here we have three options we can group them in a separate section that's what we have right now so you can see fixed fee hourly then we have our Consultants split up by the project Consultants as well as the phase consultant and then the phase and that amount all these tool tips are great they'll kind of share with you what these will look like encourage you all to again play around maybe build out like a pretending voice and just check check out which of these options is going to work best for you also know that these can change invoiced invoice so you're not locked in you know if you start the project here and you want to switch to something else you can do that as well next I'm going to show you automized by phase so here you can see that we pulled in that MEP information within the pre-design phase here because we have that person as a you know phase level consultant so we're putting that in there as well we also still have our project Consultants broken out separately here because they're at the project level last but not least we can also hide in a fixed phase fee so um what we mean here is that that pre-design total now shows also includes that amount for the MEP engineer so that's lumped into this pre-design no other info and one other thing to note here project level Consultants are still broken out separately all right so we're going to go with hidden in a fixed fee phase I'll turn all this other information back on and now we're going to jump into preview very quickly all right so this is our last spot to kind of give it a double check triple check whatever that might be before we were to Mark something as open so here we have some payment settings if you're using monograph payments you can refer to our article and knowledge base on monograph payments we can share it export it we also have an activity log so this will show when it was created as I come up here and Mark this as open it will show that if you're using payments with us it'll also show you when the client has viewed that invoice as well so we'll just kind of glance this over looks great and there we go so with this I'm going to go ahead and Mark as open you'll get this warning again you know make sure this is kind of your final round before you send it off to your client we'll go ahead and hit Mark is open and now I'm going to jump back to the invoices index here just want to show you some other options here so now we have North Pole offices we can see our invoice it's been open and then over here if I wanted to mark it as paid just want to show you here I can mark this as paid and also select my you know payment date so just wanted to share that with y'all as well and last but not least now that we've built out all this great information in our invoices we can jump back into the project itself into our financials log and here you're going to notice some changes as well so what we've done is we not only have our phases broken out for architectural fees we also have a separate section for consultants if I click this down carrot I can then also see you know my project level Consultants are at the top my phase level Consultants will be underneath those and here I can see all the information what I've planned what I've been builds percent wise you know what's been built what's remaining paid open and past due so all this information will start to populate as you send out your invoices get paid all those great things so also just a quick note I would encourage you to hover on these tool tips really really helpful for all this information again with the phases we have the additional amount here that shows what's been logged down here too we've broken out our expenses in a bit more detail so expenses we can see the category here again categories are customizable for by you within the settings section of the app and we also have broken out our other items so here I can see my discount and as you continue to use invoices these expenses and other items sections will also carry all of that information a little bit further so we encourage you to come in here use the tooltips play around you can export this as well and the last thing I'm going to show you today is that you can also toggle on to include consultant services and phases so what this is done is now if I click within pre-design I can see the total for my architectural services and those consultant Services by phase so really handy as well here I can see you know build this much nothing remaining again just a nice spot to check this all out keep a good eye on what's happening within all of these and again just you have the options of whether you want to include consultant services and phases or not those if you do do this just note that again those project level Consultants will kind of sit here and Float not within those phases all right we will jump back and continue on with our discussion I hope you've enjoyed this video and I hope you enjoy all this great new functionality happy happy holidays thanks so much wow that was great Helen we're about to get to the best part of this so as you bring it up thanks all who have been adding to uh comments in the Q a I've got a ton of questions for our customers here so one big question is with Rachel uh you know there we have a lot of firms in monograph who have a business professional a full-time operations or Finance leader or business leader it goes by different names add Adam and James you've actually managed to delay hiring that kind of role which is common at a certain scale because monograph allows you to sort of extend that Runway with your firm now when we do see customers like Rachel uh with with leaders like Rachel uh we really see monograph take off and I just love to hear about what happens because Rachel and Sean it sounds like you have a very strong alignment on business success you are a great example of a very empowered business leader in an Architecture Firm and I just would love to hear a little bit more about that story and what you've seen so far because of having someone like you Rachel in a firm like carbon yeah so like it like you kind of gave my background I was at an engineering firm I was at a general contractor so I kind of had this background of how they operated and how they did time sheets and when I came to carbon I was like so where do you keep your time logs how do you do all these things and they had a system but it's kind of like what James was saying maybe it's an Excel maybe it was another program and I was like there's got to be a better way and Sean's like well we have this program monograph that we we have and they're working through all these features check it out and so when I started deep diving through I was so incredibly amazed that like Sean said earlier how visual it was and how user-friendly and intuitive I found it compared to a lot of the other software's out there uh that I had used and it really started the conversation for Sean and I to have like hey how was our efficiency you know and these were conversations that you know maybe weren't happening before if they were happening it's helped you kind of felt you're like I feel like it's like this but you didn't have the data to back it up and so it's really how well Sean and I form Direction in our firm and with our third business partner and really have those conversations you know you know do we need more staff um is certain staff overloaded While others aren't how can we reassign jobs to make sure everyone's fair or hey they're you know let's move someone to this sector because they're much more efficient on it and they can knock out more projects and so you know it's really been useful in just starting the dialogue right because that's kind of the first step is starting that dialogue in a business of okay where are we how do we get better how do we have a better product and monograph has really helped us and Sean you can probably speak to the before and after a little better than I can the the before was complete chaos and I think the conversation was hey we have this program Rachel can you kind of sit down and figure out some things with it uh I think it's gonna help us get to that next level um but I'm not quite sure so just you know why don't you check it out and if it works for you then it works for me um I think I think what we figured out was yeah no we need to spend a lot more time with this and sit down and understand you know the the different uh opportunities in here um and start pulling apart the different projects in different ways because you know both Rachel and I are very business oriented and try to think about uh you know uh you know we're doing a business that just happens to do architecture as opposed to an architecture that just happens to do business um I think it's important to find the right tools and make sure that they're efficient especially when you know you're you're a five six person firm um you never know when these opportunities are going to come through and whether they're the right fit or not and this uh these metrics that we've put in the the key performance indicators that we're measuring now I think have been very helpful in our success this year and uh you know a 300 increase so uh you know having somebody like Rachel that's not focused on the design and you know all the the things that go into the design therapy sessions uh really help you know direct the business in a more efficient way and keep keep me out of it and trying to get real creative uh because I have a tendency go figure to to you know try to design everything and and make it all beautiful so sometimes business just has to be what business is and Rachel reminds me um consistently like hey look let's focus on the business side of this the numbers say this I know you're telling me that you want to do this but that might not be this project and those are the kind of conversations that we have to have as as uh principles in The Firm because not every project is going to be you know the Mona Lisa it's or the you know the Frank areas of the world or the other famous uh architectural things sometimes they're just there to help us be Architects and and get money in the door yeah I think the best analogy I think I always use with you all the time with projects is like look think of it like a baseball game right you're gonna hit some singles and doubles some triples and then you're gonna have your home runs and the home runs you know let's design it let's win Awards let's have this beautiful building but let's not forget that to win a baseball game you've got to have those singles and doubles as well you can't just hit home runs every day all the time because your DHS eventually gonna start striking out and it's gonna hurt you that's great just with a few more minutes I'm gonna jump to the end with what I want to show just so we get it in there and we're going to end with one last question so bringing up what we've talked about today we talked about the new features that are live now and you can always go in your app to the what's new button and that will give you a breakdown of the most recent updates um we talked we had a great series of uh dialogue with four firm leaders who are friends with each other talking about monograph talking about how to bring business success to deal with these issues these big ideas in practice like preventing budgeting risks reducing slow cash flow and client disputes adopting Better Business habits and all together growing your firm with smarter operations and the way that this happens is having more discipline and more visibility and more efficiency in how you move your phase budgets across all your complex projects from plan logged invoice to paid so again it's always so awesome to see the feedback and insights from this community of firm leaders and Architects all across the country there are lots more of you we know you have stories to share as well and hopefully these stories from James Adam Rachel and Sean have been inspiring to you to reconsider things like well maybe you should be doing invoicing a monograph now that things are a little easier for you so I want to say I want to give you a really quick preview we have another thing driven from monograph customers and the research we do a big problem that is coming up soon is adjustable billing rates raising your fees systematically over year whatever other canes you have um if you were planning on updating your fees in monograph hold on just a little bit uh we're working very hard trying to get you a new feature that will give you more power in how you track and forecast changes to your billing rates um customers who have been very vocal about the consultant fees by phase this was one of the next most important things on their list and I can tell you it is coming soon the other super cool thing that is long we we launched today is a new office hours program that's very similar to what we just did with these four customers and we're going to start it off in January you can pull out your phone uh take a photo of this or even just use your QR code for this we're bringing on an firm Award winner firm who's a monograph customer snow acrylic Architects Sarah Hughes director of operations and finance there we've done webinars with her in the past she's extremely vocal participant in helping us Create and Craft better practices for firms all across uh the Spectrum across the country with different business models and we're doing a live only conversation with Sarah so it will not be recorded so you have to join live for 30 minutes and if you have a office admin or a director Finance or a business leader in your firm chances are they don't know any other professionals that are like them we talk to a lot of them they're not like architects in that they are very connected with each other but they are figuring out very interesting things so this is a way Sarah called it they're camouflaged they're part of the fabric of making these practices run but they don't have a deep community