Streamline Your Processes with Contractor Invoicing Software for Quality Assurance

Contractor invoicing software for Quality Assurance

are you still wondering which app you should be using for invoicing and quoting well in this video i show you which one i've been using for seven years as a plumbing contractor [Music] welcome to the plumbing gurus my name is karsten on this channel we strive to save you money and keep you informed on all the proper plumbing practices so i've decided to go through and create a playlist for you guys on the back end of how i run my business so i want to help you if you have any questions at all i'd love to hear your questions or maybe you have some tips for me too i'm still i'm constantly learning constantly changing the way i run my business asking other people asking other contractors i've got electrician buddies contractors i'm always asking them how they're kind of like doing their quotes their invoices their how how they structure their business they're always kind of a learning curve so it's a great thing to do to ask questions for people it's the first thing i can kind of advise for you to do is ask constant questions to other people that have been doing it for a very long time because it's a great way to learn i learned personally by just doing it and asking other people how they've kind of been doing it and learned from them by watching them do it and make sure you're asking the right people don't ask somebody that's had a failed business or anything like that ask people that are successful people you want to emulate things like that so what i want to do is create kind of like a playlist of all the different things we're going to have a bunch of videos that are of kind of like what software i use or app i've been using that's what this one's about the joyst app this is what i use for my invoicing and estimating i also want to be able to create a video of how i i'll go through like a step by step of how i quote my jobs how i invoice them i'm gonna kind of like just a bunch of different videos i also have a quote template that i've created that's gonna be a big one i'm gonna be working on in a future video here i also will be selling this quote template i've put a lot of time and effort into this over the years i've spent countless hours looking for other stuff without further ado i'm just gonna jump into showing you which app i use here it's called joist for contractors and it's a great app let's uh jump right into here so this is i just started a whole new account here i didn't want to really go through my list of contacts and all the addresses it's kind of i just want to keep things as private as i possibly can here so i'm just going to go through and kind of i'm not going to do any mock-ups on this one that'll be in a future video so stay tuned to this this playlist i want to help you guys with kind of staying organized as much as possible i know for me at the very beginning i was searching for this type of content on on youtube all over the place like how to quote how to invoice nobody's really willing to share this information so i want to be able to do that i want everybody to succeed i'm not here to compete with people like i have friends that are plumbers and they don't know businesses i'm all about helping each other out we work with each other we help each other grow and i think that's the way people just should start thinking instead of this old mindset of like oh keep it to yourself kind of thing so let's just jump right into here right here you can see here this you can put your logo here so if you have a company logo which i think you probably should they have a company logo just get your pdf for png or jpeg whatever it is you just load it into there and that would be under i believe it's under settings so you go to settings you go to my company and then right here is company logo so you just yeah you drop your company logo in there down here you type in your company name let's say it's the plumbing gurus coming gurus that's not my real company you know five six eight nine eight that's not a real phone number and then and then in here you can put your address uh your city your state your country your postal code your business tax information it's kind of nice to have that there i put my gst number for us wherever you are if you're in the states i don't know what it is you use but if you want to put your tax number in there we have to charge gst every time we send an invoice we charge gst which is five percent so if people want to see your gst number to so that they know that it's a legitimate thing you put it in there company email plumbing gurus gmail.com and whatever your email may be you can put all this other information in your website if you have one your industry that was already filled out when i first signed up so they know you're a plumber if you're some other contractor all the different ones are in there there's electrical hvac general contracting it's really good for trades and that's what this app is actually meant for right now we are on the free version there's a few different things here so if you go to joyce pro it wants you to oh it wants us to save so it will save there first if you go to joyce pro it wants you to you got to pay for it so i've had this for about seven years now when i first got it everything was free and that was a lot it was about you know a couple years ago i think they switched over and started charging so i got like a good five years of free of everything working really good but then they added in quickbooks sync that's probably the biggest one that i reason i pay for it now i think i pay 120 bucks a year annually us dollars i believe that's for the pro then there's the elite and i think that's about 300 bucks a year and the pro i got i like the quickbooks sync the paypal you can get payments with paypal but they do charge i think it's like 2.83 or something like that for credit cards so i don't usually offer the credit card to people unless they're willing to pay that extra three percent because that's just money out of my pocket that's how i structure you can you can easily just add it on every invoice where you just add that extra three percent and nobody kind of sees it just kind of in the back end that's how you want to structure it if they pay credit card you can do that too then there's a reports thing so like this just gives you like annual and monthly and reports and it kind of just keeps you updated on your analytics and things like that it's nice to have i don't personally pay for the elite but if you do you get all of this stuff it gives you all these cool reports and things like that my wife personally does all that stuff in quickbooks and we have kind of everything documented in there i do recommend using quickbooks too and maybe we'll do one of those i'll have to get my wife to do that one again so you come in here yeah you got your payments here this is where you set up your your paypal account if you have a paypal account you set it up here you can see here when you send an invoice they can fill out their credit card information and they pay with paypal uh it used to be called we pay and i wasn't a big fan of the we pay and i'm glad they went over to paypal because it's a little more trusted and paypal has been around for a very long time so you know you can trust paypal and it goes directly to your paypal account and then with my paypal account i have it set up so that it just automatically goes into my bank account and i don't have to do anything so it's right there but you do lose that three percent transaction fee if you don't want to lose that transaction fee i usually just get people to send me an e-transfer kind of thing all these different things so document settings you can do your payment terms if you want to be paid in 30 days i keep it at zero so i try to just get paid as soon as possible kind of thing and then there's a footer message this is just on each invoice it'll kind of show up a little note for them taxes so like you can add a new tax we have a uh so gst is what we have i do gst and then five percent is what it is and then you can add that to each invoice every single time and then contracts you could write out a proper contract or just keep it generic like this by signing this document the customer agrees to the services and conditions outlined in this document generally that's that's more of like if you want to really get deep into contracts you can i don't personally i just keep it generic for myself quickbooks sync is really nice i do highly recommend it if you use quickbooks it automatically syncs it with quickbooks and then it just makes it so much easier i don't do any of my bookkeeping my wife does all that so i like i said i'm going to try to get her do one of these videos and show you how to properly use quickbooks i got to convince her to do that though then we go into clients i don't normally add clients specifically here because every time i do an invoice you can just do a new invoice then you can add a client here and type their name in so like john doe and then you type up their email address you fill out all their information here and then you can start adding line items so this is really nice it it kind of like just separates everything you got invoice one so it kind of keeps track of that and when you add line items so you can call it whatever whatever you're doing i can do let's just say like plumbing service or like a carburetor so you're doing a carburetor carburetor it's probably not how you spell it and then right here it's nice you just click on gst and it automatically adds your five percent then you just say garb whatever it is that you're doing this isn't really how i would normally do it but and then let's say 250 dollars for your carburetor it automatically does subtotal down here and you can add markup if you want you can add a discount you can request a deposit you can do a payment schedule and then it automatically adds your gst and your total is right there and then you can do all this other stuff like show your client signature your signature you can have notes in here like includes includes removable of old if they have an old one you want to put photos in there some stuff you can i think that's part of the pro i believe it is yep i've never needed to use photos to do anything like that so i'm not sure if that's something you do or not but again so then you save this is not how mine would normally look i just thrown one together and then here i don't normally like to do the quantity rate you can if you want to if you want to do things by hourly you can do the quantity and then your rate 90 bucks an hour 100 bucks an hour 80 bucks an hour or whatever it is and then subtotal i usually just turn off those i go display options and i just turn them off and i have a total so it's nice that way you just have a carburetor the guard probably want to put a little more detail into your descriptions but i'm just doing this for these purposes and then it has everything this is nice and then with your logo it looks good and then all your proper information just looks like a good well laid out invoice or estimate depending on what you're doing here if you jump over to estimates it's pretty much the exact same thing just in an estimate formation so if you're depending on how you're doing it if you're doing bigger jobs doing lots of estimates you want to go through and do some detail again i'm going to do a full video on how i do my estimates so stay tuned for that one so that's pretty much the gist of it and then as you add as you keep adding things this goes right into your items here so now you've got a carburetor so every time you do a new estimate or an invoice you can kind of like lay out all of your different line items so you got garbrader say you're doing like a new house renovation or you're doing a hot water tank or you're doing depending what you're doing depending on what whatever trade you're in you can organize these line items however you want and again i will go through and show you how i have done mine but this is a great thing because now it's like every time you do a carburetor it's already the rate's already there the description's already there all you got to do is put in your new clients information or maybe you're doing an existing client then you go to my clients and then oh look there's john doe he's already filled out his address is there and this is real nice and it's very efficient i really do enjoy using joyce i haven't personally tried anything else i got this app pretty much right when i started my company and i've been using it since but i've had zero issues tech support's always been good you click over here you have an issue you ask them a question and they're usually very quick to getting back i actually just asked them a question today about doing an affiliate for this so i'm not an affiliate because they don't offer an affiliate program i just actually really like this program and i want other people to you know be able to use it the support is awesome i do recommend using that if you have any questions that's the best place to go they've always been very quick to answering and i've never had an issue in that department the other really nice thing about this app is it's on phone too so i use it on my iphone as i'm finishing a job i generally will go back to my truck and i'll go onto my phone on my app and i'll fill out the invoice and instead of having like a paper one written out to the client i go and just fill it out on the phone sometimes you can send it right away and go get payment right away but i usually most of my clients i have existing and i trust them so i just email it to them on my email it says specifically in there thanks for your business blah blah blah and then it says if you want to e-transfer me it has my email there it tells them how to e-transfer me properly and that's how i get paid they usually pay instantly and then when i'm doing bigger quotes and i'm working at home on my computer like i am now i'll use the desktop version so this one was just a little bit of a walk through i hope you guys enjoyed the video if you have any questions at all please don't hesitate to leave comments join our facebook group the plumbing gurus come in there and ask us any specific questions if you have questions for me on how to use this you can ask me but again your best bet is to go to the support help they are very helpful that way to set things up but it's all pretty simple and basic and that's what i like about it again if you have any questions at all please let me know and if you guys are enjoying this type of video and you want to see more please let me know what you would like to see because i would love to put some content out on the different aspects of the kind of the back end of the business stuff again thanks for watching and hope to see you guys in the next one