Creative Invoice Design for Operations that Enhances Efficiency

Creative invoice design for Operations

hi everybody welcome back to my channel thank you so much for tuning in for those of you that are returning um thank you for reaching out for commenting for liking for subscribing all of the above um if if you are on LinkedIn follow me there um and you can learn a little bit more about what I do and who I work with things like that please also feel free to visit my website you can see you know what kind of services I offer and the things that come up I try to upload all the new and current YouTube videos there as well okay so if there's anything that you want to see please comment that will help my algorithm that being said um I am going to go ahead and jump right into uh invoicing I know a lot of people have asked me about monthly invoicing and closing out a project and and what that looks like so right now I'm just opening a few tabs I always work with multiple tabs open you'll know that's something I say and I do try to point things out it's not possible to possibly give you everything all in one video but I do try to point things out as I'm working and doing these on-screen tutorials okay so um it's it's for you to kind of play back and kind of get used to it a lot of times you don't always know these random tips and tricks so I try to share them as as I do them okay so that being said I do want to bring up a couple of things so we have um assuming you're an interior design firm or architect firm for that matter um when you have projects okay we we know that studio is com comprised of two modules that's how I like to teach in okay we have the project management side and we have the accounting side okay they work hand in hand to provide you with one of the best softwares out there right now okay it's it's such a powerful tool to manage your business and um assuming that you've set things up correctly and know how to navigate within within studio based on how you do business it's probably one of the best tools out there okay and I don't get paid for saying that so um anyway this is the project side um I will also show you that within the project side for those of you that have the full studio um you'll note that there's activities okay and time billing I like to and this is just everything I didn't add more so some of these are old but I'm using them for the purpose of this tutorial okay and what I want you to understand is that um tracking your time within your studio is something that I highly encourage everybody to do if you're not doing it already you don't need a team to begin using this time billing okay I I even track personal time or time away from the office general overhead all of that okay and there's ways to set that up okay so these activities here is for time billing meaning time time billing that you actually spent and maybe any reimbursables and odds and ends okay and that is uh something I will walk over because there's a number of different ways and I I see people often miss this so I want to kind of drill down and give you a little bit more detail and this is going to cover invoicing okay when I say monthly invoicing this is what I'm talking about um and and this is something that I encourage everybody to do monthly okay so for me and everybody that I teach I usually say have all your time at least for the time billing I I care more so that the time billing is captured on or by the fifth of the month okay for the month prior so I'm doing this video it is um it is the 30th of March 2023 and right now we're getting ready to start uh preparing to do our invoicing okay and what the what that means is like for me I care about the time billing and actually a lot of these I wonder if they're all invoiced out um um let's go into time billing and a lot of these have been invoiced out but I'm going to go ahead and just pretend that I'm going to go ahead and invoice these out okay and I I want to show you what I do actually yeah there's still only two okay so what I do from here is I go ahead and run this I usually run it you know like I said I try to do it by the first of the month that way I can capture um anybody that's missing time I usually remind if if it's a bigger company and they have a team this is now the time that I use to kind of send out the email before I get ready to run payroll right so it's the 30th of the month I uh for everybody I work with I run payroll from the 1st through the 15th paid on the 16th and then the 16th through the last day of the month payable on the first okay it's a easy way to keep the cutoffs clean they're nice and that way it forces everybody that is on payroll whether it's payroll 10.99 consultant all of the above it forces them to kind of have all their time in because I use this to pay I use this to pay everybody and I use this to Bill my clients Okay so typically I say okay we're gonna get ready to run the preliminary time billing right now there's not a lot that you can see here but I I'm doing that for a certain reason so this is what I what my time billing looks like see I I'm these are tests entries and this is kind of what we are we're preliminary invoicing our clients so I run these and if sometimes there's multiple Pages or sometimes I see a lot sometimes maybe 20 Pages depends on how big your firm is but this is basically what I'm using to run this I I save this I just basically save it to PDF and I'll just show you okay and I'm Gonna Save that okay I save it to my computer and then I email or I send this off to the owner okay or if you have multiple designers I will run it by designer okay or by project and you know who leads what or you should because it should be in your studio if you don't okay and if you if that statement does not uh click with you revisit some of my setup uh videos okay so this is what I have all the designers or the team Redline what I mean by Redline is they're coming in here they're making sure like I'm I want to make sure that they have the final say in what actually goes out to these clients okay so if they don't like certain verbiage they don't like certain things to be shown that's fine they get that back to me and then I can prepare the time billing okay so that is how I go through time billing I will have additional videos that show you know this in bigger detail but this is a walkover and then the next thing that I make sure of and again this probably is a little more lenient the reason why I care about the time billing here is because I will go in and re-date and I'm not going to get into how you do that um because that's probably a little bit more advanced but I would re-date everything because I want to invoice everything for the prior month by the last day of the month okay so even though I said we're doing it on or by the fifth of the month I want to back date all of these to the prior month right we want to capture our time the time of anybody that we work with in the right month for obvious reasons and again we're looking we're talking to review to update our processes okay not something that I preach in a lot of things that I do so um when we're talking in terms of the project I know people are really um specific of how they build their projects okay for me it really kind of depends if I have a third party shipping and receiving company um or if I am going to take them into our warehouse here at the office um if I am going to have it go directly to the client when that applies okay it's usually not because a lot of the bigger ones we don't we're not going to have it ever go directly to them right for obvious reasons so that being said I usually will invoice certain things out when I know the cost is final okay and what is final like like here you can see that we've only paid a portion of this and we still have a balance that probably was invoiced prematurely the reason why I say that is you want to be mindful you want to invoice the client when you know the amount that we have paid the vendor is good and final and I don't mean just posted I mean we know that it's cleared an account it's cleared our bank or credit card reconciliation okay so I usually don't post these payments any earlier than I know that they really go because those of you know sometimes we might place an order we might know what it is that is that is temporary until it's shipped out so for those of you that have like Fabric or other types of vendors that maybe estimate the freight just like we do to our clients I I try to estimate something so it's not such a shock and then it kind of gives us the ability to adjust okay so I want to make sure that we've paid the vendor in full before I ever invoice the client a lot of you like to wait until it's actually delivered I'm okay with that um the times that I might do it exactly when we know it's final is when cash flow is an issue um because obviously that that you're going to want to track that very carefully I know a lot of people want to um process sales tax a number of different ways and that's a video that's coming up next okay um we'll get into that okay so at the end of the day everything on a project just so you know needs to be invoiced and look exactly like this before we make it inactive okay I want to know that we don't know the vendor any money we don't owe or the client does not owe us any money and that we've fully accounted for it meaning you know there is an invoice okay that's when I usually know if this project is over and I've ran my reports I can make the items inactive but in in terms of invoicing I like to just kind of watch it and and you want to monitor this because this is something that you know is done a number of different ways if you're going to do everything on day which I I know people do that that is fine too okay there's a number of different ways people invoice okay but just know this and and I'm gonna try to say this a lot um once you invoice something okay do not void it okay you need to really be mindful of the dates so when I invoice something I I know some of the people know how to tweak this and put it back on an invoice or another invoice or the same invoice number right um that's kind of okay however you want to always make for sure that the invoice has not gone through sales tax already that is a really big No-No and probably one of the largest uh reasons why people have issues with sales tax okay once it's invoiced that is final that's why you can't tweak if you look if something is invoiced already we can't go in and change the client pricing right it's invoiced when it's a proposal and until something's invoiced it is still revisable changeable um updatable all of the above however when it's invoiced you can assume that that is good and final the reason for that being is I want to make sure that it's clear and you'll hear me say this on a lot of videos okay when you go in and create proposals you can create a thousand items and a thousand proposals today that is that does nothing to your financials okay those are proposals we're proposing it to a client that means they don't owe it to us it's us saying hey this is what it's going to cost you and until they put money down on something right which is a client deposit then that's usually our cue then to order and now pay our vendor per the order that is tied to this project okay and until we invoice it you can change this like you can add other costs you can say oh it came in damaged you know whatever the case may be there's a lot of different circumstances that can happen on a project so basically you can change things you can add additional costs Freight update whatever but once you invoice it that is final because you don't see that but that is when Studio recognizes the income and expense okay let me rephrase that studio does not recognize income or expense until you invoice the client even if the invoice is zero okay I repeat this over and over and over and I recommend that you write it down because even if it does not make sense to you now it will over time or at least as long as you follow me it will eventually make sense I promise okay now um when it's invoiced okay you have to understand that's when we recognize this is the income that or this is the income and then we've spent so this is the expense and the amount attributable to sales tax then goes to sales tax payable okay my sales tax payable for everybody I deal with is spot onto the penny it might be a couple of cents off for rounding purposes but it's pretty much to the penny okay and if yours is not that means there's voiding and a bunch of things going on that probably shouldn't okay so um that is my blip on invoicing when you should invoice um time billing and what that looks like okay and if you have questions or want to see more I will be making additional videos some will be um extended purchases but the rest of them I am going to continue to push them out and keep them for free at least to for the general information okay and if you have any other questions you can follow up with me on my website so like post subscribe um and please comment on any topics that you want me to cover thank you