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Estimation bill format for businesses

estimates in QuickBooks Online how do you create them who needs to use them and how they can help your business run more efficiently that's what today's video is all about welcome back to the Clara CFO group Channel I'm happy to have you here if you aren't already subscribed to the channel I would love to have you as a subscriber we're here to help you with your small businesses and specifically with the finances in your small business so if you need a little help in that area that's totally okay you know what a lot of us do and so that's why we have this channel to help you run your business more profitably so what I want teach you guys today is how to use the estimates feature in QuickBooks online if you don't already have QuickBooks Online you can go and check the link in the description box if it's something that you want to check out I do have a discount code that you can use if it's something you want to check out the estimates module that we're going to talk about today is available on all the levels of QuickBooks Online some of the features we talk about on the channel here are available at different levels but estimates I double checked for you is available at every single level okay so that's that's really awesome estimates when do we need to create an estimate so a lot of us are service providers where we might go and do work for a client or a customer and in that situation sometimes that customer needs to know you know what are the scope of services and what can they expect from a cost perspective in that case you as a business owner might need to provide an estimate all right so an estimate is just a it kind of looks like an invoice really except for it's not due yet the customer has to actually accept it before it becomes an invoice so an estimate is just a way to say hey client customer this is what you can expect from a cost perspective okay and so then the customer will come back and say yes no or can you modify this or can you modify that so that's really common we need to create an estimate for customers especially in service-based businesses and then that gets delivered to them and then there might be modifications coming back and sometimes there's a little bit of back and forth before a final either rejection of an estimate or an acceptance of an estimate the great thing is that QuickBooks has a module that will be able to handle all of those processes so they can send an estimate for you to your customer and you can also go ahead and build it and the beauty of it too is that you're not doing double work of building your estimate and then having to go and build an invoice after the fact so you that might be a manual process right now maybe you're doing estimates by hand and then you know eventually it's given to somebody to create an invoice what we want to do is make this process more efficient where you just put in the work in the estimate and then it can flow through into an invoice really quickly and easily so we're going to hop into QuickBooks and I'm going to show you guys how to do that in QuickBooks Online let's go okay here we are in the sample company of QuickBooks online I've showed this to you guys before in our other tutorials but what we're going to do is go down to the sales module and then you're going to go over to estimates and if you want to bookmark it you can estimates so here is the where you will be able to see any estimate that you've already written but we're going to go to create an estimate up here all right so the first thing you'll need to do you can see if you've ever written an invoice in QuickBooks Online this format is almost exactly the same there's a few things missing like payment terms and payment info and things like that and they've added a couple extra Fields here but this is a really really basic and it looks a lot like the invoicing so just like an invoice if you are working with a customer you're going to go ahead and look up the customer name if they're not in your system you can always add a new customer but let's just go ahead and say that we're working with we're working with cool cars today okay and then you can populate an email address in here so that way you can email the estimate directly to the customer if you want to print it as a as a PDF instead you're always able to do that you can print or preview that down here and you know if you prefer to maybe print it out and take it to your customer or something like that uh you could do that but an email is also a quick and easy way to get it to the customer or the client and then any billing address that you have in there will be populated and then you can change the estimate date and then this is kind of cool I'm really happy they have this here this is an expiration date so you don't this is just business tip here when you give a quote to a client or a customer you do not want it to be assumed that it's for an infinite time because you might quote work and you don't want that customer or client to come back to you a year from now when maybe your pricing structure has changed maybe you've done a really big overhaul in your pricing or maybe you're not even providing those Services anymore and you don't want a a former client or an estimate an old estimate that you have someone to come up and say Hey I want these Services now or I should have them at this price okay so protect yourself by put putting an expiration date on your estimates so I'm going to put this out let's say maybe if you want somebody to act a little bit faster you can put this within 30 days or if you think like hey this is something I'm willing to go 90 days you know just determine what makes the most sense for your services and your business you do have the ability to tag things here so maybe if you have certain segments of clients you can tag things with different segments there might be some other ways that you can use the tags and then you can go and build your estimate so this is just building an invoice you would build the find the product and service so you can type that in here maybe for cool cars we can put custom design for new office landscape this is a landscaping company and then we maybe just do a flat rate on that at 7 750 and then maybe maybe that's all and then maybe a weekly gardening service or something and then we're going to have $100 let's just put that in here for example purposes so you can build all of this out just like an invoice and then just double check it you can add any taxes that you need to and show that there and then when you're really happy with your estimate you can just go ahead and save it and you can save and send directly from this so if I were to click save and send and this was a live active account it would email out you would you would click on Save and send and then you would edit your email and then you can send that and close it out okay but we're just going to save and close and I'm going to show you guys what that looks like so now you can see the estimate here and this is cool the status is pending so that means that you've sent it to the client and it's not yet the client hasn't responded yet to it so at this point if let's say cool cars comes back and they say hey actually what we want is we don't want the weekly gardening service on here you can do a couple things you can just edit this estimate that you've already created and you can just delete it like we could delete it take it off right here or I can revert back to what it was or if you want to copy this and actually send them the next estimate maybe it's so that last one was estimate 10001 then you would have a new estimate number be one 02 and then this time around so if you if you like to keep track of maybe your history and You' like to know like we originally proposed this but then they came back and then we had another one you can go through and have multiple and multiple estimates for that same client and it's nice that you can just copy it directly similar to what you can do with invoices so let's take that off and then we're just going to save and close that one so now they're really happy with the 750 number and they're ready to accept but they've rejected the 850 number we can go in here and we can update the status and we can change it to declined and then we can put the person's name in I'm just going to put Jason baitman in here because he's I like him as an Hector um and then we're going to say the rejection date is today okay so one was declined and then this one now that we have the 751 we're going to Mark as accepted so this is accepted and this was Jason baitman and it was accepted on November 11th okay so once the client has accepted the estimate you can go here to where it's now that it's accepted and that's the status this convert to invoice button shows up okay if it's not accepted it won't show this for you so you need to make sure you check your status before this shows up so we can quickly just convert to invoice right here okay so and there's a link so QuickBooks will link this invoice to that estimate so that's kind of nice for a paper trail so or digital Trail uh to be able to like look back and see how did this come about so from here you can decide you know what are your terms and go about creating a normal invoice invoice as you always would and from here you can also add additional items if you need to it'll still be linked to that estimate but let's say like Jason calls and says hey can you also like bring me some landscaping products or something like that you could go ahead and add those on so that is an option it doesn't necessarily have to tie to the estimate but that estimate will just prepopulate all the lines your invoice and save you time okay now I want to show you another thing real quick and then you can just send and close that just like you would would any other invoicing any other invoice and you can go ahead and check out our invoicing video if you're not sure how to use all the tools in the invoicing module okay so I'm just going to leave without saving for a second and then I'm going to show you the other thing is how like what I really like about estimates too is that you can potentially see the pipeline of all the work that you have estimated so maybe you are a contractor and you go out every single day and you're providing bids and proposals and estimates to clients and with that you want to kind of know how much do I have outstanding and when you when you do have all of this in QuickBooks and it's not just kind of in some random you know Excel file somewhere or you know written on a clipboard here and there when it's all in quick books you can run reports so we really like to see that I can just type up here estimates and we can pull an estimates by customer report and this is where we can see here is a cool cars I mean I don't have a lot in here this is the one that shows up in the report so you can see the one that we just created it's listed here and we can see all the details of it it was accepted and the accepted date and then we can see the amount so if I had 100 estimates outstanding that might be a really important number for me to track to say like hey we need to have a certain amount of work outstanding and always be doing bids in order to know that we're going to get a certain amount of Revenue that might be a kpi that you start tracking for your business okay that's the that's the estimate module it's really pretty simple but I want you guys to be using this wherever you can because I do think that it can make that your life easier and especially if you're writing a lot of bids a lot of estimates for clients you do that work up front and then you save time on the voicing side and then it's all saved in the system and you have the nice reports that come out of it definitely can make your whole invoicing process a lot smoother and more efficient all right well if this was helpful to you please make sure you give this video a thumbs up I would really appreciate it and let me know if you have any questions in the comment section below and I will see you guys in the next video thank you so much for being here bye [Music] everybody