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Example of sending invoices to customers for Finance

hello everyone welcome back to the Clara CFO group Channel my name is Hannah smolinski I am the owner of Clara CFO group and I am here to talk to you today about invoicing invoicing and QuickBooks Online a lot of you have started using QuickBooks online because maybe you watched a video that I did on how to use it but now you're trying to figure out the invoicing feature and what I realized is some of you had questions and I went to go find a video thinking I had already done a video on invoicing and I couldn't find it and then I was thinking maybe I don't have a comprehensive video about QuickBooks invoicing so here we are that's what this video is all about today is about QuickBooks invoicing how to use it a couple key points and why you should be using it instead of doing something outside of the system so I want to go through all of that with you and then show you actually in QuickBooks how to set some things up and customize it a little bit specifically for what you need but first if you aren't already subscribed to the Channel please make sure you are subscribed we'd love to have you here as a subscriber and we give this information to you so that you can do better in your small business we want to see you to be be more financially successful in your business and that's why we do these videos so if that sounds good subscribe and then also make sure you put the little notification Bell so you will know when we post a new video so at first I just want to address why we care about invoicing in a system and when I say system I specifically mean QuickBooks online but really any accounting system why should we do our invoicing in the accounting system well one of the things that we have found and I think this is pretty true across the board is that by keeping track of things in a system you're going to be able to know what has been paid and what has not been paid you're going to know if maybe somebody wrote you a check for a little bit less than they should have or if you never really received an amount or maybe if you get lots of different checks for Lots for the same amount over and over and over again it can be difficult to match when you're doing everything manually okay and when you do things outside of the system maybe you're on like kind of a paper system or maybe you've got lists somewhere it's just has a higher likelihood of error so we like things to be in the system because it helps us identify errors much quicker and by having it there we can run reports so we can run reports like the accounts receivable aging report which gives us really helpful insights into who has actually paid their invoices and who hasn't paid their invoices and how long it's been since they've paid their invoices and that is extremely important we look at that report all the time I go over with clients every single month if they have accounts receivable we are looking at accounts receivable aging because if you have lots of outstanding invoices that is a detriment to your business your cash the money that you are earning is not coming into the business okay so really high level invoices you send them to customers and clients people pay you and then you record that you've been paid and then you don't have an open invoice anymore right okay I will show you the invoicing portion of QuickBooks Online we're going to hop into it in a second and I'm going to show you a couple things that you can do to customize those as well so let me know in the comment section below if there's any other invoicing questions that you have it might be an opportunity to do another video or maybe just a short or something so you can understand A New Concept and understand where to find something in QuickBooks but the invoicing platform is really customizable in QuickBooks and let's go ahead and get into it now all right so the first thing you're going to see and remember you guys I am in the accountant view so if you go to the gear icon if you're in the accountant view this should say switch to business view but if you're not you can switch it over to accountant view that's why mine is going to look like this so I am in the sample company of QuickBooks online and I'm going to go to this say sales section and then we are going to look at invoices so invoices all of these items this is kind of like the dashboard for the invoices if you will this is kind of the the high level view so you can see everything that's currently outstanding and then if you go down you can scroll down you can see anything that can be marked as deposited or paid okay and you can also filter this view so if you want to filter by date you can if you want to filter by invoice number customer status anything like that you can okay just know I like to see the most outstanding or the outstanding invoices at the top so I usually like to filter by date or by number really so you see the most recent things at the top but let's go ahead and just pop into one of these so we can look at it as an example because this is an invoice that's already kind of pre-populated what might be outside of your view right now is this edit invoice button but I'm going to go ahead and click that and so this right now is a example of what a filled out invoice looks like so this has been sent to a client but it hasn't actually because this is a sample company but this is you know customer information already filled out you know what was sold and the total NFS you scroll down here you see the total balance due but this is the basic structure of anything that you would put in an invoice some things you'll always see on an invoice the customer name in this situation we can send it by email which is really great so we can just email it directly to the customer you can also schedule a send it's a possibility and if this was not the sample company you also should have another option right here that allows you to accept either ACH or credit card you do have to set that portion up in your merchant services account so that you can take credit cards you can take ACH because if QuickBooks takes the money to accept the payment they have to tell it where to go so you've got to connect your bank and everything give it give your bank numbers your bank account numbers two QuickBooks and get the merchant services account set up but if you did have that set up you'd have the option here so maybe for a very large invoice for example you don't want to take credit cards you only want to take an ACH you can check the box of which one you want to do and then there's a billing address this would be for your customer and then terms so you do have the opportunity to do a couple different terms and you can also set custom terms so if you want it to be due let's say all invoices are due in 10 days from now you could put that in if you want all of them due by the 30th of every month you can do that as well or do next month within blank days of due date okay so you can set a couple custom terms as well and I have seen people use this because maybe you know industry standard might be a 60-day term or you know I like to make them as short as possible I like to have do on receipt whenever possible that's due on receipt like once the invoice comes you need to pay it but sometimes we need to give people you know 60 days or 30 days to do something so there's these presets but you also have the ability to customize eyes and then you always want to set a invoice date so that would be the date that you're actually sending it out or the date that I was created which hopefully is the same day and then the due date is automatically calculated for you so let's say I do net 30 or net 60 the due date should be calculated you can override the due date if you want to so that's just something you can do as well you could keep the terms empty and then customize the due date here you can also create a recurring invoice from this one I'm not going to do that right now I actually have a video on recurring transactions but you can set a recurrence from an existing invoice which is nice because that could save you time from doing the same invoice over and over and over again and then you can actually add tags so if it's if you have identified some tags you want to use in your QuickBooks you do have the option to do that on an invoice and then you can put in your products and service lines here so you do have the ability to have a product service name and then a longer description if you want to do that and then quantity rate amount and all of this information can actually be summarized in a couple different ways you can add subtotals if you want to you can see that on the invoice sometimes let's say like this is a landscaping design company maybe there's Services couple different services and you want a subtotal for services and then a couple different things for products and then you subtotal for products it can make your invoice look nice and professional and sometimes customers will request that so you do have that as an option I'm going to show you a couple things here down at the bottom okay so down here at the bottom you can click on this customize button so this customize button is where you can make what appears on the invoice different but before we go to customize let's go to printer preview so we can see what this looks like right now you will have to like save it before you can do that okay so let's just do a quick print preview and say let's just say we don't love the way that this is presented right now we'd rather have have maybe the service and description kind of one on top of the other for example if we want to customize this or maybe we want to update and change what we want the statement to say or maybe when we want to add contact information in here so if you have any questions about this invoice please email us at blah blah blah or a phone number or something like that all of that is customizable and I want to show you how to do that but this gives you a little Quick Print preview of what's going on and then you can go to customize and let's go to just edit the current one okay so the first thing is the overall design so this is where you can use a template this is the current template right here you can add a logo up in the corner which is really nice you can change the color format so if you want to match it a little bit more to your company's colors you can you could change even the the text and the size of the font which is nice and then if you want to change the margins you're able to do that so that's kind of all like the design the actual kind of graphic design of the invoice but then we can go into the content portion and this is where you can actually start changing what is the information you'd like to see on the invoice so business name maybe I want to add a phone number on there maybe you want to add an address maybe you would like to and that's kind of all at the top this is where you can customize things let's add the website as well now I'm not going to fill in a website right now but that's you get the point you can fill in all of that information the other thing is you can say you know what is this is this an invoice that you can change that so maybe if you don't call them invoices I'm trying to think of what else you could call them maybe like statement of work or something like that if you have some other way that you call an invoice you can change that name which is kind of interesting and then this has invoice numbers so the invoice number will be on here you can also go down to this section and this is where you can really customize exactly how do you like to see this and I've seen people get really particular about how they want this information so some people would never want the date on there you could take that off some people are like it has to be there so the date is there okay now you can also do product and service you could take it out all together and this shows you how you can how it's changing as you are doing it which I think is a nice feature products and service now let's put the description underneath the products and service line item I kind of like that it's a little bit clearer in my opinion just for this this company and then quantity and rate in the total I like to have quantity and rate but maybe you just want to have the total so let's just say that this activity was actually just a total amount and you didn't want to have the quantity showing on there you can even change the width of this too so if you wanted to change these column widths you can so you can play around with that but all of that information is really customizable and then you can get into do you have a discount is there a deposit is there estimate summary and then this is the message that you could say you know for any questions call us at 555-5555-5555 then that will be on the customer invoice okay so you can click done at that point in time and then if we were to look at that again we've actually changed the template in that situation so if we were to go to the print preview we can see that it's been updated based on a couple things that I just did now I don't think that looks great I would change it but for the purposes you get the picture of the fact that you can modify these things okay that's how you do it that's how you customize and then you can save this is kind of cool so there's a couple different ways you can do this you can save and send you can let's just go back out as your options you can save and then not send but you have to eventually show it to your customer somehow so sometimes people will pull down the PDF and then just email it to a customer that's fine so then you would just want to save and close or save and create a new invoice you also have this ability to save and share a link so this is really great when maybe somebody goes hey I you've probably sent me an invoice but I can't find it in my email can you resend that to me you can send an email directly from your in inbox that just says you know hey so and so you know I I wanted to make sure you get this invoice here's the link to it directly so you can find it really easily and that way too if a company has a lot of spam filters and stuff built in the emailed invoice out of QuickBooks might not have gotten through but if it's a trusted in email address like you've already been emailing with somebody you can share a link like that so it's a really great way that you can embed it I've also seen people embed these links into workflow processes so for example like when you're signing a contract with a new client you might want to have a deposit and then you can just put a link and like they can go directly to pay a link before they you know maybe as part of their onboarding checklist or something like that so you can get creative with how you use those links and I think it's a really great option right there and then you can just do the classic save and send as well so this is where you know I can put in the this is the email that we had pre-populated and we can even change it so if we wanted to make a very special note to say like Hey Russ great talking to you earlier today this project has been a pleasure to work on I'm so happy that you're happy you know thanks so much you know sincerely blah blah you can customize it there I like this opportunity to customize along the way it makes you feel a little bit more personal if you want to but if you just want to use the templated versions of you know the text that's already here that's totally fine too okay and you can customize this body of the email I think I didn't show that to you guys let me show you that real quick that is in this emails portion this is where you can say you want summarize details a PDF of the invoice and then this is where you can customize that message so that saves time if you're always changing the message you can just do it one time say the same thing to all your customers so that is kind of the QuickBooks invoicing in a nutshell so one of the things that's kind of cool and I'll see if we can do this see if it shows anything now one of the reasons that we like to have this invoicing in the system is that then I think like if we go here so in this example when a payment comes through QuickBooks QuickBooks will notice and recognize that hey a payment has been made for this invoice okay and it created a payment and then it matched it to this invoice number so another great reason to have your invoices in QuickBooks is so it makes the accounting for receiving that money much easier so in that situation we could just match that really quickly the other reason we like to have it in the system is we can go to what I talked to you guys about earlier the accounts receivable aging summary this is a really great report you should be looking at it all the time and this is where it shows all the outstanding invoices so if you have anything in this like 60 and above if you have any of these invoices that haven't been collected this is kind of a red flag you really want to kind of track down Red Rock Diner and say hey what's up why haven't you paid this invoice I'd love to you know hey I can send you a quick link and you can just pay by credit card make it really easy for them and you know you can keep track and make sure that everything that is owed to you is actually paid I hope this invoicing uh tutorial has been a little bit helpful if you have any other questions that I didn't answer about invoicing please make sure you put them in the comments section below and um yeah give this video a thumbs up if it was helpful alright thanks so much bye everybody [Music] foreign [Music]