Example of Sending Invoices to Customers for Life Sciences Made Easy

Example of sending invoices to customers for Life Sciences

yeah so for in this session what we're going to be covering is tivo's online invoice solution so it's part of apo's Suite of cloud business applications although invoicing can totally be used on its own so what we'll do is we'll kind of introduce you to the product itself we'll talk about apptivo as a whole and then hopefully at the end of this session you have a good feel for what aptiv's invoicing solution can do and go ahead and get started yourself all right so let's just get started off with what is apptivo so apptivo is this integrated Suite of business application so we can do things of all different kinds for different types of businesses so we have a CRM system for driving sales we have project management tools tool to track your product database purchasing inventory things like that then we have a financials area and then one of the applications in financials is invoicing and really invoicing is one of the basic things that pretty much every single type of business needs out there and it's also one of the very first things that every type of business is going to need when they get set up so invoicing it's a very critical solution it's underneath our financials category and then there's a couple apps that kind of naturally pair up with the solution so definitely you can go in there apptivo structure kind of like an App Store where when you get set up you're just like your mobile phone you're able to hop into the store and just add any apps that you like so you can absolutely deploy apptivo as a point solution do nothing but sending and receiving payments from your customers or you could go deploy it as either an intermat solution like let's say you have some basic sales in there or you can go a full end to end solution where you're tracking sales and and tracking the time and materials you spend on your jobs and doing quotes then turning all that time of materials and effort you track into an invoice and delivering customer support we really offer the whole package but the key idea is invoicing is what we're talking about today the invoicing application it's on a latest V6 technology so it looks great it's on a fully responsive design and it does have a native mobile app for both IOS and Android that allows you to send and see invoices on the Fly everything like that and then there are some just core Integrations like there's a API to integrate our invoices elsewhere we do have a connection to QuickBooks for exporting data and we also have a full set of activity management and collaboration tools like document management and such and bunch of cool little Integrations there like connecting to Google Drive or Dropbox or something so yep as we mentioned activo it's a cloud system and it's mobile friendly meaning as long as you have an email and password you're going to be able to get to your invoices you're going to be able to send invoices and take care of everything that your business needs to doesn't matter about the size of your screen although definitely uh the the mobile apps are optimized for touchscreen devices so they're a little bit nicer experience but yep doesn't matter where you go you'll be able to get your information and just to give you a feel for kind of where optivo is well we're we're all over so we've are in pretty much every country out there we fit all shapes and sizes of businesses so we match just about every single industry and we have people from independent Consultants up to multi-billion Dollar businesses using apptivo so let's just talk a little bit about the features inside of invoices V6 and really we're going to dive into the detail here but when it comes down to kind of breaking down what you're going to be doing in invoices is we've got these kind of four highle categories of you can send invoices out you can get paid track the payments going in integrating outward and then going and just having General productivity tools so when we look at this um we're able to send invoices out from the system so we'll be able to create a standard professional looking invoice there's a PDF designer so we can make it look however we want and this is isn't just built in to automatically create like a web page where the customer can do it online and they can also download the PDF at any time other than that we have some other Cool Tools like there is um there's connectors to the other apps which we'll talk about but we do have recurring invoices meaning you can actually just set up onetime payment we have subscription payment Integrations with a couple providers or you could just set up the system to automatically generate an invoice and queue it up for your financials team to send out at the beginning of every month or whatever period you specify so you got that and then there's the details around getting paid so what we have is we have automatic U reminders so when an invoice goes overdue you can have the system automatically send notifications to either you or to the customer directly um we do have integration so we connect with PayPal zitar and authorized.net and of course you can manually track payments there's just a whole engine where you can do partial payments we have a credit note system everything like that and um you can also apply late payment penalties which is a pretty cool feature where you can say if an invoice is more than 10 days overdue I'm going to add 5% to the available balance and that can just be built right into the system and it'll apply it for you automatically plus we did Just Launch our new Ledger application so there's a component of accounting integration there although really on the next side item um a lot of people definitely leverage our QuickBooks we have an ifif export which will take your data straight into QuickBooks for the accounting needs but then really the big thing is we have all these other apps that kind of they plug right into your invoicing process so when you think about it sent an invoice a lot of companies have already generated an estimate or a quote ahead of time or when you look at the details stored on your invoice a lot of the time those are like hours that you would trct in a project or another piece of software so that's one of the things that aptiva really specializes in is our invoicing app connects to all of our other apps that help you track the delivery and fulfillment of your services or products so that way if you have a sales order system and you're doing shipments full apptivo has apps to do orders and shipments but instead of manually copying the data from your order to your voice instead you simply go and you select an order and ask to generate an invoice from it so just a little bit different interconnecting all of your data and then there is just the core CRM integration so I'll show you how our invoicing module plugs right on top of the customer record that your entire organization can use and it allows for some pretty cool things which I'll show you like one of the first things right out of the gate and then on the last item so yeah we talked about the uh mobile integration and such um one other thing to kind of take note of is the the integration with like your email and your calendar and such services so apptivo has this whole we call it contextual collaboration it's this whole Suite of just general tools like okay adding a note on an invoice that tells them that the customer called in and said hey I'm actually going to be late two weeks uh so you just want to put a note of when you spoke to them and all that so we just have a suite of tools to help manage like that communication and note taking and such but then specifically we have a bunch of two-way syncs with Google so like let's say for example if you put a reminder on a calendar like a calendar event to um or sorry on an invoice to call them about an overdue invoice maybe they just wanted to chat about it they had some discrepancy with the pricing so you could put a reminder in and then we actually go and sync it directly to Google and it goes onto your Google calendar and then with the email integration this part's pretty cool so definitely we send emails straight out from inside of apptivo but we'll connect to your email server meaning when you send an invoice from apptivo it'll appear in the scent folder of your email client plus we can actually capture email convers ations so I'll show you this when I deliver an invoice to my customer we stamp it with this special ID number so the responses to the invoice let's say if they asked a question about it it would actually be captured inside of the invoice itself so you'll get a full communication history right alongside the rest of your invoice data so as far as like a high level overview of what features we have inside of the platform that kind of covers them so let's go ahead let's switch gears let's get into the application and go show you around all right so I'm in here in a a Loosely configured Appo system so in this example we're logged in as Lori Michaelson up here and we're going to want to run through the invoicing so up across the top of the page you see I have all my apps enabled the idea is that there's kind of that core set of collaboration features so if I had a reminder on an invoice it would appear in my calendar area right now I'll show you how to use that and then you have the different apps that you've enabled up here so the invoices app is the primary app in the solution but even if you're not planning to use the full CRM you're still going to use the customers app and potentially the items application which is underneath product management I actually don't have that enabled here but the idea is that these are kind of supporting applications where you'll actually have one app that lists every customer that you interact with and the idea is that when you send an invoice You're simply going to select from this existing list of customers rather than retyping any sort of information and then just so you know these customers are used all over the place so if we switch over to the invoices app we'll get into what we're all expecting during this session and I'll just kind of quickly Go and show you the creation page let's go generate a quick little invoice and just kind of run through the components so when you generate an invoice in apptivo first thing you see is right up here it will allow you to go back and select that appropriate customer so it's all using modern technology just start typing in their name it'll pop them up and then if you're dealing with organizations what will happen is as soon as you select the customer it'll automatically know which contacts that you have there allow you to select one and then some things that are happening um are you might see like the phone number and email ID and payment term all of these are actually driven based off the customer so the idea is that you can have like one Central set of information for billing details uh how often you build them there's even some other cool things on like Priceless like giving special pricing to each different type of customer but as you fill in the form it just pulls that all from the CRM and if you had like multiple phone numbers emails it would allow you to select them from right here and then we go down and fill it all in so this is kind of a common theme thread optivo is we'll put the data in a bunch of different apps but it doesn't matter you can do everything from this page so let's say if this is the first time that you're logging in you've never created anything you can actually come in here and just create your first invoice you don't have to go through any configuration so for example that customer let's say if I didn't have one yet I can actually just click on this create button right here and it will give me the form so I can input a brand new customer record without leaving the page it'll store it in that customers app so I can go look them up later on and I've got that database of information but it keeps it all perfectly handy so I can just continue with my job and get this invoice out the door so we can go fill that all in uh fvo does support multiple different currencies and we actually have a conversion table built in so if you need to invoice in another currency um what will happen is we'll flip it it'll show you the other currencies you have enabled and then it would actually go and convert the values and when you go look at like reporting and such everything will be reported back to your base currency otherwise you'll see that you are able to have multiple different PDF templates so I'll show you that in a moment how the kind of PDF template works and you can also customize any other details you want so you'll see a lot of the standard stuff like invoice number the date payment term being able to discount at a a fixed price or a percentage but you can actually go and add in your own Fields so actually this invoice type field is something that I put in here because this sample business is like a photography company and they sometimes do like corporate photography sometimes they work with schools sometimes they work with individuals for like um just like high school senior photos something like that so for them it's important to be able to create lists and differentiate between invoices sent to those different types so what you have here is they actually have a drop- down menu with these values and this is a custom field so you can create your own drop- down menus you can put your own date fields um you can put your own big text boxes if you want it's all fully customizable to you and it's actually done through a nice little drag and drop editor where really anybody can do it you don't need any sort of technical skill so as far as what you see here yep we've got all the basics handled for you right when you get set up but you can basically tear this thing apart and really make your own solution so otherwise what we'll have is we have a couple different fields of information so like we can link it to a sales rep U these are just more details that are automatically pulled off that customer account and then you have the different lines that get put on here so by default it'll say services and products but you'll notice you can change it to whatever you want so in this example I've created Services included like a standard Services section plus any additional ad hoc services so what you'll see is this one is set up to pull from your main database of items and just like the customers although there's an app called items where you can store everything and I can just have predefined lists and grab packages and you can do hourly services or you can do physical products I could also create a brand new one right from here I don't have to go to the items app to create it or I can just punch in an hourly service I could just say General Consulting let's say we did 5 hours of that and we're going to charge them $80 per hour so you can also just do freehand wri in like that very very simple and then when it comes down to building out each line you also do have tax codes built in so we've got tax code configuration to support really anything around the world whether it's additional green fees whether you have a complex stacked tax code like the HST in Canada or whether you just have very simple tax codes like um a sales tax in California so you just plug those in and then the system does all the calculations for you automatically down here at the bottom but really there's a lot more you could do so one thing I do want to point out is the flexibility of the technology where let's say you're looking at this and you are doing a business like you're a fencing business so you don't track hours you don't really track quantity you you track like how many meters of fence or how many feet of fence that I'm selling so in in my business I need to change these columns I need to change this and I'm never going to have a decimal point I'm always going to have a whole number so actually all these little details are customizable by you and that's all done through the layout editor so when we talk about like how an invoice is structured I'm going to hop in there in just a moment and I'll show you how you can have complete control um although all the formulas are built in for you automatically of how we calculate the totals you could even create an additional like add-on service fee right here and you can actually update the formulas that we have in the system to match what you want to do so very very powerful there but let's go ahead and let's send this invoice out let's get one invoice out there we'll just have one service and you'll see I've got one custom field right here where you have like a gold package but then the head count is not changing the overall price and let's just go ahead and we'll email that out okay so when you hit the email button this will tap into our standard email integration so you can have one or many email templates although there is a standard template provider for you and what you'll see is it'll automatically send it to the customer record because we know their address um you can also configure multiple from addresses so some companies might want to self um send from their personal email some companies might have a central email like billing ativo.com and you can configure those then inside of the message that you send out you'll see that we give them a nice little friendly message but then this is a a hyperlink so the user can actually open up the email like let's say on their cell phone and click on this hyperlink and it would take them to a web page they can view from anywhere and also they can just view inside of the email you'll see we actually print the entire details of the email right here inside in addition to that we attach a PDF file so we basically give every possible way that your customer might want to look at this invoice we give them those options and then here is like the web page so if they clicked on that link in the web page you can scroll down you can see the different options here but if you have let's say PayPal or authorize.net or zmark one of our three integrated payment providers it'll actually offer them a button right there to complete the payment process so if you integrate with PayPal for example and they pay through PayPal our system will automatically be notified when the invoice is paid will automatically go send a receipt out to the client showing them that everything is done and you don't have to do anything H so in that scenario it's very very seamless but of course some of you do wire transfers or you take a check payment something where the system can't integrate and pick it up so of course once you send an invoice out um from the backend you'll be able to go and just record a payment so I've just created that invoice and then we've got it set up right here and then um you'll see I've have the option to record a payment so you can always come view the details of an invoice let's say if I drafted one up it's really easy to come make changes in the software you just click on a field make your adjustments and save it once you're done but then across the top you have all these tabs of other different information so one of them is the payments tab tab so you we just be able to see there's no payments and you can record one from here but we always all the over the place will'll give you little shortcuts so right up on top I can hit record payment or maybe the customer needs another copy of the invoice so we allow you to resend it or anytime you can just download the PDF to your computer just like the customer can get the PDF you can get the PDF as well and you'll notice it just follows the same design that we had seen on the web link and then back inside of here I can go and just record my payments say that they gave me a check on this date check number 506 and then we do support partial payments so you can either choose whether the invoice should be fully paid or not and then that will determine whether we turn the invoice into a receipt so once you mark off an invoice is paid our system will actually update it so if you go print the PDF um you'll just notice it has a built-in functionality to notify them of their paid invoice and give them a receipt so right this this is just a combined flow where it'll open up the email window you'll see that the invoice is automatically updated to say paid it'll show a balance of zero and then anytime from here on out if either of you prints out this PDF file you'll see it reflects the same exact clear payment status okay so that's your general flow um gets all paid off you're all kind of set at that point so let's go talk a little bit more about like the um the ongoing management I want to show you a little bit of the configuration and then a little bit more of kind of like the standard day-to-day stuff so we'll go ahead let's talk a little bit on the day-to-day and and then we'll go look at the configuration so one once we get the invoice out there I mean there's all sorts of kind of accounts receivable type activities like okay well how do I see which invoices are overdue how do I just see which invoices are unpaid at this moment how do I report on how much um Revenue I've received during a period all these sorts of general questions and then there's the other details of hey I I have to discuss this one invoice I I need to call on this invoice and track my reminders and anything like that so what you have is on the details of every invoice you have this common set of collaboration tools so you'll actually have a calendar of follow-ups and tasks although um you can disable every one of these features if you choose to in the configuration so that way if you wanted to come in and let's say you give them a call and we try to call them it's an overdue invoice I can just say call for overdue invoice and I can go take some notes on it record it away for later so just a way for you to capture every time you've attempted to contact them and then maybe I choose to send like an email followup so using the email integration right here I can send a standard email message we could program in templates and such or I could just put in a reminder like maybe we got a hold of them and they asked for me to call them back at tomorrow at 2 p.m. so I could use the calendar feature I could just come tomorrow at um I clicked 1 p.m. but we'll Click 2 p.m. and I can just go schedule in that um call about overdue invoice so the way that these activities work is I can be doing all this work here and then U maybe I use these other tab so there's an area for notes maybe I had taken some general notes you see some notes get automatically published but I could just say um she she thought the fees were too high so you can take this sort of information down it'll see the system will just like Tim stamp and show you who had posted it in there and then um you also have an area to store any sort of files so if they sent you any sort of files I can upload from my computer or from like a Dropbox account or something like that I just happen to enabled it here but you've got all that type of activity but for the Remer system the way that those work is I just put in a calendar reminder to follow up on this invoice so the first thing you saw when you logged in is actually your dashboard so if you've tagged any invoices with reminders you'll actually see them present right here so the idea is that I can click on this say oh I've got to call them about that invoice but down here it has this hyperlink called associated with so it says that this reminder is for invoice one05 meaning well I want to see what that invoice is about when we spoke last everything like that and that's kind of the CRM type component comes up in apptivo so the idea is I click to this invoice what apptivo is all about is giving you all the information you need and making it immediately accessible so on the invoice I have a couple tools here we just saw there's like notes and documents and such but there's this cool feature called Newsfeed the newsfeed will track all of the updates that are performed so instead of clicking through each tab to say what's been going on you click on the news feed and here you can get a chronological breakdown of every up update that's happened so when did we create it when did we send it did we schedule a reminder did we add a note to it all that will be captured right here and the same thing is timestamped and tagged with who performed it then there's actually other ways to go look at this as well so one thing you might need is I need the person's phone number okay it might be present right here but maybe this is like the billing their office number and I want Cindy's cell phone number so you actually have all the CRM data at your fingertips right there where we have one kind of profile for the organization or the customer then one profile for each person or contact so I can actually click on this is a school right there and then you'll see all the information we have inside of the CRM so I can see their billing information or any fields that I've configured over in there so I can see that there is school as an organization or I can click on Cindy and now I get all of her personal information so in this case I don't have her cell phone number but if I did I'd be able to view it right here and then it even goes one step further so with the email when you send emails you'll be able to capture it and see it from inside of the tab right here and if they respond to it you will be able to see their email responses in this email tab but that will be like specific to that one invoice there's actually a place in the system that'll capure just every email that you communicate with every contact so what I could do is I could say show me every email I've ever sent to S Cindy before so if I click here to the details of Cindy it's all interconnected but this actually switches me into the contacts app which is part of our CR M but what you have here is a couple really cool tools so one is you have a news feed on Cindy so Cindy's news feed is going to show Integrations with the other apps you'll see like opportunity updates and such coming in here Cindy's email tab I don't have anything with her but it would actually show every email you've ever received from her or sent to her right here and that happens 100% automatically the idea is that once you put a contacts email into the system we'll track every email that you have with them so that way you have one view to say show me the emails about this invoice then another view to say show me the um emails about this contact and then you can also do the same thing show me the invoices for this contact or show me all the information for this contact or account so everything is basically just visible by associations aptiva is all about linking your data together to help you make the right choices so you have here is called a 360 View and what this does is if I look at a contact 360 you'll see all of our apps so if you use other apps like let's say you use estimates which is closely paired up with invoicing it just allows you to send a quote and you can turn a quote into an invoice if I had any it would actually show a list of them right there but in this example we did have an invoice with her so immediately from the contact I can see an invoice history and then the cool part is you can also see it at the customer level so in this case I've only sent one invoice to Foothill High School to Cindy but I could have sent multiple maybe over time you sent five invoices to contact a and then four invoices to contact B so what would happen is at the customer level you'd be able to see both of them but at the contact level you would only see the invoices that were individually addressed to that one person that you were talking to so you can just flip through app by app you find all that information and then things like the news feed and all that they're fully centralized so right here when I look at the customer Newsfeed it has more data than either the invoice or the contact did because it will aggregate everything together okay so that's basically as much as I wanted to show you in kind of the general day-to-day activities and such and I want to end this off with just a little bit of the configuration so I talked about when you're inputting an invoice you can control this however you want so the idea is when you have the details on an invoice and when you're looking through like a list of your invoices you can totally change all this so the invoices app has a very large amount of settings you can change so it's everything from like connecting your payment gateways to changing what billing terms you want to have available everything like that and configuring email templates like yeah as you can see here there is oh man there's like 30 some OD different settings pages that you have available but the big one right here is Master layout really Master layout print web layout and list layouts make up a large part of your configuration so this master layout is a drag and drop editor that allows you to update delete or create any new Fields you this is where you can come in and you could even change formulas and such so what you'll see is when you look down here um like at our total amount on the services included it actually shows you that it's multiplying the item quantity times the item rate but what you could do is you can be changing the labels of these fields which we have you could even come in and you could go edit this formula um this case it wouldn't be recommended but that gives you an idea of some people actually have really complex invoices where you don't just multiply quantity times amount you might need to multiply three or four different numbers and add-on an add-on service or something like that so what you can actually do is yeah you can add like a single text field up on top like if I wanted to add an extra like an internal notes section right here I can just drag it on over call it internal notes no problem it shows up to all my employees right away but then potentially you want to add a field onto every single line that comes onto the invoice so right here I added the head head count value I could actually add like a drop- down menu or something so I can come in here I can add a drop down menu or a number and we could create a drop down menu that appears on each line and we can basically just call it like status or confirmed or we could add any sort of information we want um so maybe right here what we're doing is we've got like packages but then we're just saying like number of photographers and we could have one two or three plus so I can just build that in and then you'll see that because I put it into that table every time I add a new product onto my invoice I'm going to be able to go and type in that number of photographers so you see the system is very very flexible and easy to build and really this is just the basics of it there's some very Advanced things that you can do such as adding conditions where upon selecting individual or organization I can make additional Fields down below hide or become read only something like that I could also change the values of this drop- down menu like let's say if you select individual I can make the number of photographers only display one so that's actually it's all still drag and drop that we're not talking any sort of programming here but I'll go show you that real quick just so you can get a quick taste of really the power so apptivo is designed to be really really simple you can get going you can create your first invoice in a minute but you could also go spend years customizing this there's really an unlimited number of options so here we'll give you one little taste and then I'll just show you the other two components and we'll go ahead and wrap this up so number of photographers you see I've got my values there there's all these different settings that you can control about each field one of them would be value restriction so here watch this I'm actually going to create a condition that says based on the selection of the organization field so we'll come up we'll find our um or sorry invoice type so we're going to say invoice type if the value is set to to individual the only attribute values I want in this drop down is just one I'm only going to allow one but or or if the invoice type is set to organization then I'm going to allow any of those values so I'll allow one two or 3 plus I could even do something like maybe it's always two or three plus for organization or it's always one for individual so you actually just do that you just click a couple buttons and look at what we've just done inside of the actual UI so now is where you're really starting to get advance of okay it's an organization I've only got two and three plus now you flip it on over to individual and now I've just got one available so you can do some really really cool things with this platform the idea is you get all your Fields configured in the app then we do allow you to manage many different presentations so that PDF file and the web link that we send to your customers you could have maybe of a couple different types of products that you sell so you want to have a different presentation for each you can do all of that and then it also allows you to say well which Fields do I actually want visible to the user so a moment ago we just added a custom field called internal notes but until I go added into my print um layout it won't be visible to the customer so they'll never see it they're only going to see the notes to customer which I've shown to show uh chosen to show them but then you'll see here you have like the same kind of attribute editor so every field that you store on the customer or contact is selectable and every field you store on the invoice is selectable so you can get an idea of really how much power you have over how you present these out to your customers and yeah there's even a code editor so if you want to directly update Json you can come and update that that's way more advanced um okay so that's basically you get all the fields in order then the last thing I want to show you is like list layouts and Views so what you have is like a standard set of columns that are displayed whenever you're browsing a list of invoices so by default it'll look pretty good but let's just take that um invoice type example well in this business invoice type is really important so what I can actually do is I can come and I can remove all these fields and make it show only what I think is important so what I'm actually going to do is like remove created by and all this stuff maybe I'll remove currency that and we'll come and we'll add in like the invoice type and maybe we want to add in like the um the balance and the total you can reize it just like Excel I'm doing all this stuff one time and now every single time you browse through a list you can see the new effect so you can totally change your layout here and you can actually create custom lists over in the left column so check this out I can search because I created that field for organization I can filter everybody who's an organization invoice I've already got my layout correct so I can save this away as a view call my org invoices I would have the option to share it with others and that actually puts a c cust list right over here you actually I can did it I did it before but the idea is that yep base product will work great right out of the box you have unpaid you have overdue you have different um built-in reports so like in here you can come in and run like tax reports or there's um an invoice summary report that'll just show you like how much revenue and such you've collected during a period but using that ability to filter your invoices based on whatever criteria you want and then display whatever columns you want that's really powerful and you can do a lot of reporting just from that okay so that's going to go ahead and wrap up this session for today so thank you very much for attending if you want to find more information on the invoicing solution you can definitely check out our YouTube channel or you can hop on over to the help and move into the the user manual section on our website and of course our top quality support if you have any questions definitely just reach out right here um if anybody who's attending this session would like to get a personal one-on-one demo we' like to offer to the the end of each webinar so if you're interested in that I'm going to be sending a quick followup to everybody right after this session just simply respond back to that email with your interest and we'll go ahead and we'll get you scheduled in so once again thank you everybody for attending and we'll catch you next time