Explore Examples of Billing Invoices for Planning that Simplify Your Processes

Examples of billing invoices for Planning

Hey, welcome back to my channel. My name is Ray O'Daniel, and in this video what we're gonna be covering are how invoices are handled and invoice payments are handled inside of high level. Before we get started, if you have not subscribed to my channel, please click to subscribe button. I always appreciate your support. All righty, let's get into it. Okay, so here we are inside of a sample, uh, sub-account that we have set up here, and I want to show you for those people that are using invoices or invoice their clients out to be billed and how payments are received, I want to show you how all that works inside of high level in some of the other components that you can customize right off the bat, if you are gonna be using the invoicing feature. So right now, uh, the invoicing is configured underneath the payments option on the menu. So you're gonna go to payments. Now here, there's a couple different things I want you to make sure we can get done first before we start doing invoicing. So these will make it very easy whenever you create the invoices to be able to simply create them, um, issue them and be done with them, um, before you have to realize that you didn't do something and then you have to go back and fix it and go back to invoicing later. So, Couple of things you need to get set up. First of all, are your products. So if you want to click on the products area, in order to have an invoice and bill somebody for something, you have to build them for a product. You have to have a service, either a digital, physical goods, something in the products area in order for you to be able to bill a client. Now, in this example, what I'm gonna be dealing with is just two different services. One of them is a website consulting fee, which is where you're building a website for somebody, and we're just gonna charge $2,000 for that. And then we have a website hosting fee. Now, a lot of people don't realize this, but you know, website hosting is something that high level does for you. Built in. Uh, right now all the high level websites are hosted within the high level platform. This is a cost savings. I mean, if you could imagine somebody having a. One website, 2, 5, 10 different websites. That's 10 different hosting platforms that you have to pay for every month. So you can imagine the deal people can get, if you charge just a client, a website hosting fee every month just for hosting their websites, and that's all that you charge them for, you can make some money off of it. So what I've got here is a a website hosting fee. So I've got a couple of products created already that's gonna give us a jumpstart. The next thing we need to do is look at the tax settings. Now, I wanted to wait to create the tax settings for you here because taxes are something that's gonna be different in your area. Now, as a business, you need to understand what parts of your, what parts of your business are taxed and which ones are not taxed. Typically, labor is, isn't taxed in most states, but if you have, if you're selling a product or something like that outta your state, You could have taxes. So right now, before you, uh, get started with invoicing, you should understand the tax rates in your area. No. Um, typically there's like a local tax, uh, state tax and even a federal tax. So right now we're just gonna spend a little bit of time here just to create those. So I'm just gonna create a local tax and I'm just gonna give it a 1% rate. And just for the description, this is gonna show up on the invoice. Just uh, um, I'm gonna come up with just, this is asking for an e i n number. The description is just what it's gonna show in the invoice, but the tax identification number, this is what your company's e i n number is, and you do need to make sure you write it down. I'm just gonna make something up here. And let me copy this just to make sure I use the same one. So I'm gonna add that. So that's a local tax. Now I'm gonna come back and just add a state tax real quick, and I'm gonna do state tax at 9%. Man, they really get you on that, don't they? State tax and pay the same number. Add that, and then come and do federal tax and we'll just do. 12% on this one here, and depending on your services that you offer, you might have other type of taxes that are involved with, I'm not sure what they are, but this is where you need to come first, configure all of your taxes, and then I'll show you how you can add those taxes to your invoice when we're billing people out. So those are a couple of things that you need to get set up. First, it's your products and your SE and your taxes. Now, I didn't go over products, but if this is connected to your Stripe account, you can simply click this button right here and import your products from Stripe. If you have them already in there, you can just simply import them. You don't have to manually create them like I did, me myself for this example. I'm just gonna manually create a few of them and try not to, uh, deal with the Stripe connections as of right now. So right now we wanna go back to all invoices. Something else I wanna show you is this little button right here, this little gear button. Before you get started with invoicing, you need to go ahead and click on this. This right here are all of your settings regarding your invoicing, and we're gonna show you how you can customize a few things. So first of all, uh, by default, every invoice just says a title invoice on it. Now, for this particular example, I'm using a company, uh, sort of a company, marketing agency called dig, uh, Digi Global Agency. And I'm just gonna simply just type in invoice. So right now I'm gonna customize the top of this to say digital, uh, Digi. Digi Global Typed Agency twice. Um, go figure that. But the Digi Global Agency to this right here, you can, uh, brand it if you want to. Your terms and notes. This is very important here. What are your conditions of your invoicing? So, I'm just gonna put in here, please pay balance within seven days. Now, whatever your terms are, just add them here. And the nice thing is every invoice you create, your terms and notes will be added to the bottom of every invoice. This is why I want you to do this first, because this right here is gonna make the invoicing process just much more streamlined and much easier now. With high level. High level has a lot of notifications that you can get. So this right here is the different notifications that happen whenever invoicing is done. So notice right here, this is the customer notification. So right now I'm gonna blow this up. Customer notifications. You can't turn this off right now. Um, Invoice received. So whenever you send an invoice, they're going to, uh, an email and a text message is gonna go out to your client, whatever's configured in their particular contact record that's gonna go out, just notify them of a new invoice. Now, there are default templates that are very basic here, and you don't, you can't really edit those, those are behind the scenes and high level, just that it just ends a basic email. Hey, you've got an invoice. You know, click here to look at your invoice. Something like that. Now, if you wanted to, you can collect, uh, select this and choose a different template. So you can choose cu, you can create custom email templates as well as custom text templates that you could select here if you want to. Now I'm gonna go back just a little bit here. So, invoice received, invoice payment, successful from the client, so. Once the client makes a payment and that payment goes through, they'll get a notification here, whatever this is, that a payment's been made. If there is a failure, for some reason, they get these templates, and then any kind of auto payment information. That's paid, uh, automatically in any auto payments that are failed. So this right here is just a way for you to customize each one of those notifications up to you. You can leave it to default or you can specify your own custom template there. Now inside the team notifications, invoice payments successful, this will go to your internal team to be emailed to say payment was received, payment failed. Auto payment failed. Auto payment, skipped, the invoice cannot be sent. Something like that, your, your team's gonna get notified of that. So these are all the different changes that you can make. I'm gonna go ahead and save this. So those have been saved successfully. Now as far as the email templates go, I just want to take a quick minute and just show you where you would actually configure those. This is in the exact same area as where you would configure any of your other email templates. So here under emails on the email campaign, you can go to templates, you can add your template here. This right here can be a full, uh, version html. I don't really have anything here. It's just for an example. But you can build a full html layout, uh, brand it with your logo and make it look all nice and fancy, or you can come into the templates area. This template is really kind of like for texting, text-based, uh, SMS messages and a text-based email, uh, templates, which you can get here. So right now you can just simply, uh, create a template using a text or email template. Configure that those templates then become available in the dropdown list, making it very easy for you to configure it. So that's where you go through and make your email templates and all of these things should be done first before you begin using. The invoicing system because once this is already finished, then creating invoice is just a matter of just boom, boom, boom, just knocking stuff out. Now for the example of here, I'm just gonna show you, I only have two contacts that, that are in the CRM area for the high level system. Those are the only people I'm gonna be dealing with. But in order to invoice somebody, they do need to be inside of your contacts and your CRM system here. So if we, uh, just take a look, we've got, um, a basic. Uh, Jane Smith and, uh, John Smith configured here. So, uh, we'll just, we'll kind of see them when we make an invoice, um, here, but we've got tax settings all set up here. Just take a quick look. Local Satan Federal, we've got our products created here. We've got a couple different types of products. Website hosting fee on this one is a reoccurring monthly. Uh, product that we, uh, service that we have, versus website consulting is a one time payment. So just to kinda let you know, those are the different ones that we can have. Also with invoicing, we are gonna be taking a look at. Just doing, uh, with these two different types of products, we can have a one-time payment invoice that you can send out, and we can also set up reoccurring template invoices for the, uh, in this kind of case, the website fee. We're gonna show you how to go through and set up a reoccurring invoice so that can go out every single month to somebody, to your client. So here, what we're gonna do is just simply click on the new button and we're just gonna do a new invoice for right now. Now notice, uh, you have Digi Global Agency invoice looks nice and neat. At the top, you've got a branded logo here. This is actually configured at the company page in your settings. Whenever you configure your company logo, it pulls that in. Now you have to simply do, oh, I'm sorry, I should have said this beforehand. Before you can use the invoicing template. You must have your Stripe account connected. Stripe is how you're gonna be able to receive payments to this. And um, I'm sorry, I should have kind of mentioned that before. If you don't have Stripe, then you will not get this nice little pay button. You'll get a little banner across the top saying you need to integrate Stripe with your account before payments can be received. So just my little uh, Disclaimer for that. So let's kind of get back to it. This bill too makes it very easy. Just click on the button and we pull up all of your client list. Right now we're gonna submit this to John Smith and if we, uh, pull John Smith here, John Smith's information should be populated here. Wonder what's going on. So if we look at service, um, we'll come back to that. We'll do website consulting fee. Notice that we have this price in here. We'll just simply click save. This pops up in here and it's a $2,000. If you remember, that was a product that we actually had for this. And we see John's, uh, uh, John owns a t-shirt printing business, so we created a website for, uh, the T-shirt printing, charged him $2,000 for that, and that's how much we're gonna bill him for, but, Because of your area, you might have to, uh, you might have to charge them taxes. So right here, underneath the price, there's an add tax button. So if you just simply click on add tax, it comes up and you can simply select what taxes you want to include, and all the tax rates are already included. Simply click save. And now notice that you have federal tax, state tax, local. All of these came in the description. And notice now that you have 2000. The federal comes out state and local, giving you a total of 24 40. So once you do this, you can simply click save Right now, I'm just gonna save this and make sure that we save this in a draft mode. And I want to show you this because you can. You don't necessarily have to send out invoices as soon as you make them. You can keep them in a draft mode here and make them available for you in case you wanna go back in and e edit them. But right now, let's, uh, we're not gonna be sending these out, but if you wanted to, you can click send. You can simply, uh, uh, click this button and then that goes out to, uh, send it an email and you get all the notifications via email and text message to the client based upon the information and the contact record. Here, if you wanted to take a quick look, you can simply record preview. So this right here is the preview of what the invoice is gonna look like. Now it's not, it doesn't have the pay button on here. The pay link, whenever you send it to the client, you know it will have a pay link that they can click on, which in turn will allow them to go back and pay for it, um, electronically, directly using your Stripe account. So this just tells you what it looks like to make sure that everything looks good before you send it out. Now one of the nice things is you could send this invoice out to the client and they could pay this. Um, notice that this is kind of, uh, you can't click on it right here inside of the editor. But what you can do if you wanted to, if the client knows they need to pay, you don't need to necessarily send them the invoice. You can simply give them a call. Click on this option to save record payment. Now, when you did this, let's just say, uh, you've got a couple different ways you can do this. You can charge a credit card, so they can give you a credit card over the phone, and you could simply select, charge a credit card, go through the rest of the wizard, charge a credit card, and you know, that gets approved, everything gets done. Or if you actually went on site, maybe you went on site to this particular client and they issued you a check. A company check for it. So this is where you would record manually. This is where you would record, record a payment you've received already in cash check, or, you know, a certified cashier check or something that they've, uh, sent it. You could record the payment here. Those things can be done, and then the payments received, and then mount the payments received. Then all the other notifications get sent out to the client as well as a team saying this invoice has been paid. Hey, client, um, the invoice, we've received your payment. Everything is good to go. So that's typically how just a one time, one and done, uh, uh, invoice is handled inside of high level. Now I'm just gonna leave that here. What I'm gonna do now is come and look at the reoccurring one. So you can come here from this direction and go to reoccurring templates, or you can click on new and choose new reoccurring template. Either way, it would take you to the same place. So, That example, it was a one time website build where you're charge 'em $2,000 to build a website. Now we're dealing with a client that you may host their website or websites inside of high level, and you may charge them so much for it. Now I'm charging just simply at $20, but you know, you can charge 'em whatever you can. You feel as comfortable with the number of websites that they actually have. So at this point, you know, how often do you want to have this done? Excuse me, daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly? We're gonna do monthly and we're gonna select some of the options here. We can choose a date, we can choose like the first Monday, the first, Friday second. You know, we have all of those options. So we have the first, we have the last something of the month. Maybe it's the last Monday or the last Friday. I'm gonna pick a date for this one right here. And I'm just gonna say I want to pick the first of every month. Um, and then right now we get to specify how often that is. Just because it's monthly, it doesn't mean it has to be every month. You can have it every two months or every three months on, on here. So right now I'm gonna choose monthly. So once a month, on the first of the month, every single month, this is gonna generate. Now for the date, I'm just gonna pick today's date end. I'm gonna say never. I don't want it to ever end because whenever the client leaves, then I'll make sure that we cancel the. The reoccurring template for them so they're no longer billed and everything is is done now. How far in advance do you wanna send the invoice? It already says here that you're gonna send it out on the first. So let's just say we want to send it seven days in advance. Well, one of the nice things is first invoice will be due on May 1st, and we'll be sent down on April 24th. Now, I know we're behind on this one, but you kind of get the point. You can specify how many days in advance. That this is gonna be, uh, automatically emailed out to the tenant to be paid just to make sure that you're paid promptly on time. Now the reoccurring template, very similar to the same, uh, one and done invoice that we've already configured. I'm gonna click on here and I'm gonna just choose Jane Smith this time. Um, Jane Smith owns Total Relief Massage, and she's got a couple of different websites that we're just charging her 20 bucks a month. To host those inside of high level, we're gonna come here and look at a product. We're gonna choose the website hosting fee. Click save now. Again, this one you may or may not be able to charge taxes. You understand if you do charge taxes, you can select whatever taxes you want. Make sure you put that on there as well. I'm not gonna do any taxes this time, so right now it's gonna be a straight $20 a month from this one. We can just simply click save to make sure that we save it in our system. And now that we have this, we can, uh, sorry, let me save this again. Something must not have happened, but here we see a, uh, a new reoccurring template and. I guess I can simply edit this to make this here at the top, make this more of, um, just total massage website invoice and save that just so it's descriptive. So when we come back here and take a look at it, we know what this is for. And the last thing is, you know, tells you the last time it was issued on, and again, it's still in draft mode because we haven't actually sent it out to the client. But you can send it out and so forth. Now, here's one of the things that's nice. If you click on this option, notice that you have auto payments. So this is where if you have a reoccurring service, rather than getting an invoice every single time, The client is allowed to store a credit card on file, and that credit card can then just be charged every single month on the first. Perfect. That would work out fine, but they need to set up, uh, this is something that the client has to do when they get the invoice. They would simply click, pay the $20 instead of Stripe. Stripe would say, would you like to keep this account, uh, keep this credit card on file for future payments? Yes, you can then manage auto payments. The client can then say when the payment's gonna be made. And everything is gonna be, uh, fine at that point. Now, once you do this, that is a level of automation that you have. I'm just gonna leave here. I'm not gonna save this, but that's nice to get those auto payments configured because then that's just like money in the bank, right? Well, this is where your settings come back into play. So here you just need to make sure that under your team set of, uh, settings that your auto payment failed. That you make sure that that's, um, that your team is definitely getting that because you wanna make sure if a credit card, for instance, if it expires, if the ex expiration date uh, goes beyond there and the card can no longer be used, you wanna make sure that your team gets notified as well as the client gets notified when the auto payment information fails. This is how, why it's so important to do this. Now, one of the other things about this is, um, Well, that right there is, before I move on, this is the basics of just setting up invoicing and reoccurring invoices, getting your products set up, uh, for being able to make payments, and then getting your tax information configured as well as going in and configuring all of your notifications as well as your customizations of your. Website. Now notice in here when I, uh, when you click edit on this notice here at the bottom, your terms are already customized cuz we put that in the customization. Anything you put in there will be at the bottom of all of your invoices. And at this particular point, invoicing becomes a breeze. Um, just pick the client, pick the service, submit it, you're done, and you can send it out to them. All of that stuff is, is gonna be great. Now, if you look at this and you look at all invoices, now you can kind of see all the invoices that you have, which ones have been paid notice over here, you have so much in draft, so many payments due. So this right here is your accounts receivable. How much money do you have out that people owe you, how much money you've received, and then how much is overdue. So it kind of gives you a little dashboard of all of that. Now, That's perfect. I mean, this right here, people actually pay money every month to have an invoicing service and just how nice that high level integrates this in. So you can use the same contact that's in your CRM system to bill for it. And not only that, if we simply take a look at the contact record, the actual conversations area inside the, uh, inside the contact record will have whenever you send them invoices. So all of that information's maintained in the contact record. Very nice, very clean. You can go back and look at all the history of when you text them, email them when you send invoices out and so forth. So now that we've gone through this, I want to move over. I'm a big automations guy here. I love using the workflows inside of high level. I would be amiss if I didn't show you some of the workflow features involved in invoicing. So these are some of the things that you can have done here. So here I'm gonna edit this particular workflow and just show you. Here inside of this, there's a trigger that you can have for invoicing. So right now this is for invoicing is being paid. So right now, if you take a look, the invoicing status, it could either be paid or sent. So what does this mean? Whenever an invoice gets paid through Stripe, now you can have a workflow off and, and have something a lot more custom. For instance, let's just say an auto payment was to be, uh, You know, you had, uh, some kind of a problem, uh, with either sending or getting payments. You can configure a workflow to get a much more detailed step-by-step logic of what your team is gonna do, rather than just getting a one-time notification from the system saying that a payment failed or, uh, either you know, paid or was sent. So I just at least wanted to show you that that's a, that's available to be able to trigger off of because you may want to have more detailed, uh, logic involved whenever somebody, you send a request. You might have follow ups, um, for that, or when somebody page, you know, you might have some custom messages that go out to your team or to a third party. So I hope that you enjoyed this video. You understand a little bit more about invoicing, how invoicing works, how do you get it configured inside of high level. Again, if you haven't subscribed to the channel, please do so. And if you haven't, if you thought the video was useful, please click like, leave me a comment. Uh, to, you know, if it, if it helped improved or anything else that I can pro provide value for. I just want to say thanks so much for visiting my channel and have a great day. Hey, I want to thank you again for visiting my channel and give you one more little thing here. If you are interested in high level and getting some additional high level training, please see the link of the description below. I do have a free course I'm offering that covers everything related to high level and gives you all the information that you need to know. Thank you so much and have a great day.