Elevate Your Building Services with FreshBooks Invoice Generator for Building Services

Freshbooks invoice generator for Building services

hi this is Tim yod with fit small business and today is our second freshbooks tutorial you can find all of our freshbooks tutorials by Googling fit small business freshbooks tutorials So today we're going to learn how to manage your clients and send invoices in freshbooks so we're starting from the freshbooks dash dashboard the first thing we want to do is add a new client so if we go over here to the left menu bar click on clients and this is what I like to call our Client Center so by scrolling down I can see all of our clients we have listed here and to add a new client all I have to do is click the Big Green new client button and from this screen I can enter in all of the necessary contact information first name last name company now you need to have one or the other or you can have both you can have a first name last name and Company or you can have just one or the other first name last name and then or company name so for individuals obviously it's a first and last name for companies may just be the company name okay and there's all your contact information in client settings over here um you can turn send reminders on or off if you're going to automatically send reminders um you can click on that click here and it'll ask you how often you want to send reminders very cool very easy to do um charge late fees again if you want to change this from no you can automatically add late fees and then you can tell it how much late fee do you want to add add and when do you want to add it very simple and currency and language um now if you send invoices that are not in your home currency you can send them you can receive payment but it's not going to automatically include those amounts in your financial statements because it doesn't have any sort of translation function where it's going to convert your your foreign currencies into your domestic currencies so you'll have to somehow record that conversion manually um or and then here you can select to turn on the PDF attachments uh to your invoices so great so these these set defaults of all of these items for your customers when you send individual invoices um you'll be able to uh change these settings for each individual invoice as well so that's where we set up our new client so I'm going to cancel out of that so how do we view details for our current clients well we can scroll down and here a list of all of our clients and so let's take a look here at Dan a North Builder so I'm just going to click on them and this is going to open up their client screen so here I have all of their contact information very easy to view um and here is their outstanding Revenue so they have one outstanding invoice of $1,000 that is overdue um we don't have any unbilled time to them and we don't have any unbilled expenses to them so that's a really really great financial shot of the client uh right off the bat uh here we can click over to this relationship tab is kind of interesting so this is just a place for you to make notes about your relationship with the client you know maybe they have kids what are their kids' names what are their interests their Hobbies how did you meet them whatever things you would like to know um to kind of you know help your memory when you're ready to deal with this client so that's kind of a neat um option okay so down here if we scroll down a little bit we have all these tabs we can really find out just about any information we need about this client um so our contact tabs so if this is a company you might have multiple contacts at the company you might have salespeople you might have the controller you might have you know accounts payable so you can enter all of the various contacts for this company in the contacts tab invoices will show all the invoices that are outstanding from this client so they still owe you $1,000 it's uh 3 months old so you might want to do something about that um recurring templates so if you have invoices that go out regularly on a template on a monthly basis you can see those here if the client has a retainer so if you charge client's retainers this will give you a summary of the status of that retainer for this client if you've issued this client any credits it'll show up here if the client pays your invoices through the automatic checkout links that are included with your invoices um then you can see those payments here any expenses that have been charged to this client um you can see here and you can actually add expenses here so this is usually not where you're going to add them usually you'll add them in the expenses section of the software but you can actually add expenses billable to this client uh right here um estimates out to the client um time tracking so any time entries this is really neat so again you can add things here but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it that's not the usual workflow you're going to add time tracking when you're looking in the time tracking um module but they'll show up here so anytime you want to see time entries charged to Dan a North Builders here is where you can come and see a very easy summary of them and then projects for this Builder you can see a summary of them here and then if you want to filter reports for this customer uh here are your reports so really really neat um again you know and up here so in the create new button here if we click on this drop it down um we can create all of these items here fantastic but again generally that's not your usual workflow usually you're going to create them you know when you're doing time tracking you're going to be time tracking time for multiple clients you'll enter it all there but you can see it on this client tab in all of these and in the client information in all these various tabs so very cool I like how it brings all the information together okay now let's create a new invoice so let's go back to our dashboard and we want to create a new invoice now we know one way to do it would be right from the client screen like we just talked about but let's do it in a little more typical workflow fashion um so there are there are a lot of ways to create an invoice here so we could go up here to this green new button and go create invoice that would be one way to do it I'm going to first go to our invoices screen and so this is our invoices screen it's going to show all of our recently updated invoices and this is probably a good place to create a new invoice you can create a new invoice by clicking here and the under the recently updated you could click a new invoice up here so let's click new invoices up here okay so this is our invoice template um we can uh so here's our logo so all of these all of this for at right here this was all determined when we set up our company information in the first tutorial it sets the default for all of these invoices however we can now change individual invoices very easily as we do it so for instance right here is the logo if we don't want the logo we could delete it but next time we create a new uh invoice the logo is going to reappear so any changes we make here will only affect this particular invoice which might be nice that way you can customize invoices for particular customer customers okay so um here is where we would designate the client that we're going to build let's uh let's bill it to Cole home builders today's issue date is going to be due in 30 days automatically assigns an invoice number okay and there's no amount do yet because we haven't charged them for anything so here let's add the line items that we're going to charge them for now let's say we did some plumbing services and we've already set up an item called plumbing services for $500 so let's click on that item okay and that includes a $500 charge let's add another line we could call it um I don't know travel time so let's say we have a deal with them they're a long ways away we they've agreed to pay some travel time okay and here we can uh put the rate of say $75 okay and we could add another line okay and so forth so we can continue to add lines there so let me take one second to uh to to illustrate something that's in addition to just creating a normal invoice um if you have a item that you're going to put on a lot of invoices then you really want to dis to create kind of of a permanent item like what plumbing services were so you can very easily add it uh to each invoice and so the way you're going to do that is Let's uh duplicate our tab here so we can have a second tab with fresh Books open okay and we'll cancel out of the invoice okay so if we go to the Cog willll and then we have items and services and here where we can see the plumbing services show up so we can do create a new um item and we'll call it a um call it a plumbing widget and we're going to sell them for $75 a piece okay now let's go back to our invoice um and see if it shows up yet no it doesn't we might have to reload this screen okay um so yeah we'll have to start it all over here no problem going to do this to Coal Builders now we can see we can choose from plumbing services and we can also add in this Plumbing widget so if you're going to have an item that you're going to include in a lot of uh that you're going to include in a lot of invoices then you'll want to set up an item excellent so that's adding all of our items and we move down here if we want to add a discount we can do that if we click on add a discount um you can put in whatever discount you want um so uh that's the amount due if you want to request a deposit you can this is pretty cool if you want to um provide them with a payment schedule so if it's not all due immediately you can actually provide them a payment schedule right on the in voice that's fairly unique great so notes here um this is just very specific to this uh invoice it won't show up on any other invoices um terms um if you want to have any special terms you can type them here so uh very good um the settings for the invoices uh this is very similar to what you set up for the customer so whatever you set up for the customer is going to be the default here but you can change them for individual invoices uh you can customize the style of the invoice and so just like in the prior tutorial where we set up the default style uh we can choose from simple modern or classic okay simple here is the default because that's what we set up in the first tutorial you can make the invoice recurring and then again these are the defaults for Cole home builders so these these settings here are only for this invoice these settings are the default for com for Cole home builder so we've already set these when we set up the the customer but if we want to change them we can change them here and they will be changed for all of the future invoices as well so great there we go that is our new invoice um if we want to email it or print it we're going to have to do a send to oh so this actually this is actually going to enable us to do an online payment which will be great but before we print it or email it without the online payment we're going to have to save it okay now we can see it's in draft form so we're going to have to open it and we're going to have to approve it and actually by approving it we're just going to print it so here we can print the invoice and send it off in the mail or if we prefer we could email the invoice now we don't have any contact set up for this customer so we are not going to be able um to illustrate the invoice but here so the emailing of the invoice but if you have a contact set up for that particular uh customer then you'd be able to choose which contact it is so remember we might have the controller we might have the owner might have a salesperson choose which one of those you want to send the invoice to excellent okay and there we go so that's how we create and send a new invoice okay so let's talk about applying customer payments now so here I clicked on our invoices screen okay and now we want to collect a p payment from the customer so if they pay online through the the through the email we send them then that'll automatically be recorded in freshbooks but if they send us a check we're going to have to record the check manually so let's do that so um let's say Cole home builders pays us their $1,500 so let's click on this okay and now let's do a add a payment so let's say they paid us $1,500 by check on 53 and we can send them a payment notification and there we go now if we scroll down below the invoice it'll actually show us what invoices what payments have been made on this invoice and so if we want to enter what we call a short pay where they don't pay the entire invoice perhaps they only paid 8 00 of the $1,500 we can certainly do that and then we'll have a list of all of the payments um that have been made then on this invoice well great Okay so we've learned how to create an invoice we've learned how to send it we've learned how to accept a payment on it um now let's make sure we can view all of our outstanding invoices so if we go to invoices um here you can see all of our invoices okay and these are going to be just the outstanding invoices so we have a total outstanding invoices of $ 4,575 okay these look like they are in the order of their due date which is good okay um however there is another way to view this that's going to be a little bit nicer and that's by looking at our aging report so to find our aging report we go to reports scroll down to our payments reports we have an aging report and here it gives us our client name and then it separates the payments into four different periods 0 to 30 days late 31 to 60 days late 61 to 90 days late and 90 plus days late okay and so this is a very common report for companies to refer to on a weekly basis to determine which customers they need to contact UM regarding payments great so that is how we manage our customers send invoices view invoices track invoices in fresh books so if you would like to try fresh books um you can do so by clicking the link in the YouTube description you can choose from either free 30-day trial or 50% off for 6 months um this tutorial is also available in written form um which I've provided a link to in the YouTube description and we also have an additional four free tutorials that you can find by Googling fits small business freshbooks tutorials my name was Tim Yoder I'm with fit small business and I hope you found this fresh book's tutorial helpful