Elevate Your Legal Services with Our Invoice Bootstrap Template for Legal Services

Invoice bootstrap template for Legal Services

what good is time and expense billing software if you don't have a robust billing area to use bill quick of course provides this looking at quickbooks for example you do have the ability to customize your template and there's a fair amount you can do with that but when you get into very specific service areas like architects and cpas might have the need for there's not enough there and build quick fills that gap you have actually very detailed choices from among 100 different invoice templates that you can use so that you can get the layout you need and present the information that you need to present to your client when you're sending them a bill the ultimate objective is very simple you want to make sure they understand what they're being billed for and you want to head off any questions of the past because the last thing you want to do is have to invest time and resources into answering your clients questions about what was on their invoice billing and specifically time and expense billing is one of the main reasons why bill quick exists of course as you've already seen now it does a lot more than that but time and expense billing was really the main reason why bill quick was born it was created to help simplify that process and help make it so that you don't have to enter information you know more than once and that's been the problem historically is you have one person submitting information and then somebody else gets that and then they have to enter it again into you know the accounting system and it lends itself to errors and it's also just inefficient it should only have to be entered once especially with the technology that's available to us today so now we're going to get into showing you the the reason behind behind why bill quick was born and and the core of why it's here in addition to the project management aspect so as we pointed out in the written portion you're going to want to start here in the view menu when it comes time to go to get into the billing process really and i wanted to show you the service fee schedule and the expense fee schedule so let's open up both of these screens there's not a whole lot to show you here but i just want you to see it so that you're not overwhelmed by it or just unfamiliar with it when when your time comes to take a look at this now it's as you can see it's pretty straightforward i can use you know a preset fee schedule or i can create a new one by clicking new or i can grab the schedule based on a budget so any of these are options if i go to create a new schedule i can name it give it a description i can base it on an existing fee schedule and the bottom line is as i'm creating these fee schedules it's pretty straightforward i'm going to choose an employee and for that or i can choose an employee group these are sort of mutually exclusive so if i choose a group it's it's going to blank out the employee once i tab out of it so you can choose an employee or an employee group obviously it wouldn't make sense to do both same with activity or activity group so i can and we can set up these groups obviously in another screen and bill quick so that and you know an employee group obviously is a group of employees i might want to have all my architects or staff level architects in one group and their billing rates and cost rates may be exactly the same so that's the idea behind the groups we don't really cover this in this course but it's there and you should be aware of it since it obviously comes up in this screen and the same with the activity and the activity group so either i can set up my schedule my fee schedule for this based on a specific activity or i can base it on a group of activities that might be uh you know part of the somehow related like all my admin activities or all my computer related activities and so on beyond that it's just establishing what the bill rate will be and what the cost rate will be for this particular line item for this particular combination of employer employee group and activity or activity group it's really that simple the expense fee schedule is not much different again i'm going to have an employee or an employee group in this case it's an expense id or an expense group right and then i can again have my cost and this time we're going to look at a markup percentage on that cost to come up with the amount and of course if it's something that's taxable i can establish that here as well so not rocket science nothing too complicated there let's go look at the project billing area if i go into project information and we've already seen the screen so for any project i come over here to the billing tab and here's where i want you to pay careful attention because there's a lot in here that obviously has to do with billing first of all if i have a fixed fee project and there's going to be a recurring bill let's say each month for the same amount i can establish that here i can establish how much retainers there is and for that matter i can establish what the retainer amount is in dollar form as opposed to percentage here's where of course i can assign my fee schedule service fee schedule expense fee schedule if i have an estimate that i've created i can establish what that is here and i can assign a budget to the project over here as well we have delayed fee schedules and then from that you can establish what the trigger is and what the amount is for that we have payment terms of course and as you may well have gathered bill quick has multiple currencies so we can establish what the project's currency is in case we're dealing with something that's overseas over here we can establish that by default all invoices for this project will be sent as a joint invoice what does that mean uh particularly in the case of architects i might have multiple phases so checking this off means that bill quick will assume when it comes time to bill that it will automatically consolidate all the billing for all the phases into a single invoice a lot of times clients want that they don't want to get three different bills because there's three different phases and of course here we can establish that we want to email invoices and then there's the automatic billing which we can set up and invoice templates i want to show you what this looks like because this is kind of one of the really uh compelling aspects of bill quick is that you know if you compare it to quickbooks quickbooks lets you customize the template and there's limited capabilities there here you can customize but you almost don't need to they have so many choices and you can select an example of one so you can see what it looks like so these are cost plus invoices these are fixed so for an accounting firm right accountant's custom billing period and so on so you know and look how nice they look they look very professional so i encourage you to go through this and take the time if you're using this for your own practice or if you're using it for a client and review this with the client and decide what the client likes because that's where i know i've gotten hung up with a lot of clients particularly my architect clients where you know they and here's a phased invoice speaking of the architect clients where the architects are very particular about how they want the information laid out typically in my experience they want to be able to show of course what the billing is that we're sending to them now but also the bigger picture project stuff what's the contract total what's been billed to date what are we billing here and what remains to be billed based on that and then as you can see here a detail on the reimbursable expenses and then some want this detail and some don't want the detail they just want one line item for reimbursed expenses so look what you have here invoice summarized with expenses and then invoice with expenses and then a phased invoice with expenses and then just a plain phased invoice and of the phased void invoice so you have a lot of templates to choose from here once you've established which invoices you like for your purposes and again this is just an index then what you're going to want to do is come up here where it says assigned invoice templates and drop that down and you can choose from among the templates so of course you might want to go to a phased invoice select it and then over here assign selected so this way your standard invoice will be this phased invoice and then you can choose a different template in cases where you're doing a join invoice a manual invoice and of course you can use a different template for a statement so this is how this screen works and it's definitely worth spending some time in here because as you can see you can get some really professional looking invoices with the detail nicely laid out so your clients customers assuming you're using this for a client are going to be ecstatic because they're going to get a bill that they understand they're going to get a bill that explains them very clearly what they're paying for and what where we're at with it right because this is we're talking about billing for very potentially complex projects that have a lot of information and a lot of detail that needs to be described well so that it's very clear because the bottom line is when i send an invoice out i want to make sure i get paid and the more clear the information is on the that's on the invoice in terms of what they're being charged for and what stage the project is at which of course stands as the proof of why they're being charged what they're being charged on this invoice the clearer that is the more likely they're going to be to just pay it if if they're not clear if it's not clear to them when you're sending them an invoice what you're billing them for then they're more likely to question it and that's going to slow down the process and that's going to delay you getting paid on the project so to me that's one of the most important things when it comes to sending an invoice out is getting paid and we want to make sure that we can do everything in our power to make it as easy as possible for the recipient of our invoice to understand very clearly what they're being billed for and why the amount is what it is so they don't have to think twice they can just put it in their system do the entry and send a check off as soon as possible now let's take a look and see what the next thing is because now that we've seen the invoice templates and we understand the project billing area and we've looked at the fee schedules we want to take a look at billing schedules because this is another thing you can do when it comes to uh billing your clients or billing your clients clients so over here under billing create invoices we'll have billing schedules and here it's nice you can see they show you the whole contract amount in the screenshot that i put in the written portion this was blocked off from the drop down but this is what it looks like and what's nice about this of course is i can set up if i have a fixed contract that i'm billing then i can create my billing schedule based on that and of course it shows me the total so that i can make sure that my total amount comes up to the right total and doesn't exceed what the contract amount is i'd look kind of foolish if i over build my client so this is pretty straightforward you bill number one what's the amount is there a retain is it a retainer the net bill and so on or is there retainage being taken out and then the net and then of course you'll add in however many line items you need to in order to achieve the entire billing schedule and get that laid out so again that's pretty straightforward now let's go to the time and expense review under time and expenses we're going to come here to review time and expenses and as you'll see you can choose how you want to look at this in a number of different ways so i can look at it for all employees and vendors or i can look at only employees or only vendors or only a certain employee group and so on there's a lot of different ways i can review the expenses the other important thing to notice is here where it says active filters notice i've got three filters here one is that i'm seeing approved only unbilled only and billable only right because if it's not billable i don't really care to review it now the thing i might want to change in a case like this is i may be reviewing unapproved time and bill and expenses to see what i want to approve before i go to do my billing so i might want to flip this and uncheck approved only and check off unapproved only and that way i get my screen and i can select any number of items one of the cool tools that bill cook provides by the way is let's say i can do a reverse select so let's say there's just a few that i know i don't care about so i can select these i can select just a few or let's say this range and then do a reverse select and it selects everything else so that's a really cool feature that build quick offers that i've not seen and would love to have in many other applications that i use so i can select all of these i can even say select all and i can simply approve it so now we've got everything approved and that's essentially how you do it of course you want to pay attention to the criteria that i've got established here i've got this pretty much showing absolutely everything for all of time and every single in this case vendor i might want to do it by project right so i select project click refresh and then i do all projects and refresh and then now i've just approved everything so i need to switch that and check that off and now i've got some stuff in here to look at but this is how you review time and expenses you review this stuff you question it you see does it make sense am i seeing stuff i don't expect to see here am i not seeing stuff i do expect to see here so from the screen you can easily drill around and review your time and expenses and decide what's ready to be billed and what isn't maybe you decide oh this shouldn't be billable and you uncheck it next once we're done reviewing expenses and making sure that we've got everything approved that we want to be approved but then we're ready to actually do the billing review possibly the most compelling area of bill quick in terms of billing is the billing review screen as you've already seen bill quick provides us with a robust infrastructure in order to gather information about the time and expenses that have been incurred in connection with a project in the billing area you get the opportunity to review that information before sending the bill you can send multiple bills out to multiple clients at the same time by simply selecting what's going to be billed and bill cook has the intelligence to be able to take that information distributed amongst the projects to the invoices and send it out to the clients in one fell swoop your whole billing process gets so much more efficient we're going to show you what this looks like in this lesson which is the last thing we do really before we're ready to actually produce invoices so we go over to billing create invoices and you'll see billing review and once i click on that again i can i can view it by project i can say show me billing for all projects and as i mentioned in the written part this what you choose here is going to have a lot to do with who's the one doing the billing right if i'm a project manager and in my particular case the project manager does the billing for the project then i'm probably going to want to view it by project and i'm going to say no to this this comes up if there are unapproved records in either time or expenses that fit within the date range that we're looking at of course the period is all so in this case if there's anything out there at all it's going to come up if there's anything unapproved that falls in the timeline that i'm looking at it's this is going to come up to ask me if i want to review the unapproved time and expense record so i'm going to say no and i can again i can say view by project manager so i can say you know i only want to see if i'm curtis james i only want to see my projects so i can select that and then again that dialogue comes up so curtis is working on it looks like just well at least of the projects curtis is working on there's only one that's got stuff ready to be built and for that matter if i'm just a billing manager where that's you know my company structured so that you know there's a billing manager who does all the billing the project managers then are probably the one who approve the time and expenses for their particular projects and then the billing manager comes in and does this actual review so let's say we want to look at it by project because i just want to see for all projects what am i ready to build and i can look at this for all projects or a specific one and then i've got everything here that i need to see now i mentioned in the written portion that you can do joint invoices so here's a good example of where that would come into play so i have main one two and three so this is the same project with three different phases right so i can actually group them by saying one one one all i have to do is assign the same thing to all three of them and it will it will build them as a single invoice that's what lets it know that i'm doing a joint invoice here otherwise each line item here is going well each project here is going to have its own invoice uh in other words if there's a distinction like this and i don't do the joint invoice thing then this is going to produce three separate invoices one for each phase because there's a distinction whereas if i have several line items for the same project and let's sort this by project id really quick to see if we have an example of such a thing then it would be all on one invoice so as long as i have information here that's for the same then it's going to come out on one invoice now of course over here is where i check off what i want to bill right and notice as i check it off it lets me see that it's going to be you know invoice number 1205 1206 and 1207 and so on so let's just keep going and watch what happens when i get down to my joint invoices and of course i'm a big fan of keyboard shortcuts so down arrow spacebar to select now let's see what happens oh my god look at that it's so smart it knows that i want these three on the same invoice so you get to confirm it in other words that this is actually going to go all on the same invoice so let's say this is it let's say this is everything that i need to build this actually is everything that shows up in the screen nonetheless i go to process here and i have two choices i can process final or process as a draft process is a draft it's pretty straightforward this is what i do if i want to take a look at it before i make it final and then send it off to the client and of course the third choice is i can process this final and print it so let's just say i process as a draft so i'm going to let it process all these invoices and now of course everything goes away from the screen and if i go to invoice review then right now nothing shows up so i need to check off here where it says draft invoice and refresh and here they all are and you can see the invoice numbers here so i can again review it and i can let's say double click this and it's going to give me a view into what this invoice is going to look like so this way i can double check things before i'm ready and then of course what i can do is let's go to select everything and i can say process invoice now so click to process selected draft invoices so this is going to make them final boom so then i uncheck this and refresh and here's all my final invoices that i just processed everything's here and of course finally what i can do is i can send these well i can send it to quickbooks right and then i can email and i can email a client i can email a client manager i can email a project manager or other so again if i say select all email client it says i can email only 10 invoices at a time so i've got to do it 10 invoices at a time but you get the idea this is how you can actually send out invoices in a batch rather than having to send out uh you know and look what it does it automatically chops the list down to the first 10. so then it confirms you've selected multiple invoices do you want to attach invoices of the same client in a single email so look at that if i say no it'll send each one in a separate email but of course at least in my case i'm going to pretty much say yes always to something like that and you can say yes and you can email the invoices out to your clients and notice what it does is it creates this nice little screen where i can go in and actually uh edit the body of the invoice it's incrementing attachments and it's going to compose the email or allow me to do that so notice what it's doing is it's opening up multiple tabs so that each email is getting prepared so that i can send out the invoices but i'll still still get to review that email so if you've ever used quickbooks to send invoices out you know that you don't really get this opportunity to really customize what the email does and what it looks like you have limited availability of fields to change and that's pretty much it so if i go select across the board here i can go into this and i can look at the attachments and i can of course establish who it's going to and then when i'm ready i can simply click send and that my friends completes the billing process you've seen how to review everything you've seen where to go you've seen how to establish which templates you want to use for invoicing purposes you've seen how to set up your fee schedules and assign those to the projects all of that has been covered so of course if you have any questions please visit our answers forum which is available to registered students of school of bookkeeping.com if you're not a registered student and you'd like to take advantage of that please sign up for schoolbookkeeping.com today and then of course you can ask all the questions you want in our answers forum as always i hope you're having an absolutely fantastic day and don't leave the course is not over yet we have one more section to review which is going to show you how to integrate all of this with quickbooks we'll see in the next section so now we've seen a lot of the benefits that bill click can provide in terms of the robust infrastructure around the billing process itself and everything we showed you leading up to that in terms of the time and expense entry and of course the project management at large now that we have this information and we understand the billing there might be one more question lingering especially since we mentioned that in the intro to the course which is how do i get this stuff into quickbooks from bill quick and bill quick as you probably well know by now does integrate deeply with quickbooks in the final lesson in this course we're going to show you exactly how that integration works and i think you're going to be pleased when you see just how easy it is to accomplish you