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Invoice message to customer example for HighTech

in today's video i want to chat to you guys about customers and invoicing on sage accounting [Music] good day my name is andre rubia i'm the only best accounting network and i've been in the accounting industry since about 2008 and i've been using stage since 2009 so i've got many many years of experience on stage in today's video we're going to be chatting about customers and invoicing and everything that you need to know regarding that on stage just remember before we continue remember to give the video a like and subscribe to my channel as well and also keep in mind that if you are maybe looking for a new accountant for your business remember to go check out our website .essaycountynetwork.com today we've got a list of many different accountants all over south africa that's able to service your business needs also just another note as well if you've got a paid site subscription remember that i give away free half an hour consultations with the people i'm going to share the link of that video at the top of here and also in the description below and then we go show you guys quickly how to do the customers and invoicing section on stage accounting great let me quickly show you what's happening with sage so just before i continue with the video as well remember that if maybe you guys don't have a subscription if you'll see it in the description of the video there's a link over there if you click on that link over there is where you can sign up to get the sage package and the only favorite that i do ask of you if you do sign up through my video remember just to keep my referral code there as i get some brownie points with sage cool so let me quickly look um in the previous video we talked about the basic setup where we went through company and we went to company settings and we went through the whole screen over there where to put an address and where to put in your logo and all that type of stuff in this video today we're going to be talking about everything relating to customers so that is where you're going to be doing your customer quotes your customer invoices all that type of stuff is going to happen under the screen of vm so you can see if you start at the top the first option that you've got is to add a customer the next one is a list of customers a list of sales rep customer categories then you can see you've got transactions over there so this is where the day to day stuff comes in where we can do customer quotes customer sales orders invoices recurring invoices credit notes customer receives allocating receipts write-offs and adjustments and then you can see obvious along the stuff report i think on this one there's basically two ones that stand out that we use on a regular basis and the special you can just adjust opening balances over there time tracking is something that you can look at if you do render service we keep track of the time and then data's management is a really cool functionality but i think i'm going to do a separate video on that it's quite intense and there's a lot of really cool stuff about the data's manager module if you had to start with that so let's start at the top because if i go to customer and i say add a customer this is obviously the starting point of where you have to start you see so just to mention as well there's two different places we can create a customer um a new customer you can either go to customers over there and go add a customer or the other place that you can also do it that ends up in the same place if you go to customers and you open up the customer invoices screen which i'm going to just quickly do just open it up in a new tab you can see you can open up a lot of different tabs so this is the place where you can create customer invoices as well and part of this process if i say edit that text invoice then again at the top here we choose your customer it's going to close that notice over there you can see where i have to choose a customer they also have the same option to add a new customer so whether you click that button over there or whether you click this button obviously it basically ends up in the same place the only difference this one is a little bit of a shorter version than the other one you can see it only also the basic stuff over here we can put in the customer's name customers that number the credit limit opening balances contact name email we're going to talk through all these things quickly now but let me quickly run to the full one first if i go down here and i'm just going to put in a test customer i'm just going to invert myself as a customer over here obviously my computer pre-populates most of the stuff and no opening balance over there that's fine but if you do have opening balances and stuff then you can do that over there you can see here's a a little button that you can tick that says or to allocate receipts to oldest invoices it's quite nice to do that it simply fastens a little bit when you get to the banking because there's a button there we have to actually when when customers make payments where you can allocate the payment again a specific receipt where if you had to select that then automatically it will take the payment and allocate it to the oldest invoice automatically you can always go reallocate those payments as well so it's not set in stone it is something that it can change or move over there then you can see but there's the status of the customer so if you have an old customer and you're not do working with the guy anymore you can untick that thing over there then if you had to create invoices then the guy's name won't pop up obviously customers that numbers if you work with that then that's important over there it's the thing that says electron accepts electronic invoices so remember the previous video we talked about the customer zone so it's really important if you do work with the customers owners to tick that little box over there otherwise your clients won't be able to see the invoices online and remember the other thing that i did mention just now is if you work with the details manager if you activate this module there's two other ticks over there to say that the customer accepts electronic reminders and there was a second option as well that pops up over so i think if you just want to create a basic customer without having to populate all these things you can see there's a lot of stuff over here against the activity additional contact nodes you can make notes user-defined fields personal information but it's not necessary to put all that stuff in so just as as a starting point you have to put the customer's name in there and then obviously email it to yourself as well those are the three important things that they have to do and then after that you can hit the save button and you'll see that we obviously saved the customer on the system over there so if we had to go to list of customers you can see that there is my name now at the moment my telephone number and then obviously i've got actions button over there if i had to go to the process invoice section of here and i'll do the same thing over here let's maybe just do that come on populate now and i'll just put a number two behind that then you'll see that it's going to end up in the exact same thing if i to press save up here then you can see it's giving me a warning over here so this customer is set up to receive statements by email piece and they'll add a valid email address so you have to make sure that they put at least the email address in the other device they won't be able to accept it and they can see there's that same button again that allow this customer to view invoices online and then the other thing that it can do if you do work with the details manager then you're gonna have those other options over there as well and the next thing after you've done that um just quickly jump back down to this one so customers we looked at that thing about adding a customer the next one is customer list so this is the same list that we're looking at over here list of sales rep and customer categories i'm not going to touch on that now because we just want to just get going on the basic things about customers so now if i had to go to the next one you can see customer quotes is the next button that i've got over there but then and you have a flow of how to work with customers so normally by default if you just work with cash customers and just invoice stuff as you're doing it then you would just skip this step of doing quotes remember quotes doesn't get recorded anywhere in your accounting record so it's just for you to keep track of all the quotes that you've done for customers and the nice thing about quote is if you send it out through through said if that customer comes back and they accept the quote then it can just press one button and then it changes that quote over into an invoice but let me show you guys quickly so i'm gonna create a quota here so i'm gonna say customer quote and i'll say add quote and then you can see there should be two customers that we created the one was let me just close this button over here so the one was um the one that we added there by the customer screen and the other one was from the invoice screen so i'm just going to use the first one and then you can see over here as the lines that he can go through so normally if you had to load all the stuff on the customer um tab then all the information will pull through automatically onto this page over here and you can see here you've got document numbers you can put in your quote numbers over there and remember when we did the video on the setup there was that place we can change the document numbers so this one will continue from the last number that you enter onto that system over the customer references so that's your instance um your clients work with purchase order numbers then the purchase order number would go in there then you can see here at the bottom you actually have to say what the what the quote is false at the moment at showing account remember that if you work with items i discussed them in the last video as well if you go to your customer settings and you go to um general settings there you will find the the selection to say whether you want to work with items or whether you want to work with accounts so remember if you work with accounts is the easiest way to do that so now we're just going to choose our income account which is other sales under the description you can go change the description to whatever it was they're decoding the customer for and then over there you're going to say 5 000 rand so it doesn't only thing to take note is if you work with account you can't change the quantity and that is not going to appear on the invoice as well you see it so you can only write in the description of what it is that you actually supplying the service for if you do want that thing to display numbers then you're going to have to use the item option of the theme and obviously at the moment we haven't got any items listed over here but um you can always go and add a item so let's quickly just do one quickly so let's quickly save you can choose any one you want i'm just going to say item one and then again cbs is quite important if you do work with items if it's physical stuff that is selling you would you make it a physical item otherwise you make it a service item which is always the easiest so if you come on sage don't do that now so if you do to work with items as quickly as here again let's try once more item one and we say item one we make a service item that's all comes that it works this time comfortably says save and you can see there's items and now i can go over here and say whatever the item was that i want to put in yeah i can now change the quantity to five and say that there's a thousand rand for each of those just remember that if you do work with items like i said just now that you add an extra step to the accounting process so by default if you can try not to work with items that just simply fast the whole thing so we're just going to keep it on account we're going to say other sales the cells that's the default one that they've got and we can change our description to whatever we want it to be and then we're going to say that that item was 5 000 once you've got that done you can see at the bottom you've got some options over there you can either say save save a new print preview and email and you can see over here you can set the default email messages or the stuff for the quotes if you do the basic setup you'll see in one of the screens over there you can also set the messages so this is the place where you would set the default message for quote with to say that the quote is valid for 20 days 50 deposit will be seen as acceptance after quote and obviously all your banking details now i've got an option to either save it press save a new print preview or email so if that thing is set up for for um for email distribution now i can see that it's gonna go to my email address obviously you can see yourself on the email if you want and then you can see the description that it gives you the eye and the review please find it that's your quote for five thousand rand and then you can say email the report and then there as the plays um i'd obviously won't give it on the free trial but here you can actually add stuff to and that specific quote itself so if there's maybe other documents that you need to send through together with the quote that is the place where you would do it let's quickly just see whether it actually saved that code now see if i go to customers transactions customer quotes let's have a quick look and then you can see that there is our quote number one if i do do this go to vm so the other thing that he can do is you can save it on your computer as well print preview so this is basically what the quote would look like just remember that the one that we use now was the default one so this is what that template basically looks like your description will come in the bottom over here of all the terms and stuff in terms of that quote remember you can change this template as well there's a little button over here that it can change and i think in my last one i told you as well that we prefer to use the one that says simple layout so if you had to preview that and then you can see um that it should look a little bit different maybe because i saved it on the previous formatted to skip them just keep my page size right again yeah but that isn't short how does the customer quotes work the next one that we're gonna be looking at is custom invoices just another thing on customer quotes so let's up instance that customer comes back and he says no i'm going to accept the quote then you can see under actions over here you've got the option of the to print preview uh preview print email edit delete update status create invoice create sales or sales order copy quote or view your stream so if that customer comes back and say no they're all good they want to accept the quote then they can say create invoice and then you can see there it gives you the warning to say creating a tax invoice from this quote the quotes titles will will change to invoice so if i to do that then you will see that it opens up the process customer invoice screen so you can see all the information that we captured on the under under on a quote template basically pulled through to the customer invoice template as well so now once again if you've got a full function you can press email and it will email the the um the site's out or the invoice out to your client you can print delivery notes print preview save so if i do say separate preview then this is basically what the invoice would look like you see um so let me show you quickly another way that you can do the invoices as well so remember this way that i explained to you now is basically just if you do work with customer quotes then you would first go and create that quote for the customer and then once you finish with the code then you would go and create the invoice or trans or change the the quote over to the invoice now the next way that you can create invoices if you go to customers transactions and you say customer invoices so this is the screen where we now and you can see over there we've got the one customer invoice over there if i now go say add tax invoice and say for instance i'm going to create an invoice now for the second one that i made i need review two and um and go through the same screen so you can see once again you can put in addresses it should pull through when you set up the customer remember the document numbers will pull through automatically from our setup that we did if i work with purchase order numbers then i would put that purchase order number over there and layout once again i can choose over here without i want to use like i said we prefer normally to use the one that says simple once again you've got the option there again for counter items by default it's much easier just to keep it an account and just type it in what it is that is setting so if you whatever the thing is that you want to sell and the price is let's call this one 10 000 then you've got the same options again you've got the thing about save print preview email print delivery note and then obviously just the stuff over there so if you say let your princess print preview i think especially in the beginning what i used to always do is as i always printed the the the invoice and i saved the invoice on my computer as a pdf and then after that i would type my client email myself and then i would go look for their specific file attach it and then i would email that off to my client because then it's an email that they receive from you another email that they receive from state so there's a little bit of a difference there but it is actually such a nice functionality this is trading invoices straight out of state and then there's much easier just that way so now you can just hit the save button and then that invoice is saved over there so so that is basically how i create a customer invoice let's quickly have a look the other ones that they've got customer recurring invoices so this is a really lovely functionality and we use this at our accounting practice every single month if you want to work with a recurring invoices once again you would select your customer so unless they're printers we want to use with customer one reference number again over there if you work with purchase order numbers you'll put your purchase order number there if you work with discount you'll put it there sales rep against your layout again you can choose which one you want to use we're going to say simple out so here's the setup of the recurring invoices now you can say that you start date the acceptance must be the 1st of august and then from the 1st of august i want my invoice to go out you can see the options that you've got this everything every day every week every second week every month every so there's a lot of different things where they can do it we normally work with every month and then if it's going to be a continuous thing then you normally wouldn't pay put a end date in there now i've got the option of yet to say that due date for payment is how many days after the date of invoice so he can say that the due date is seven days after the days of invoice of whatever terms you you do you you negotiated with your client and you can say obviously create invoice it gives you an option here to either save it as a draft or to send it out automatically so if you send it save it as a draft what would happen is if you go to customers well maybe let me go to the screen over here if i go to customers and i go to transactions and i go to customer recurring invoices then normally that list of recurring invoices would show on the screen of vm and then by default there would be two tabs so you can see you've got your normal recurring invoices so if you create this one and you say that you want to you save it as a draft then what will happen is you would have a list of a year of draft invoices so there that means on the first of next month is going to be list of 50 invoices over there and then they can go through every invoice individually just to go make sure that everything is accurate on those invoices before you send it through and then just by pressing that one button their process and email then all those 50 invoices will go out automatically so that's really really cool we normally by default we know that most of our clients work on a fixed fee so instead of draft we just specific automatically so then on the first of every month that that invoice will just go up automatically so i'm just gonna the sales again i'm going to say whatever the services that i'm providing and the cost is 8 000 rent so now on the first of next month i'm going to receive that draft invoice for 8 000 from this accounting system over here so that is basically how your recurring invoices work so you can see i've loaded the one the due date to run is the first of august it hasn't been run yet next run in date total every month automatically and your actions once again over there again so you can either edit it or delete it so this is a really cool functionality that says and we use it every month customer credit notes let's for instance we decide that if i go to my customer customer then customer tax invoices for some reason we decide that this person doesn't want to take the full thing over there we can go to actions and you can say that there is the button that you say create credit notice actually easier if you want to create credit notes to do it from here because it links it to that specific invoice if you do go to this screen over here to customers and you go to transactions and there's a customer credit notes you may maybe just open this up as well and just show you guys quickly just close that screen and then i decide that i want to process a customer credit note over here i'm going to quickly show you what happens if i say add credit note and i say that i want to send out a go away and put that warning away over there i said that i want to create a customer credit note for my first one over here and then you can see i can load all the stuff over here and i'm going to say other sales over here other sales because there was the original one that asked to invoice it out and i was going to make the credit note 4 000 renders here so now if i press save then you'll see that it will record that customer credit note over here but now if i go back to this screen and i refresh the screen then you can see that my understanding balance on this under screen and we are still going to be 5 000 rand because that credit note that i created on that other screen is not linked to the specific invoice so they don't actually talk to each other so if i do wanted to link it with you with this invoice i'm going to show you just now where to do it but the other place to do the credit is as i mentioned is you can go to actions over there create credit note i'm just going to open this one in a different tab so it opens up the original invoice but now it opens that up in a credit note format so let me maybe change this amount over here to 2000 rand so now we know that there's gonna be three thousand random outstanding once we process this invoice plus the other thousand and one that i did now if i go back to this screen and i refresh the screen now then again i see that the amount due on that invoice is going to change because in the background stage wind because i created the credit note from the invoice again so it took the 2000 and of this invoice so remember we still have that other one thousand went missing so if i had to go to customers transactions remember we've looked at these ones just now customer quotes sales orders invoices recurring invoices credit notes we talked about now receipts i don't want you guys to touch this function up here customer receipts because it messes up the accounting system but here's one that is allocate receipt so let me quickly show you what happens if i open up this tab so now if i go to my allocate receipts and i'll go choose that one over there say refresh then you can see now we've got that invoice there for five thousand rand you can see there's 2 000 rent is every year's my credit not lying the one that i processed manually but not from the invoice and now i've got to take that now drag it over to the site to go and allocate that credit note against that specific invoice so now if i say save then you'll see that if i go back to my custom invoice screen over here and i refresh this screen then you'll see that that balance is now going to come down to 2 000 rand because we had the original invoice for 5 000 red we did a credit note straight from this from this button over here which allocated two thousand rand against that invoice and then there by the allocate transaction screen i went and allocated the the other credit note against that invoice so just keep that in mind if you work with credit notes please guys make sure that you use this functionality from the screen it just takes one step out of the process and if you had to do it on the other screen remember that you have to go here and say allocate your seat and then you would allocate the receipt from the other bus that's still going to show that the castle owes the foot amount of money right so let's quickly see so we went through transactions we did quotes we did invoices recurring invoices credit notes customer receipts allocate receipts write-offs if you do want to write of a customer that's not something that you would work with on a regular basis then you would write it off over here so now you would go choose the customer that you want to write off and you would say add if i'm that actually don't want to save this now you're going to choose the customer i'm going to say the first customer everything now i can see that the balance over there is 2 000. there's a for instance i only want to write a 500 then i can get put in the description of here to say but the reason is why i want to write a 500 but it's not the right way to do it because the problem then is that that 500 grand ends up in the account on the income statement which is the bad debts written off account so we actually don't want to go there the receiver of revenue was asked a thousand and one questions as soon as you start filling with that then because you have to prove that it took weekend action to try and recover the money and stuff so rather not follow over there um the other one that you've got that we didn't touch on now was customers transactions and you can see the bottom one is customer adjustment so if for some reason you have to adjust some balance on the customer account so the dependencies the customer pays and it pays one rent short or one rent too much then instead of you having to chase around for for one rand then we're going to choose the customer with them so that you can see the balance as a 7500 rent we decide we want to decrease it by affecting account i don't think by default they've got a discounts and adjustments account over here we're going to get to the counseling but let me quickly show you so you're going to make an account that says discount and adjustments this would normally be an expense account and then you save that account over there and then after that if you've got a reference you'll put the reference in there we're going to write a file friend you can put in the description why i want to write it off and then it allocates it against that receipt so if i move down you can see processing new so now we've gone through that screen as well there's quickie put back yeah so we went through customers transactions you can see there's a quotes invoices recurring invoices credit notes receipts write-offs and adjustments i think we've hand built all of those ones over there the only thing that i want to mention is that we haven't looked at the receipts um so if if your client does pay i'm going to do a separate video on banking but this is also quite important that if you're going to banking and your client pays this is the place where it would actually record the deposits from your clients so don't go to the allocate receipts so at the moment we haven't got a bank account i'm going to add one quickly i'm just going to say bank there it's going to say bank and press saves at least we can do this one transaction so when you you'll see when we get to the banking um video itself i'm going to show you guys how to import transactions and how to link your bank account so the bank feed pulls all the transactions in automatically but now i can just say maybe for instance that this customer paid cash and then you can say instead of account you've got to drop down now so now i can go see they say that it was a customer who paid i can choose my customer here i can say that it was 100 who bear my first one my reference again you can put in any reference you want to say that receive 500 rand and then you see yes a little 4k over there so if you click that button over there you can go and allocate that 500 payment against which even invoice it is so now if i had to press save and i say save changes now if you go back to my customer screen and i just refresh the screen you can see that our balance is going to come down now to it should be about a thousand bucks so you can see 995 rent because there was a credit note we did we did a customer adjustment we did a customer write-off and we obviously did that receipt if i go back to my banking and this event says i had to untick this little bucket box box here vm i was going to show you quickly what the difference is so now if i say save changes and i go back to my customer invoices and i refresh the screen remember the balance now was 995. so now if i look at the balance it should be a thousand four hundred and something because the 500 rent that they paid that's not allocated against the invoices here so if you don't press that little fork button over there it doesn't allocate the payment against the customer so then you would have to go manually and go to customers transactions and then you go to allocate receipts and then now if i had to type in my name over here so if i say come on if i say a hundred and i say refresh now i can see that my 500 rent receipt is lying on the right hand side i've got to take it and drag it over to the left hand side so once again you can do it that way but there's an extra step in the process so the easiest way to do is just straighten your banking remember to press the little fork over there and then you would just say that that 500 deposit was for that specific invoice hit save and then it does that process automatically for you so that is how you would receive money when your clients pay you so like i said normally you would have a couple of different accounts we only have the one but we're going to do all separate video in the banking so i don't want to go too deep into that i just want to make you guys aware that he mustn't use that other screen to um to do customer receipts so now you can see the next button over here has customer reports and the top one over there is customer statement runs and you can see here's the bottom one that also says customer statement so the difference between the two is you can send that one out then it sends out all the invoices at once or all the statements at once so you can press one button if you've got 50 clients off it goes all 50 clients can receive their statements but i think this maybe you should shoot down a couple of screens so so that one he can use and the other one that he can use is the um if i go back to reports this one there says customer statement it gives you the same thing but before we get to that if you press this button and this is really important if you say customer balances days outstanding then it pulls a list for you of all the people who owes you money on a specific day so now if i look at this report over here i can see i've got myself twice every day on the top one i own 995 rent at the bottom one over ten thousand if i to click on it then you'll see if there's a couple of invoices that make that amount up then i will have a list of all the different transactions that happen over there normally by default you wouldn't send your clients this breakdown over here because it's not so easy to understand the one that we prefer to use if i go to customers report customers reports and i go to this one that says customer transaction this thing is really really cool if you had to work with this little report ibm because now i can say that i want to look at one you can choose the date yourself to say either you want to look at a monthly quarterly yearly life to date you can even go many many years back if you've got a couple of years transactions but then i'm just going to choose my first customer because we're different around a bit with that one if i say view report then you can see it gives us a breakdown of the chronological sequence of how things happen inside that account so you can see there we've got our invoice we've got the one credit note which we captured manually we've got the second credit note which we created from the invoice and then we've got our customer adjustment over there here's our customer receipt and then this is our customer write-off so so the guy gets a nice breakdown of exactly what happened inside this account you see so we prefer normally by default to send our clients actually this report to be a customer transaction report because if you had to go look at that report then you can compete quickly with your customer statement doesn't it quickly see if it will give it in the same format the the problem with with your customer statement sometimes there's one thing that i find that's a little bit frustrating with with sage on your customer statement screen and then our view report so what happens you can see on this statement over here you can see that it shows you the the the the one invoice and obviously with all the different payments so it's sometimes not a very easy report to read um so that's why i would broke normally but in normal circumstances i would not mess around with statements too much i don't normally prefer to rather use the other one for me it's a bit easier to understand yeah so back to customers reports so the two main ones that we can use is the one that says customer transactions and then the other one is the customer balances they start stating the rest you can't go through it yourselves but i think that's those are the three most important ones that you can use there's so many other different reports that you can aggregate as well so remember once again um yeah thanks for watching my video on the next week and on the next video i'm going to be talking about supplies and supply invoices there's also really a lovely one and when to use that because i think a lot of people are confused with that remember once again yeah just to like the video subscribe to my channel and keep your eyes out for the next one thanks for watching