Crafting an Effective Invoice Message to Customer Example for Sport Organisations

Invoice message to customer example for Sport organisations

hello there mark Cunningham here and in this video I'm going to show you how to create and send an invoice from zero using Zero's new invoicing screen I use the Australian version of Zero's demo company in this video but the process is pretty similar all around the world so you can watch this video no matter where you're from and if you'd like to learn more about zero then please check out the links to our courses in the description below so let's jump into zero now and see how it's done so just starting off here on the dashboard there's a few different ways that you can get there you can actually click on this new sales invoice button here on the dashboard or you can go up to the plus sign over here on the create new menu and just click on invoice or you can go into business and sales overview and you can just click on the new button here there's also a little drop down there so you can click on new invoice or you can just go into invoices and once again just click on new invoice or the drop- down menu there okay so regardless of how you do it this is where you're going to end up on the new invoice screen if you end up on the new screen it will look like this if you end up on the classic invoicing screen it will look like this and all you need to do is just come down the bottom and just click on switch to new invoicing okay and then you end up back here and you can start to create your invoice okay so let's start off by going through the fields that you need to fill out so the first thing here is the two field where you put in the name um of your customer so the way this works is if you put in just one letter so for example I've just put in a you can see it brings up all of the contacts that I've got the letter a in there if you put something a bit more specific like Al okay you can see it's got all of the contacts there with Al somewh in their name so that's just a way that you can sort of search for the contact that you looking for but if you're going to put something in that doesn't exist at all okay so I've just typed in Zelda so we don't have a contact in zero called Zelda but just because you don't have it in zero doesn't mean you can't use it you can just type the name in here make sure you spell it correctly and then click on ADD Zelda as a new contact and it will add it into zero and then later on you can go into the contact Section and you can fill out the details for that contact so that will be their email address and their ABN and all that sort of stuff okay so what we're going to do here is I'm going to choose this city limousines and we're going to create an invoice for them okay so the first field that we can fill out here is the reference and you can see here this is optional so this is somewhere that you might put in something something like a purchase order number or if you've got some other reference number so I'll just put something in there okay so I've just put in p-1 1453 just a pretend reference number there the next one along is the invoice number and zero has automatically generated that um based on the invoice settings so it's got orc as the prefix and then it's just um put the next number in the sequence um on there so the last invoice that created would have been orc 1042 so if you want something different in here you can either just go ahead and just get rid of that and type it in there or you can go into your invoice settings and set up your own um prefix and your own sequencing numbers and and zero will automatically populate this for you but again you can change it if you need to I'll just leave it as is for this exercise next up we have the issue date so it's got today's date on there for me so obviously you can just pick another date if you need to go and change the date the due date is something that can automatically populate as well so you can actually set up automatic due dates for all of your customers in settings so if if you for example um have invoicing terms of the issue date plus 30 days you can set that up and then zero will populate that with the date 30 days from then or you can actually set it up customer by customer in contact so we could set up City limousines for example to be something like plus 14 days and again it will automatically um populate that for you here or again you can go ahead and do it manually you can see there it's given us a couple of um I guess pretty common sort of options if you just wanted to quickly grab that one or you can get the whole calendar up and pick a date there so I'll just grab that 14 days one just for the purposes of this exercise okay so that's that you've also got this add last items button so I've hovered over that and you can see it says add all items from this customer's last invoice so if you wanted to create pretty much the exact same invoice that you sent them last time you can just click on there and it will populate um all this stuff down here for you so that's a little shortcut there all right moving down you've got online payments so if I click on that manage online payments okay now this is the demo company so there's not much hooked up here but what you can do is if you've got stripe hooked up for example you can allow your customers to pay with their credit or debit card or even things like Apple pay and Google pay directly um from the um invoice that gets emailed to them so there'll be a button there and they can go ahead and just quickly click on the button and go through and make the payment so that's nice a nice fast way of them paying your invoice you can also do the same if you link up your business's PayPal um account you can have a pay by PayPal button on your electronic invoices and there's also one there for um direct Bank payments so this is a sort of thing that you can hook up again in your settings and if you do you can go ahead and select them here and then they will show up on your electronic invoices all right you've also got currency so I've got Australian dollar there if you've got a um zero file with more than one currency setup you can go ahead and pick which currency you want so you don't have to just create invoices in your base currency and then you've also got your branding themes so you've got your standard and in the demo company here we've got special projects and very orange invoice as well so if you wanted to choose a particular look and feel for this particular invoice you can do it through there so I might just grab that very orange invoice one there okay we'll do that one okay moving down we've got this show hide Fields button and you can see here you can select which invoice fields that you want to show up so let's say for example that you never really give discounts well you can leave that unchecked and it won't show up in your invoice or if you do give discounts you can just make sure you've got that checked and then you'll be able to put in a discount down in here so I might actually just leave that checked just for this exercise and then obviously you've got all these other things as well so this region is a tracking categories so you can check or uncheck your tracking categories as well so I'll just click on Save okay now you can see that discount um option just came in there that wasn't there before and then also over here you've got whether the amounts that you type in are going to be tax Exclusive Tax inclusive or there's no tax um relevant for those amounts so exclusive means that when you type in a number if it's $100 for example that's excluding GST so you need to add uh $10 of GST on top of that or at least Z will in your invoice if you choose inclusive and you type in $100 that will be $100 including GST so you'll end up with about I think $9.9 worth of GST and then you've got no tax as well okay so the next thing that we can do is we can actually just start filling out some Fields if we click on item here so what this is this is um items of um inventory and services that are set up in the products and services section so if you've got inventory you can see we've got things like golf balls here you can click on there if you've got them set up in zero but you've also got Services as well so if you've got particular services that you sell all the time over and over again you can just click on um the service here and zero will actually fill out this Row for you so let's just try that let's just say um we've done this project management and implementation due diligence here so I'll click on that okay and you can see that it's brought in all this information here from the products and services section so that's a bit of a Time Saver um if you've got things that you sell over and over again okay I'll just get rid of this box to move everything up so that's the first line of our invoice now just because it's brought that through doesn't mean you can't change it so you can see there you can go in and change the description the quantity the price Etc let's actually just change that price like so and you can see that it actually changed the amount over there um to 110 that was 105 before and you can also see that because we've got tax exclusive chosen that $110 is excluding GST so it's adding $11 GST on top if that was inclusive that would be including GST so it's basically $100 plus GST right there okay so I'm just going to put that back there let's do another line so this time instead of bringing an item through we'll just type something in okay so what I've done here is I've just typed in Consulting and then I've got five here is the quantity so we're just saying 5 hours of Consulting and we've got it at $200 an hour now I've just put it into this other Revenue um General edger code just for something different I could have put it into sales but I just wanted to show you this is where you go to actually choose the general ledger accounts um that you want to use so um for your invoices you'll you'll usually pick one of these Revenue codes and based on which one you pick it will bring through the GST tax rate that you've got set up in your chart of accounts but you can change it here if you need to so for example if you put something in that's GST free um but it's got the wrong rate you can just choose it here all right so you've also got the tracking categories here I'll just show you very quickly so these are tracking categories that are set up in the demo company this is obviously by some kind of region um you might have other things like um head office departments Etc so let's just put a couple of these in here just for the exercise like that okay so now we've got a TW line invoice and we've got a subtotal down here with GST and you can see that when we did that it's actually just brought in another line for us right here so it just um zero just automatically um creates another the line there that we can fill in if we need to so also over here you can actually drag and drop these if you want them in a different order if you want a Consulting to show up first you can just drag it up like that so you can just drag those around by grabbing those little things there and you've also got a little menu over here where you can save this to inventory if you want to if you want that to actually go into your products and services section and you've got remove if you don't want that line at all and that's the same uh there you can actually edit that invent ventory item because that came from inventory or came from products and services so it's already in there so you can edit it and again you can remove it and down here it's not letting us click on that one so that's just not even going to show up at all in our invoice all right so moving down to the bottom what we've got here is it's done our totals for us it's also saying that there's a credit available so there must be a credit note in the system that we can apply to this invoice um if we like for that particular customer and then down here it's got attach files so if you want to you can upload files if you've got some sort of spreadsheet or PDF or maybe the purchase order that we um referenced before you can just save it on here and that will um basically be saved with the invoice in zero for reference and then down the bottom you've also got show history and notes if I click on that and just move down it's just got that I created it and then edited it um if you do other things it will show up there in the history as well so it's a good little audit Trail there you can also add a note if there's some note that you want to put up against this invoice just for yourself just an internal note you can do that and then down here you've got send as an e invoice so if I just click on that little information box there it says send this invoice directly to your customer's Financial system they must be registered to receive e invoices and then you can you can click on that if you want to learn about e invoicing in zero so that's just a way to get the invoice uh to your customer uh quite quickly okay so that's basically an invoice created so if we have a look up the top now I just want to show you you can see here where it says that it's a draft invoice it's actually been saving the draft as we go along so you can see down here where it said that I've edited it 10 times so it's actually been saving it every time I edit it so you don't need to save the draft you don't need to worry about losing your work um if something happens if the power goes out or something like that so that's good you've also got a preview button okay so that's showing us um what the invoice looks like and it looks like that image hasn't come through so this is from The Branding theme so let me just change the branding theme maybe back to standard and you can see that's saving the draft again and we'll preview it okay that's better this time it's bringing the um image through that's attached to that branding theme so you can see how it's all laid out here um it's got all these contact details of um your own company and the customer as well and then down here it's just got the line items as well and all the totals including um GST split out there so that's what it looks like on a computer that's what it looks like on a phone all right and then across here you've got all kinds of different options so you can just save it and close it so that will save it as a draft you can save it and add another invoice you can submit it for approval if you've got a process where somebody else needs to approve it that's where you can go to do that and then over here you've got approve and email if you just approve it yourself and you want to email it straight to the client and you've got all these other options um down here as well approve and print approve and get link Etc so it's up to you whichever way you do things in your approval process you can just choose things on there and then finally over here on the right you've just got some other options as well if you want to print the PDF um you can email it this way um you just got to make sure you don't email some on a draft invoice copy to draft delete and then you've got some shortcuts to things like invoice settings and help with invoicing so let's approve it and email it okay so remember we had the $60.50 credit available it's just asking us if we want to apply the credit to this invoice so that must have already been in zero um let's just apply it okay there it is and we'll just type in the amount there so it's just asking us if we want to um use the whole $60.50 or if we just want to do part of it we could have just typed in $20 for example but I'll just do the whole lot and click on apply okay okay so now we're taken to a screen where it's just uh showing us the email that's it's going to send uh to the customer so that's the email address it's going to send to um that's come through from contacts so if you don't have the email address in contacts for your particular customer um you'll have to type the email address in here and then it's just got um basically um an email template um that you can change when you go into your um settings in zero it's got a basic one here or an overdue one here I'll just choose the basic one based on what you choose that's how all this text comes up you can change this um in your settings but I'll just go with what's here and just to let you know you can also change the text and you can change the uh text up there as well finally come down here and tick on that check boox if you want to send yourself a copy of the email and then if you want to attach a pdf version um of the invoice in the email you can check that box as well okay so it's up to you which way you want to do those and then you can just click on send okay so because this is the demo company it's just coming up saying the email address is blacklisted because obviously that's um a address but in real life that would have sent to your customer okay so you can see up here that's changed from draft to awaiting payment so let's go and see if we're we can find it on our invoices screen Okay so we've gone there to the awaiting payment bucket and sure enough we can see that that's the one for City limousines that we've just created um it's got this different looking icon there next to it because we applied that credit note to it that's why it's a bit different to these ones that don't have a credit note and over here if we had successfully sent that email we'd have that little um green sent up there as well so that's what you'll get when you um successfully send those emails uh directly to your customers from zero all right so that's how you can create and send an invoice using the new invoices screen in zero