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Make an invoice for Procurement

govcon winners hello and welcome back to my channel where my goal is to help you find bid and win profitable federal government contracts today's topic is all around invoicing there's a lot of myths around invoicing the federal government and as someone who has been involved in this space for over 10 years i thought it would be a great opportunity to really talk about this and to dig deeper so let's go ahead and begin when it comes to the federal government the way in which you are paid the frequency in which you are paid are all based on the contract if you recall maybe maybe not when you first registered your business or if you work for someone in this govcon space their business is under sam sam.gov your business is registered in sam.gov and you are asked to provide a bank account that's why your m pin is so important because if you ever need to change your bank account you're going to need your m pin so the federal government for the most part will pay you electronically directly to the bank account connected to your cage code that's in sam that's how you receive your accounts receivable amazing in order to receive the money from the government there are different things that you're going to need to do and my goal is to help you so that you avoid any kind of potholes and you can ensure that you have strong cash flow and can receive your money as quickly as possible so i'm going to show you a couple of systems here and provide you tips first system this is ipp i am logged in all of the amazing information is here and this is a system that the usda and a variety of federal agencies tend to use when you log into this system you're going to type in the information connected to your contract typically these are contracts that could be one-off trainings it could be a multi-year effort where you're paid let's say thirty thousand or a million dollars a month for the services you're providing it could be that perhaps you sold a product to a federal agency and they've instructed you to use the ipp system in order to even gain access to this system you will need to register is this something you need to do today no not at all not whatsoever because it's all based on the requirement in the contract it doesn't make any sense to go ahead and register for any of these systems your time and energy should be focused on finding bidding and winning federal government contracts so if you're at this stage or you're looking to invoice or you know you're like look i know what i'm gonna i'm finding i'm bidding i'm winning but i'm also ready to invoice and get my money get paid got it so inside of this system you enter the key information as well as you will need to upload an invoice and what's really key in terms of the federal government and invoicing is one you're going to use this system that they indicate that you use number two you're going to need to confirm with your client how you intend to set up the invoice just let them know hey i just want to let you know based on the contract i have line item one that's what we're going to have in the invoice is there any kind of attachments or anything you want me to include with the invoice as well as would you like to see a draft copy as well as would you like for me to email you a copy and or to notify you when we submit this into the i p p system this is important this is not a magical system where you upload an invoice and bam i'm paid within 15 days many people say things like that can you be paid or receive payment within 15 business days of course department of transportation paid my flagship company within 24 hours yes it's possible but remember we're talking about people if someone's on vacation someone only works monday to thursday and you submit an invoice and they're not there to process it or they're not even made aware that you um submitted the invoice or what if your core changes that happened with us too we're in the middle of all of this our core change thankfully we found out it there was still a little lag so it's important to know and be aware of all of this information because if not your funds will be held up so what we like to do and what i really emphasize is communication out the gate especially when it's ipp you communicate with the client and let them know hey you know i use quickbooks online i use whatever accounting system i'm going to create an invoice i'd like to give you um a copy i'd like to email you i'll notify you when i update it or upload it to the system anything else you want me to do how else can i make your life easier that way you're in this nice battle rhythm and you can predict your cash flow if not you're at the winds of the system the whims that when people approve that's not a good place to be because most of the time when you're dealing with the federal government your core just needs to know your core has other obligations other than processing your invoice so it's something to really discuss with them the other really nice thing about this ipp system is that you can add other users so that's amazing the customer service is really amazing one drawback if you submit an invoice and it's wrong guess what you're going to have to notify the core because they're the only ones who can remove it so you want to make sure you double check things and you don't like key enter if if you can avoid that it's best to cut and paste because the last thing your core wants to do is to delete an invoice because you made a mistake they don't want to deal with that so something to definitely keep in mind now when it comes to defense side of the house they use they use the pi system procurement integrated enterprise environment i love it because i think pie cheddar another kind of way of saying money i don't know maybe it's just me so again when it comes to using the pi system which also used to be known as wide area workflow it's all based on your contract the amount of money you are to invoice every month if it's a flat rate or it could be hourly one contract that my flagship company has is based on the number of hours that my employees work so every single month the dollar amount varies there are times where my flagship company sold products to maxwell air force base it was a flat rate you must follow the instruction it's also very important especially with this system if the line item says admin 7 h52 you should put that in your invoice and that you want the line items to cleanse to match what you have in the invoice and again you're going to need to ask hey i just want to find out do you have any preferences for the invoice here's the invoice that i want to submit here's what it looks like do you want me to notify you do you want to send an email and that actually happened with one of my clients from my flagship company where they notified my team and said that they wanted an email every single time an invoice is submitted because there are times where a week will go by and they they aren't notified that they have invoices to process in the pi system because again they have jobs they have responsibility they're worked on they're focusing on the mission again not hey i need to process this small business's invoice you the small business owner you must advocate for yourself that's why it's very important to ask permission to ask questions to really elevate that client relation so you are working with them not against them with them not against them okay also what is really key in this system is this one is very sensitive to names normally when you are uploading an invoice you can't have dots or dashes or spaces or a long invoice one may four five two nine seven it it'll kick it out uh it's also really important in this system as well as in ipp you wanna upload a pdf and it's awesome in quickbooks you can quickly turn an invoice into a pdf as well as when it comes to attachments in pi it's really nice to upload each attachment as an individual attachment you're also going to need to check all of the codes there have been numerous times where the codes don't work that's the situation my flagship company is going through right now where the codes that were listed in the contract don't match the pie system and therefore an invoice cannot be submitted because there's a mismatch and thankfully my team became aware of that by following these steps and they have been working with a client to come up with a remedy it's very important to always be thinking when it comes to invoicing it's not that simple you don't just submit an invoice and bam 15 days later you're paid people who share things like that yeah i don't know what to say that's not reality reality is you are here to make their lives easier even in terms of invoicing regardless of the system whether it's pi or it is i p p there's something else i want to kind of emphasize here and that is there may be times especially in terms of a contract closeout where an agency will ask you for all of the invoices you submitted all of the dollar amounts and what's beautiful about these two systems all of that information is there so in ipp you can pull a report and bam you're able to show and pi you have a breakdown of everything that you've been paid for also i want to add at least in the pi system if you have there's multiple businesses that you own that are in sam you can log in with one username and password and access all of your businesses there will be a drop down and you can choose which is really cool because it's it's a pain to have multiple logins and things of that nature it's much much easier to have everything connected to one also another quick tip when it comes to the pi system you can add people pi security in my opinion is stricter than ipp so there are times it may be 30 to 90 days in which pi will send an email warning you must log in you must change your password if you do not your account will be locked and then they proceed to send you an email every day until that time little table has come to an end yeah so it's really important to make sure that you um log in regularly if you are not responsible for handling invoices because you want to make sure everything is up to standard in terms of security another security concern is you want to make sure if there are people that you have added and they're no longer with your team have them removed even if you disable their company email address you want to go in and manually have them removed or if you need to contact either of the platforms because there has been fraud that has occurred in these different areas that's why sam made major changes there are the different changes and security elements around both of these platforms because billions of dollars are paid out every year to government contractors so there's always someone lurking trying to figure out a way to try to scam but by following these tips you're not going to hand you're not going to fall for that you're not going to be involved in any of that instead you're going to have all of your ducks in a row so then you are paid in a very fast time frame typically payment is issued 15 to 30 days any time the federal government issues payment after 30 days you'll receive interest that is if they do not kick out your invoice if they kick out your invoice reject your invoice it starts the clock all over again something to be aware of also in terms of your invoices you want to make sure that you have the information as it appears in the actual contract the client's name all of the different contact information the address etc to match what is in your invoice you don't have to go out and spend a ton of money on a an accounting subscription i would say at least try out quickbooks i love quickbooks i have so many quickbooks accounts that's just my preference because everything looks very professional you can brand it another tip at the bottom of our invoices we restate our banking information because there was a time in which the banking information was changed in sam.gov because sometimes it happens you move from one bank to the next and they actually paid the other bank thankfully it all worked out but it was a big lesson learned so every single invoice has the bank account and the routing number at the bottom just in case that ever happens again so my amazing devcon winners i know this answered all of your questions about invoicing if you have more you have comments please comment below subscribe hit that notification button and if y'all are new here and wondering who is this lady again i'm dr kizzy parks i've won over 50 million dollars in federal government contracts and i just love being here to help you and don't forget everything is possible take care [Music] you