Discover Modern Invoice Design for Accounting

Modern invoice design for Accounting

good afternoon everyone and a warm welcome to today's webinar on how you can personalize your invoice in Sage 50 accounts my name's Tina and I'll be your host for the next half hour or so I'll just start by taking you through a bit of housekeeping before we get going now you may be familiar with this if you've attended any of our webinars before so please bear with me for anyone you joining us today you will notice that you'll be muted throughout the session any questions you may have during the session can be submitted via the questions panel on the right hand side I have Jackie and Michael joining me today to answer as many of your questions as possible we do try and answer as many questions as we can during the session but if for any reason you don't have your question answered today please take a look in the sage Help Center or contact our support team for further help I've popped to these slides in handouts area for you to download during the session and these will also be available after the session in Sage City where you'll also be able to access a link to the recording and the top questions asked from today's session so if you just watch out for an email around an hour or two after today's session you'll have the links that you need there so let's take a look at what we'll be covering this afternoon I'm shortly going to run a quick poll to gauge how you get your invoices out of sage so I'm really Keen to see what most of you do currently so I can try and make these sessions more meaningful to you I'll then explain briefly about the different types of invoice layouts available in the software so if you're new to invoicing this should help you decide on the best layout for you or if you've been using a particular invoice layout for a while you may find you prefer a different layout to the one you currently use now as the invoice layout in the software can't have any changes saved over the top of them I'll show you how to create a copy of your chosen layout which can then be amended to suit your needs I'll then start showing you how you can make some basic amendments to the layout now there are quite a few examples I want to cover with you today and I'll try and do as much recap as I can for you and I've also added some simple steps into the slides for each task so it just means you can refer back to them at any point now if you're new to report designer which is where we're going to making be making the changes today don't worry I'm going to do my absolute best to explain the steps to you as simply as possible I am just covering the basics today but I am hoping to schedule in some sessions which are a bit more advanced very soon so finally I'll touch on where you can get further support after the session okay so I'm just going to start by setting a pool so the poll that I'm wanting you to answer is do you currently print or email your customer invoices so I'd love to know if you're still printing customer invoices and if so are you printing onto plain paper or is it pre-printed stationery or have you switched to emailing instead so you can save money on postage costs Etc or are you doing a bit of both or are you new to this all together and yet open to suggestions so that's lovely I can see some of the answers coming in now I'm just going to leave that running for a little bit longer so I can get some more people to vote nearly there I'll just wait for a few more seconds okay that's lovely I'm just going to close the poll now so thank you very much for everyone who's popped in their answer there don't worry if you haven't yet it's just basically so I can get a bit of an idea okay so just to confirm what the situation is is that 13 of you are printing onto plain paper I've got around only seven percent printing onto pre-printed stationery and around 37 of you are emailing and the same amount are actually doing a bit of both so printing some and emailing some and I've got a few people that are new to this so seven percent of you are new to this um so nothing yet okay so that's really interesting to see I was thinking that it would be heavily leaning towards email or printing email so that's great to see that's actually the case okay so let's get started so I highly recommend spending a bit of time looking at which layout is right for your business so I've seen many customers making changes to a randomly selected layout only to find that they've wasted time adding something on there that was already in place on another layout so even if you do a little bit of research beforehand it could save you time in the long run so I'm briefly going to talk about what you might need to consider and then I'm going to show you some of the options available to you in the software so when choosing yellow what I'd like you to think about is how you want to send it or your printing or are you emailing if you are printing what paper size are you printing to is it A4 or 11 inch because there's different layouts within the software to suit each paper size do you offer your customers a discount at line item level and you need to show discount on the invoice do you need to show values in both pound sterling and Euro as well and to get ever raise invoices where line items could be assigned to different tax codes and you'd like to show the tax breakdown for each tax rate so by asking yourself these questions are going to help you make the right selection and I'm going to give you some tips in the software to help you do this so I'm just going to change my screen and you should all be able to see Sage 50 accounts professional on the screen now okay so to access your invoice layouts go to invoices and credits down the left hand side now you might notice that some of the icons along the top of the screen there are grayed out some of these will only be activated once an invoice or a range of invoices have been selected from the list so if I just select one of my invoices from the list you can see that these icons on the toolbar are now active I now need to select the print icon to access my invoice layout and selecting the layouts folder on the left shows all of the standard invoice layouts available to you now there are quite a few and I certainly don't expect you to troll through each and every one of these to find which one's best for you you've got far better things to do with your time what you can do however is limit the list of layouts shown based on how you want your invoices to be sent so for your first tip of the session there's a filter option at the top of the list which is currently showing all layouts available by changing what's shown in here will reduce your selection in the list of layouts making it easier to look for a layout that's good for you so for example if I'm printing onto A4 stationary I would select A4 paper and then that hides all layouts other than the ones designed for A4 stationary if I'm emailing I can choose email and I've got fewer options to choose from again so another tip for you to save you previewing each layout to see how it looks you can do this quickly within this screen by just hovering over the little printer and magnifying glass icon shown at the right hand side of each layout so if I have a look at another one bit see that's got a blue P Now button so each one previews how the layout will actually look now you can get all layouts back in the list by simply setting this filter at the top back to all and you're back to the beginning okay so I'm just going to run through those first few steps for you again so from invoices and credits at the left hand side select an invoice or invoices to activate the icons at the top click print and then click layouts limit the list of layouts showing in the window by setting a filter for you to select a layout from there now today I'm going to show you my own personal favorite set of layouts which are A4 plain paper and email so these are dual purpose so if you're one of the 37 of you that print invoices for some customers but you want to email invoices to others you don't actually need a separate layout one layout works for both so in here you have four options so again I'll just use the little printer and magnifier just to explain what these are so you have one with line item discount so in the middle of the screen you can see there will be a disk amount column to show your discount the one below is the same but it just doesn't have the discount column there's also a one with settlement discount so if you offer discount for early payment to your customers that's shown just below the payment due information and then finally the commercial invoice now this was introduced after brexit in version 27.1 to make the import export process easier so this newer layout includes extra information to help shippers and Customs authorities assess duties and taxes taxis taxes even Etc now there's an article in The Help Center with further information on this if you're interested you just need to search on Commercial invoice so for the demonstration today I'm just going to use the layout without discount so now we're ready for the next bit which is to create a copy of the layout before we make any changes now each of the standard layouts in Sage is fixed and what that means is you can't save changes over the top of the original so this is why when amending a standard Sage layout we must create a copy of our own to work with and I'm going to demonstrate that for you now so once you've decided the layout that's best for you you just basically click on it to select it so we can see mine's already selected there and then I'm going to click on edit from the top left and that's going to open report designer now we can see both the layout name of A4 inv crd without discount plain paper print or email and also the file name of inv plane A4 dot layout at the top left of the window so this is what I'm about to change so to change the name of the layout from the report menu select report properties and I'm going to change this report name to something more meaningful to me now a lot of the time customers will just use their company name so you can do that to identify the layout I'm just going to pop this in as Tina's invoice you can also amend the report description if I want to but just for the purpose of today's demonstration I'm just going to leave that as it is so if I click ok now what we'll see is that the name of the layout has changed at the top left the next bit is to change the file name so we want it to be something different from the standard so to change the file name of the layout from the file menu I'm going to select save as now in this menu you should notice that the save option is grayed out so just to warn you if you ever see that all it means is you're amending a standard Sage layout or report and that it must be saved as a new file the save option will only be active on a layout they can you can actually save the changes over the top of so I'm just going to select save as and within here I'm going to see the location where the layout is going to be saved to so that will default to the correct location and I can also see the name of the file name which has defaulted to add the words copy of in front of the original so this says copy of inv plane A4 now you can absolutely change that file name if you wish so if you wanted to call it your company name for example what I do though is I tend to leave that set to copy of just because it means I'll know which file I used originally to create the copy and also leaving the file name like that can also help our support teams if you ever need help with the layout so I'm just going to click on Save there and then I can see the new file name is also showing at the top left so I've got the new file name and I've got the new report name as well so just for the minute I'm going to close report designer just to show you what's happened in the layout window so there's my new invoice layout in the window we can see it's got the new name of Tina's invoice and the file name at the right hand side is set to copy of inv plane A4 so another tip for you if you click the star to the left of the new file it turns it yellow and it adds it to the favorites folder so this is going to make it easier for you to find each time you access the print icon so just to show you that I'm just going to close out of the layouts window I'm going to go back into print and because the folder defaults to favorites we can see we don't have to have fun trying to find out our layout within the list Okay so we've done a bit of research now to find the right layout and save it as a new file I'm going to start showing you some of the common changes that were asked for on an invoice layout so I'm ready to make some changes to Molly out now so it's already selected from favorites so I'm just going to click on edit and that will open report designer again now logos are generally added to either the top or the bottom of the invoice layout and we can see the information on screen at the moment is what's shown at the top of the invoice so the section that we're looking at just now is this first one invoice number header so in here we have the company details so that's the likes of your company name company address telephone email and vat registration details further down we have the customer details so that shows the customer's name and address on the invoice and then over at the right hand side we've got the invoice details so in here you'll see the likes of invoice number date any order number and account reference now the reason why I love the plain paper layouts is that a lot of the hard work is already done for you you've got lines and boxes surrounding the customer and invoice details and you've got text boxes already in place which a lot of the other layouts don't have now I can also see I've got a lovely empty area at the top right of the layout which is where I'd like to add my company logo so to do this from this toolbox toolbar at the top I'm going to select the option that add image logo now if for any reason you can't see the toolbox toolbar you can access these same options from the toolbox menu at the top so you can see there I've got add image logo there it does exactly the same thing okay so I'm going to collect add image logo and then I'm going to move my mouse to the area where I want to add the logo and you should be able to see now that the mouse pointer is now showing as a plus sign that kind of means I'm going to add something to the layout so I'm going to click and drag a box to around the size you want your logo to appear and once you're happy just let go of the mouse and we can see I've got a new window for choose an image now the option you need is the one that's already selected we're going to browse the PC for the image to add it into the layout so all I'm going to do here is Click OK and then I'll be able to browse to the location where my image is stored so mine quite handily I've just placed on the desktop and there's my logo here so if I select the logo you can see you get a little preview over at the right hand side so you can basically check to see if it's the right one if you had more than one logo listed there I always recommend leaving lock aspect ratio ticked just in case you need to resize the logo afterwards what that will mean is it will keep the dimensions of the logo accurate so I'm just going to click on open here and there you can see the logo has been added to the layout now from here if I want the logo to be bigger or smaller I can resize it and to do that select a box surrounding the logo you can see the mouse pointer changes there and I can just click and drag to make it bigger or click and drag to make it smaller now when I'm doing that can you see the little blue lines that are coming up these are alignment lines to help you line an image up with other objects on the invoice okay so let's say I'm happy with that size I can now move the logo around it well so if I just click and drag you can see I can move that around with the mouse now if you'd prefer a little bit more control you can use your direction arrow keys on the keyboard so up down left and right so if you're finding you're getting a bit carried away with your mouse you can always use your arrow keys on the keyboard and you have a little bit more control that way so just to recap that for you again I'm just going to get rid of this logo so I'm going to go add image logo click and drag a box to the approximate size and then release click ok browse to the location and select your logo click on open and then remember you can resize and then move it around into the preferred position so I'd also recommend you save as you go to avoid losing any changes so right now what I'm going to do is to click the save icon underneath the file menu and we're good to carry on so moving on to adding a text box text boxes can be added to your layout for absolutely any purpose so whether that's to add a title next to a data field or just to add a message to the invoice to highlight either a promotion or add Bank details for the payment Etc so I'm going to demonstrate adding a text box at the end of the layout just to show you a different section now if I scroll down the invoice layout you will see there are a lot of sections on here but please don't worry about these I'm going to leave those for another day the section I want you to focus on now is the last one on the layout which is the invoice number footer now in here like the header we can see we already have lots of lines and boxes available here we've got delivery address information and then we've got total information at the bottom right and we can also see we have payment terms on the layout which again a lot of the other layouts don't have as standard now we are coming up to the festive season so let's say we want to let our customers know about a promotion being run so we'll add a message for this underneath the payment terms so I'm going back to the same toolbar that we use to add the image but this time I'm going to select the option for add text so if I click add text again I'm going to move the mouse to the area on the layout where I want to add the text box and again you can see the cursor is a plus sign indicating you're going to add something now this time just click your mouse once and you can see a little box appears on the screen I don't want you to worry about the size of this right now what I would recommend you do is just start typing so what you'll see in a minute when I start typing my message we'll see the Box automatically extends to fit the text so bear with me I'll just see if I can get this entered hopefully I haven't got any typing errors in there so once you've added your text in there just click away from it and you can have a quick look to see if it looks alright now the Eagle Eye of you might have noticed that the text text in this box doesn't look the same as the rest of the layout the font's different but we can easily change that to match the rest of the layout so to change the font of this text box first of all I need to click on it to select it and I can now change the font attributes from the formatting toolbar which is just above the toolbox that I've been using before so it's much the same as word so I can change the font so I know my font is Tahoma if I wanted to make it bigger or smaller I would just change the font size and I'm going to put this into bold just so it stands out a bit so if by making any changes you find that you've actually lost some of your text which we can see in this example I have I've kind of lost the end of the word November double click on the box and it automatically resizes for you so you don't need to try and click and drag to resize double click will work just as well so again I can drag that into position by using my mouse or if I want to use my arrow keys on the keyboard I can do that as well and remember click save at the top to save as you go now before I move on to adding data fields lines and boxes I briefly want to show you how to delete any objects you don't need and this is really easy so in this example I'm going to delete this line here that's currently showing in the footer section just so I can show you how to add it back on a little bit later so to delete an object first of all click on it to select it and you can see there are boxes surrounding the outside and then on your keyboard press the delete key and away it goes now I'm going to move back to the top of the layout to delete some more information so if for example you don't want to see page numbers on your invoice because you know your invoices are always going to be only a single page you can actually get rid of the text and the number that will be shown there as well so if you're struggling to find your delete key on the keyboard you can also delete items by right clicking on them and then the very last option in that menu is delete so I've right clicked on the first object I'm just going to move down to delete and then click and then I can do the same with this second object so anything you don't want you can just right click and then go to delete also if any of you are not registered for vet it might be pointless having the vet registration objects underneath the company information so I'm going to get rid of these two so remember click on an object and either press delete on the keyboard or right click on an object and then select delete from the menu and save as you go so moving on now to add a data field now data fields are also referred to as variable Fields or sometimes just variables it's all the same it's just different words now these are fields that will pick up information from your Sage 50 accounts company data set so if you've ever run a mail merge in word before it's a similar concept to that so to give you an example the data fields for your company name and address on the layout pick up the data held in the company preferences area the customer's name and address data fields pick up the data from within the invoice record so another tip for you if you hover over an existing field in report designer it will tell you which table and variable is being used now this is often handy if you think you know the data field you need but not which table to get it from okay so that's again a great tip now I want to add my company's web address to the invoice and I want to add that just underneath the company email here but how do I know which data field to add now to help you with this we've got a brilliant article in The Help Center which I've added a link for to the slides and I'm going to use that now to help you find which data field I need so I've got that here so this is the article tables and variables used by report designer so if I just scroll down a little bit so basically it gives you a bit of blue but the top so you can click the relevant options on the interactive image below to navigate to the area in the software so a lot of the time you'll be familiar yourself with where you access data within the software this is just to find out how this will be represented in report designer so just to show you I know my website address is held in my company details so I'm going to click on settings and then I'm going to click on company preferences and that opens the company preferences window in this interactive article okay what I can now do is hover over the website field and it tells me that the field in report designer is company dot web address so company being the table and web address being the data field or variable field so now I've got that information I'm ready to add the field onto the layout so I'm just going to go back into report designer so you should all be able to see the layout again so to add a data field I'm going to go back to the toolbox again but this time I'm going to select the option for add data field so I'll click that I'm going to move the mouse to underneath the email again we can see the plus sign indicating we're going to add something and I'm just going to click once don't worry too much about your positioning because remember you can always move it after the event so a new window appears here showing the tables available to this invoice layout so each table within here links to a particular area of the main software now the article confirmed the data field I need is company dot web address so I'm going to expand the company table and the list of available data fields for the company table appears in alphabetical order so another tip for you to save scrolling through the list of fields I'm just going to press my letter W on the keyboard and it takes me straight down to the variable I need so it's just going to save you scrolling so once web address is selected I'm just going to click on OK and we can see that the field is now added I can now move the field into the correct position just by clicking and dragging and again we can see the little blue lines should help me line that up okay and then again click on the save option at the top left so I'm just going to recap that for you again so I'm going to go to add data fields I'm going to move on to the report in a bit of space and click once I'm going to expand the company table and then I'm going to press the letter W on my keyboard because I know I need the web address data field once I've selected it I'm going to click OK and then I can basically reposition that wherever I want to okay so the process of adding a data field is quite easy your biggest challenge is going to be knowing which data field you need from which table so I can't recommend enough that you use the tables and variables article that I just showed you that will give you exactly that now I've used the report designer myself for years and I still use that article now just to confirm some of the Lesser used Fields so use it as you wish so moving on now to adding boxes onto your layout now we can see we already have some boxes showing on this invoice I'm not quite sure whether you can make out from the screen but the boxes on here actually have rounded corners so I've got another top tip for you if you want to add a new box and you already have some on your layout the easiest thing for you to do is just to copy and paste an existing box then you can resize and reposition it in the same way as we've seen earlier so I'll just show you how to do that so I'm going to click on the box that I want to copy and you can see I've got the boxes surrounding the outside I'm now going to right click and then I'm going to select copy from the right click menu and then I'm going to right click again away from the original box I'll get the menu again and then I'm going to select paste now you might also notice from the menu that you can use shortcut keys Ctrl C and Ctrl V which will achieve the same result so I'll just paste that there and then I can drag it into position and then if I wanted to resize that I can do that there so there's the new box with rounded corners I'll also show you how you can add a box if you don't currently have any that you can copy so I'm just going to get rid of that box so again we're going back to the toolbox at the top and this time I'm going to select draw box I'm going to move my mouse onto the layout and I'm going to click and drag a box to the approximate size that I want again don't worry too much about getting this right first time you can do this after so once I've clicked and dragged the box I'm going to release and then the box is there so if I just click away from that the default box shows square corners rather than rounded but I can easily change that and other attributes if I want to so I'm just going to click back on this box again just to show you how to do that at the right hand side the property's pane should be shown it might be like that so just a little tab on the right hand side if you click on it it appears if it's not there it might be that it's just turned off and you can you can actually access that via the view menu and there you can see properties I'm not going to click on that because it'll turn it off because I've already got mine here so I'm going to open the properties pane on the right hand side and the two properties I'll just select that box again sorry then back into properties the two properties that you'll be needing to look at are background and border so in Border this is where we set our rounded Corners so with border selected I'm going to select select the button at the right hand side the window appears and it's this option here for rounded Corner radius I'm just going to up that to three and again it might be a bit difficult for you to see but on the corners you can see they're rounded in that little preview on the right hand side I'll just click on OK and the corners are now rounded on that box I can also apply a background color to a box to make it stand out more so again I'll click on the box I'm going to go back into properties and this time I'm going to choose background so again I'll click on the little button to the right and then I can set a background color preview shows on the right the color so you can make the change if you wanted to and then if I click on OK we can now see I've got a gray shadow in the background now with both of these options it is a good idea for you to have a bit of a play around until you get the result you need so just to remind you to access the properties click the Box open the properties Pane and then its background and border that you'll be using okay so adding a line is very similar to adding a box and again you can copy and paste an existing line or you can add a new line via the draw line option so what I'm going to do is go back to the end of the layout and I'm going to add the line that I deleted earlier from the end of the invoice so back up to the toolbox click on draw a line and again move your mouse to the area you want the line to appear doesn't have to be exact just in the right area now the easiest way for you to draw a line is just to click and drag a box to the approximate size of the line you want and then just release the mouse so what you can see here is that I've drawn a line from the top left to the bottom right of that box now to straighten this up by far the easiest way is to use the dynamic help pane which is at the left hand side okay now again if Dynamic help isn't there you can get access to that from The View menu and you have Dynamic help there okay so mine's there so I'm just going to select the line and I'm going to go into Dynamic help and it's this little section here at the bottom for alignment so what I can do is either select vertical so if I just click that and watch what the line does it straightens it up but it goes from top to bottom so if I wanted the line to go from left to right I would just choose horizontal and that's by far the easiest way to draw a line and then Straighten It Up again you can move a line around in the same way so I'm just going to click and drag it up to the top which is where it was before now you can actually draw horizontal and vertical lines but to do this it just needs a bit more Mouse control and I'll show you this now I did want to show you the easier option because sometimes drawing a line and trying to get it straight first time is a bit difficult I still struggle with it now so I'll just demo it for you and see if I can get it to work so I'm going to go to draw line I'm going to move the mouse onto the layout and again look from a plus sign and I'm going to click and drag a box from left to right now before I release the mouse what I want to do is to make this blue box disappear so I've still got my mouse click press down now and this is where yaml's control comes in so this is the bit it can often take a while to get okay so I'm going to start moving my mouse upwards and you can see that the box is getting smaller so I want it to disappear now what will probably happen is you'll end up going up up if you go up you've gone too far so what I need to do is look for this box to disappear so Steady Hand there we go so you can see now I don't have anything on screen the blue lines have totally gone once you're at that point you know you're going to draw a straight line so I'm now going to release my mouse and there you can see my straight line is there and again I'll just move that into position but total preference whichever is easiest for you I still personally like to just draw a line in the shape of a box and then use Dynamic help to straighten it up it's far easier okay so that's all my changes made now so I'm going to remember to save as I go on I'm just going to click on the save icon at the top of the screen and we're going to have a look at it to see how it looks when I've run it now I just want to let you know there is a preview option at the bottom of report designer within the layout itself so you can see that little magnifying glass next to the page numbers here that will let us preview from within report designer I do recommend you use this with caution as it will show you every invoice in your Sage data and not just the one you highlighted in the invoice screen so just to quickly show you because I don't have lots of data in my data set if I click on preview and I'll just let that run if I look at the page numbers here at the bottom right we can see I've got over 80 Pages showing so that means I've got around 80 or so invoices in my data set assuming they're all one page so if you have a lot of invoices within your data set I would recommend you use that preview option with caution so you can see I can now scroll through these invoices okay so I'm just going to go back to report designer so you can see the icon changes so if I click back to get into report designer and I'm just going to close out and then I'm back into my list of layouts so after you've done your changes the best way for you to preview your invoices from within the main program itself which is where I am now so if I click on preview at the top here it's only going to show me the invoice that I had selected from the main screen so you can see I had invoice 84 showing and I've only got one page showing there so if I just zoom out a little bit there see if we can get this all on one page there we can see the changes that I've made within this session so that's us done now with the Amendments so I'm just going to switch back to the slides okay so just to summarize what we've covered this afternoon and a reminder of some of the top tips remember to do a bit of research beforehand to find the best invoice layout for you now you can use the filter option in the list of layouts to narrow the layout shown and remember the little hover option at the right hand side so you can see how the layout will look before you actually go and amend it you can then save as a new file and add it to your favorites for easy access and I've shown you a few common requests for personalizing your invoice layout such as adding a logo adding a text box and lines and Boxes Etc so just remember to save as you go to avoid losing your changes now if you need to add more data fields to the invoice remember that great article that when you navigate to an area of the software and hover over a field it will tell you exactly the table and variable that you need and then finally everything I've shown you today also applies across the other layouts in Siege 50. so this isn't just applying to invoices you can follow the same steps I've shown you today across statements sales and purchase orders and more so in addition to the tables and variables article I've also added some more helpful links to the slide so as always if you need help after the session you can refer to the sage help center which has some great help topics there's also a link to an article to help you take a layout only backup now I can't stress enough how important this is if you've created your own layouts in the software so taking a backup of these will ensure if anything goes wrong and your layouts are either lost or deleted an error you can restore these in the same way you can with the data backup so please give that a go once you've had a go with a mending year layout so you're all good if something goes wrong and finally if you have any bespoke report design requests and you would like something new created we do offer a report design service so you can complete the request form via the report design service link and one of our expert team will contact you to discuss so a quick heads up for you on our upcoming webinars this week and Beyond we have a chart of accounts one tomorrow at 2PM and to celebrate International Accounting day we're running three webinars for you on Thursday so you can join Jackie at 11 to gain some insight into the benefits of sage membership and Michael's going to be running the management report session at 2PM and then for a bit of fun we'll all be here at three giving you a chance to test your knowledge on stage 50 accounts now there will be some Sage goodies on offer for attending this one so please register it's always good to have you and later in the month we're running a new webinar a report designer so this will introduce you to report structures and how adding groups and sorts can impact a report when previewed so we're starting off these report designer sessions at a basic level and plan to deliver more in the future on some more comprehensive stuff so we'd love to take a bit of the Fear Factor out of report designer to enable you to amend your own reports okay so that brings us to the end of today's session and please feel free to stay around for the next few minutes or so if you're waiting for an answer to a question or you have any further questions to ask if you think you've got what you need and you want to leave the session I'd just like to thank you very much for joining me today and I hope to see you on another session very soon if you can spare a minute or two to complete the exit survey for me when you leave that would be much appreciated so remember you'll receive an email in around an hour or two with links to both our webinar schedule and today's handout and recorded session for you to refer back to if need be or we'll just go to the questions and I'll just see how we're doing there see if there's any of these I can pick up I think Jackie and Michael are trying their best to get questions answered so I've got a question can you organize how the data appears for example by date order or alphabetically um for that question it kind of depends on what it is that you're actually amending if it's a layout you can do but it's not as simple as just adding a sort if it's a report again it's not always as simple as it looks now the webinar that I'm hoping to be delivering soon should be able to give you a little bit more information on grouping and sorting and how that how that all pans out so just watch out for that one okay I've got another question here from Lynn once a layout is finalized how is it shared across multiple users so for example an invoice layout to ensure consistency company wide now with your invoice layouts the invoice layouts are actually held at company level so at the same level as your data so let's say Lynn there's two of you I'm using Sage 50 accounts here connected to the same data set you will be able to see the layout and so will your colleague so it doesn't have to be separately out on everybody's PC you're all actually just sharing the same one okay just having a little flick through some more to see if there's any app and pick up um okay I've got another one here I'm from Alison I've noticed that when we create an invoice it says invoice what do you do for a credit invoice as I click on credit invoice but shows invoice now that might depend Alison on the layout that you're actually using I'm just going to quickly check the one that I showed you the plain paper one so just bear with me I'm just going to check that on my screen yeah the the variable field that's on there should actually change in ance to whether it's an invoice or a credit so if yours isn't changing I'd probably think that you might have a text box on there that you've literally just typed in which says invoice there is actually a data field that you could add instead which is from the invoice table and the data field is invoice or credit so you might want to give that a go and then that will change in ance to what your invoice record is whether it's an invoice and whether it's a credit um Agnieszka I've got a question from you how can I add Bank details you can add your bank details in the same way as I did that promotional message at the bottom of the layout so just buy a text box so click add text click onto your layout and then just start typing now a tip for this if you want to get to a second line within your text box just hit your return key on the keyboard and it'll take you down so you could type in Bank details at the top hit enter and then put sort code hit enter account number Etc so that's probably the easiest way for you to do that um Marco um under invoice credit can a variable be added to say that if it's an invoice a chosen voice in red and if it's a credit it shows Credit in Green absolutely we call that conditional formatting and it's basically if this is the case then show it in this color if something else is the case show it in that not something that I'd be covering today but absolutely you can do that I would maybe suggest look on the help center for conditional formatting and that will take you through that um been keeping Jackie and Michael very busy today which is brilliant I'm still scrolling through to see if I can answer any more um Donald you've asked a question on how do I add a sage pay box now you've got a couple of options with that if you have a little look through some of the layouts some of them actually have the pay now button on already so it depends whether you'd prefer to just take that layout and make some changes to it because it's already there for you or if you have your own layout to add a sage pay box to that so if it's your own layout and you want to add a sage pay box again go into the sage help center and there will be an article on that for you foreign when you use the data variable field for invoice or credit can this print in capitals absolutely what I'm going to do is I'm just going to see if I can copy if you add that so if you double click on the data field it'll open up what's called an expression editor and if you copy what I've just posted in that answer for you that will actually change it all to capitals so Grace um you're asking how do I get the customer details on the invoice do I do it manually um no absolutely not the customer details will be there already so I'm just going to re-share my screen just to show you that just going to make sure right so my report designers back up on screen now it depends which customer details it is that you're referring to so on the invoice so the customer name and the customer address is shown in this little box here so if I just preview this in report designer you can see there my customer is A1 Design Services and that's the address so this is the address that picks up from the invoice record so by default it will pull through from the customer record but you can over type that at the point of invoice which is why we look at the invoice record rather than the the sales Ledger or the customer record um so we thank you very much for your comment there and thank you great webinar um handouts are great to have but all the black is a nightmare for printing please consider changing it back to how it used to be totally taken on board and I will do that for future sessions so thanks very much for that suggestion um Carolyn I'm not sure about sharing invoicing I recently had to reinstall and none of my layouts were available now normally on an the standard Sage layout will be installed so are you say I don't know if you're saying that you had no layouts at all or whether you had customized layouts and that none of them were available so this kind of links into when I'd mentioned about taking a layout only backup so if you've actually created some new layouts and you've got you and we've done your bit personalization and stuff like that really important because then if you had to do a reinstall you could then also restore that layout only backup so I'm sorry that happened to you it's a nightmare I've had that done before when I've had a load of changes and lost it so it's not the best but it kind of just reinforces the the need for a layouts only backup [Music] um okay so I think we're coming towards the end of the questions now I do apologize we've run a little bit over but that's basically down to the Fantastic questions that you've been adding so I'm shortly going to end the session um I think everyone's just about answered apologies if you haven't had your question and said you know we do try and answer as many of those if you haven't got your question answered please have a look in the sage help center so I'm just going to end the session now so I'd like to thank Michael and Jackie again for your help today in answering the questions and I'd just like to take the opportunity to thank you all again for your participation and I look forward to seeing you all on a future session very soon so take care bye for now