Discover a Progress Invoice Example for Teams that Streamlines Your Workflow

Progress invoice example for teams

um this is Pro Power Hour uh I'm Chris won one of the community managers with house call Pro uh this is a new series that we've been doing for a little bit over a month now since the end of May uh we took last week off hope you all had a good Fourth of July but we're back um happy to have Phil back with us again um and really happy to have Laura here too um we're gonna be talking about invoices today uh specifically um invoice reminders and progress invoicing um so I encourage you to be here every week it's every Thursday 3 Pacific 6 Eastern uh We've covered a variety uh of topics already we talked about reporting a couple of weeks ago we had Jennifer and James Nichols here we've talked about service plans we've talked about multi-day approvals uh or sorry multi-option approvals and multi-day appointments uh we've talked about a couple other things too and so we'll just keep building this Library so if you're new to house call Pro I encourage you watch the recording of This attend it if there's something you want us to cover for you let us know open to your suggestions um and you can kind of just think of this as like a mini mini training onboarding session you can attend every single week um before we get started I'll let Phil and Laura quickly introduce themselves s oh I can go first I'm I'm Laura I've joined the I've been at house call for about six years I'm on the product management team and um actually was in a similar role role to fill before this um helping on board and then Coach to the product so yeah that's pretty much it currently just focused on invoicing stuff previously price book um but really anything that's focused around getting our Pros paid and um streamlining how you communicate that something's outstanding to to your customers yeah and hello everybody again I'm Phil um one of the onboarding Specialists you've seen me on probably a couple of these other calls or you've probably if you're on the max or Max Plus plan you've probably talked to me or one of my teammates um been here for about two and a half years uh coming up on my three-year so um really excited to show you guys this new product um a lot of you have been asking us for it so um we've we've heard we've heard your call so um excited to show this to you today um figured just kind of explain just kind of how we're going to have the setup I'm just going to essentially show you guys a little uh slide deck here of what it is that we have um we have in store for you and then towards the end of it I will go ahead and do a little bit of demo L will go ahead and mention a couple of things to look out for look out for and uh we will be happy to answer any questions along the way so um I'll go ahead and share my screen and we'll get started so as Chris mentioned uh we are going over progress invoicing and invoice reminders um there have been improvements to the invoice reminders and um now that we have progress invoicing um the headache of uh segments is is gone essentially but um we'll talk a little bit about that as we go through our uh as our our slide deck here so for Progress invoicing um basically as I mentioned for your larger jobs that require multiple invoices or any of your customers that uh choose to be on payment plans something similar to that scenario that is now what progress invoicing is for in the past we used to have to break this up into segments and now we've tried to make it as um clear and concise and easy for you as possible by having everything all on attached to one particular job so as I mentioned has the ability to see all your invoices within one summary so you know exactly your balance so anything that is outstanding and you can uh keep track of all your your outstanding balances and catch up on any late payment um it allows you if you're familiar with the um discount as well as the deposit feature it's kind of the same thing we're able to take in a percentage as well as a fixed amount for those particular payments for job numbers and invoice numbers uh those job numbers are going to be separate from your invoice numbers so you may have a job number that is you know let's say job number 113 but your invoices can be 114 115 116 and then the benefit of this is it creates some transparency with your customers when it comes to billing schedules and just overall improving the experience um being able to communicate with your customers and be as transparent about what the costs uh are still left on this particular project so why do we why are we going with Progressive billing because again allows Pros um just like yourselves to set up a payment schedule with your customer that is flexible and being able to um reduce the price objections on larger more expensive more expensive jobs so gives you a chance to offer you I was just working with somebody earlier that was talking about water heaters and didn't really want to go too much into the consumer financing route but still wanted to give his customer the ability to pay off this water heater over a period of time so that's one of the reasons we set this up and because of those payments it put it kind of already locks your customer in by having them put some skin in the game so when you get that money for that first payment when you collect that money for that deposit you already have some startup um capital for this particular project so this is another reason why we started this initiative um it reduces the cash flow burden on the business by allowing you guys to pay for the labor materials anything that goes into the job or the project with cash that is already coming into the project itself just like as I explained earlier so um it's nice to get you know a couple thousand bucks and use that to go ahead and get your materials instead of using what you already have in the bank and it also drives communication with the customer by giving status updates based on the paid date and outstanding balance so every time they make these payments we see a payment history and are able to keep a concise record of when all these payments were made how they were made and when they were made so here's just a little screenshot of essentially how it's going to look again I'm going to demo this at the end of the slide deck and give you all uh an idea and see how it looks in real time but essentially at the top of each particular job there will be this add invoice button for you to create a new invoice for this particular job there is the uh send button so typically we do send them off right our invoices off right away in our normal day-to-day workflow but if we do ever want to kind of give that customer uh a little reminder we can go ahead and resend the invoice we also have the credit card button so very similar to our badge payments um when we were checking off uh the um the invoices that needed to be paid the little credit card button would light up we put the same button right here so you can go ahead and make take those payments on those particular invoices and then there is the more button which I'll show you in the demo and we'll be able to see what other options are available as we go through that button so couple of frequent asked questions that we've gotten from you all um do you still have access to segments uh when you have the progress uh progress invoicing the answer is yes we have not getting gotten rid of segments so if segments is the way you like to do things we're not going to stop you um but those are we are definitely releasing this progress invoicing as a better solution um but so you still have access to segments yeah and I think what I'll add Phil is like some of our Pros are so creative and have found a way to use segments um what we also understand from a product side is like they're not super intuitive if you're a new Pro and we drop you and we're like segments um you know that doesn't mean much to you so the whole goal of progress invoicing as as Phil has been um saying really well is we just wanted to simplify that workflow that you don't have to create segments which can sometimes mess with your reporting and you know we we had some pros like I think the record that I actually saw someone walk me through was 83 segments and that gets really hard to track from a reporting standpoint also like what's outstanding and so it's like what if we just give you one page where you can see all of this so you know great point from Phil like we're not going to stop you from using segments if you have a beautiful workflow that you love you still have that option but for for most Pros you know a segment isn't an ideal solution um it's just was kind of like a hacky way to accomplish something you couldn't do before so yeah yeah exactly um um can't tell you how many times I've talked to people about segments and so we're really excited about this progress invoicing um the next uh common question we get is is there a limit to how many invoices can be for a job the answer is no you can have as many invoices as you need for your job um can each invoice have its own due terms yes you can adjust each invoice to have its own due term so if you want to have that first one be paid within a week and the next one be paid within a month that's entirely up to you and we'll be able to see that live what are the different statuses mean for the invoice so there are currently three statuses one is open one is closed uh or I'm sorry paid and then the other is void so really pretty straightforward there open means we're still waiting on that payment uh paid obviously means it's paid and void we're going to talk about in a second um which is obviously we're all familiar with what void means but um to go into the next question is what happens if we have a mistake on an invoice and we've already sent it to the customer ideally we would want to put that into void because there's really no other way we can kind of fix this you've already sent it out so just like we would with a bill of sale we would just simply Market void and have to create a new invoice so moving away from progress invoicing um we're going to talk a little bit about the customizable invoice reminder ERS the system as long as I've been here we've always had invoice reminders um it was very set up to be um a frequency um and a frequency over a period of time and you got to control how many times that that email went out so now we've given you a little bit more to customize for this and one of the things is that now we can single out specific uh specific customers and so just kind of here on the screen just the key features send reminder for p du invoices and set exclusions by specific customers or customer types like I just mentioned and set a limit to the number uh to the max number of invoice reminders that a customer gets which I also just mentioned um so why do we have these reminders everybody uses it for different uh reasons but most common one that I get as I talk to Pros every single day is that they want to have a little bit of automation so they don't have to be the ones having to reach out to their customers you know taking time out of their day while they should be on a project or something to reach out and get these payments so we've given you some more power and control of doing this um and we'll take a look at how that's going to look yeah I think the big thing here is like you know things happen you know I I can say like as a homeowner like I'm checking my emails at the end of the day after work and so this isn't meant to you know if you're technician is the one sending the invoice reminder making sure we're reminding that customer hey there's still something outstanding and so you know like Phil said it's been really limited it's all or nothing and we know some of your customers don't like to be bothered or you know don't appreciate this sort of communication so we want to give you the power to turn it on for the people that it makes sense for but not annoy those customers that you really don't you know maybe you have trust you have a long-standing relationship with them and like they don't need this type of communication um and not to get too ahead of myself but you know there's 's a lot more that we're looking to do here in this area so would also love to hear in the comments what other Pros are looking for we're first starting off with hey I want to exclude specific customer types um some other stuff that we've heard is you know I'd love to be able to modify that messaging you know maybe the first reminder is like really plight and then the second reminder is like a little bit more Stern hey you know this is your second reminder so um we're definitely looking at this but starting with what we've heard the most as like a top provote here yep um and so uh really from there um I know these are kind of small I had to kind of zoom in a little bit but the some of this alludes to what Laura was saying is some of the improvements that we are making as of right now if you can read what that little box says it says for the exclusions we can really only have uh customers at this point um we are working it is in beta it's for customer tags which is very similar to the market marketing feature that we uh I believe we went over but if not we did talk about it at the summit so pretty similar feature there um and then some other things uh as Laura was mentioning just kind of um excluding from the invoice reminders you just get a better look at it those tags and uh pulling up your customers so let's go ahead and jump into a little demo and I have right here I've gone ahead and pulled up a fresh new job that I just created and we have here a couple of line items and we have a subtotal now obviously this isn't real but um let's take a look at a couple of options here so most common one and one of the biggest things that we needed for Progress invoicing was deposits so uh let's go ahead and take a look at what a deposit looks like as we can see here this is where we can go ahead make the changes um if we are going to say in invoice amount we can go by a percentage and if we're going to say a deposit of 50% we'll go ahead and put that in there save it and so now the new invoice is showing $94.50 while still giving us a total on the entire project so if we go to next and I'm going to go ahead and email this to myself just like we would with a regular invoice now down below we see here that that invoice has been sent out it is in its open status and there's the amount that's when we sent it and here are the buttons that we mentioned before so the send button if we need to resent if we want to manually resend it um there's the pay button which we'll take payment in a second and with the more button that gives us a chance to view our invoice print it or export it as a PDF so my customer is going to call in say hey I'm ready to pay my deposit I'm going to pay it over the phone all right let's hit the pay button again I don't have a credit card machine over here so I'm just going to mark it in cash so we're going to say all right cash and you are paying off the deposit all right so now we have see here in the invoices that it's now moved over to the paid side and if we scroll down if you got if everybody has seen this before there's our payment history so we can see when we collected it how we collected it the amount and what the reason was for can also issue that refund or cancel the payment alog together and then at the top we still have that new sub total so maybe this time the customer wants to pay off uh you know 25% of the next uh on the next invoice so we can click that invoice button and at the top here where the details are again we can make any more changes so we can do a dollar amount or again we said said we're going to do a uh you know not this time we'll do a quarter of amount 47 47 is the new due amount with that still full sub total up there and there's the payment history Down Below on the invoice so in this case I'm just going to go ahead and cancel this one um but we'll go ahead and pay off the rest of it so let's go ahead and get collect our last payment um let's do that by doing it through an invoice there's the full remaining amount send it to myself and then we'll go ahead and collect the payment on that one all right oh yeah sorry go ahead and I was gonna say that's pretty much it right there so Laura what you have to say yeah there there's um a couple other scenarios that like come up super often that we can highlight and you know some of the pros have said like I know my billing cycle I know that I always collect 20% a 40% deposit and then you know I collect the remaining balance so a lot of our Pros are now saying like I can I just create the invoices at the beginning of the job so I know that I have three invoices to collect and and the answer is yes you know in this scenario Phil just like created the invoices they were collect cting payment that's one way to do it some of our Pros are creating these invoices ahead of time um with those predetermined amounts so they're kind of like ready and and good to go and then you can send them out to the customer for payment when you're ready um and then the other thing is you know sometimes you're not going to sometimes you just want the invoice to communicate the different stages of work so um if you are a pro that just wants to collect the final payment at the very end you're still able to do that via the pay button at the very top um but but yeah those those are some common questions that come up which is like cool can I just start all my invoices at the beginning beginning of the job if I know how much I want to charge and the answer is yes yeah that was just quickly trying to mimic what you're saying here so we'll say 10% on the first one send it out um next one let's say 40% so yeah just similar to as Laura was saying I could keep going on and on um but as we can see here you can just start creating those and send them out when you're ready cool um before we move over to uh reminders any questions Chris that have come up um I'm not seeing any questions but I know a lot of people will be watching this later Lauren thanks for tagging all these folks just want to encourage if you are watching this recording we're we're paying attention to the thread we'll definitely get your questions answered I know a lot of you watch this in your evenings and your time off so um we can keep going I know Franklin's here Franklin let us know if you have any questions Jen I know you're here too same thing um Franklin's a pro Franklin's like early ba Alpha tester for progress in voicing so he shared a lot of feedback with us early on and um some of the improvements are making or you know based off feedback from him and other Pros in our beta but we'll talk about that in a bit cool um so yeah for um invoice reminders it's in the same location um where it's been since we uh moved it and started having this new format for our account settings um if we do go to invoices there's the progress invoicing first so when that does become available to you that is where you can go ahead and turn this on for automatic reminders they are now going to be in automations and as we can see here send unpaid invoice reminders for every 3 days after the due date has passed for a maximum of five reminders we can turn that on or off and we also have the ability to customize that very similar to how it was in the past as Laura mentioned kind of taking baby steps with this and um right here you know we can set up our frequency so if we want to have every five days and have eight reminders that means every five days one of those eight reminders is going to go out to the customer um and that's more time back in your day now as we mentioned the newest part addition to it is excluding our customers so as of right now really just kind of searching through customers unless you're testing out the beta so um you know I don't want uh I don't want my nephew getting any I don't want my brother getting any so all the sple is they're not getting any of these emails um and it's pretty much just as easy as that and obviously the idea is is that I know a lot of you work with commercial accounts where they don't want to be bothered with a new invoice every couple of days so um for those that's why we have our Auto invoicing feature so that you can get that summary out to those customers you know once a month once a year and then they can make that payment across the board yeah and then right right now um I phing like this is live with I think about 150 Pros some of you which said like yes please give me Early Access like I've been waiting to turn this feature back on so um if you don't have maybe we can share out the early interest form and we can get you added to our beta um and pretty soon I think over the next two weeks we'll be able to add the ability to exclude by tag which we know a lot of you tag your customers like do not um like no Communications or no reminders or commercial so you'll be able to use those tags to enter it and then exclude you know all the 50 customers that are related to that tag um but the hope is we can automate it for the customers that Mak sense and then make it really easy for you to exclude anyone that doesn't um we got some really good feedback last time we were in the community which is you know can I be able to see that a customer was excluded when I go into their profile so uh we're going to be looking at adding that too before we go to GA as well yeah Frankin says very nice he's on the alpha yeah um so yeah that really concludes at least the demo portion um so we do have a list of questions here that uh were already submitted to us which we can certainly um will'll go through those but before we do Chris any questions or anything from the chat or any scenarios not at the moment all right cool um so um yeah do you want me to just kind of go down the list and we can answer them together yeah I think we can go off off the first one which I think was is progress inv voicing available yet um you know I I know Jeremy this is from Jeremy Miller he was like we land landed several jobs that we need to use this on so right now we did um an update to our invoicing system to support invoice reminders reporting Squad maybe te it out last um Power Hour that they're doing aging invoices reports but um we're in the process of updating all Pros to this new system right now about 70% of Pros have access so if we've done that update update to your account you can just use the flow that filled where you go into your settings and you can turn it on for yourself um if you if we haven't yet updated your account then you can chat into our support team and we can update your account so that you can get access to that so that's one way to request access if we if we haven't yet done the update but that'll be out to um that update will be out to 100% of Pros over over the next um one to two months here so the answer Jeremy is I'll I'll check your account but um if you don't have access we can do that invoicing update and then make sure that you guys are all set to turn it on for your account sure um yeah the next question from Jerry Klein um is it Progressive billing and multi-day jobs or is it true Progressive billing or the workaround with segments um if you caught the beginning we are moving away from segments and having a true Progressive billing so the answer to the question is yes it is yeah and um I know we didn't touch on multi-day jobs but there's like two main reasons why prosu segments and one of them is like we have a ton of return work where my tech needs to go out there and know their schedule date and then the progress invoicing side handles the billing piece which is I need to generate many invoices to get paid for this job so we have a lot of Pros that turn on both um but you know some pros are still using segments for the scheduling piece and then using progress invoicing for the billing piece so there is that flexibility of you know you can turn on both of those features or just one or the other depending on on your workflow preference preferences cool um let's see uh I think the next one that we can really answer is from uh santon uh update on the launch which I believe we've already covered um can you turn off invoice reminders for just a few customers yes you can uh we explained here is that you can buy customer eventually by tag we will be able to do this well and then we can take a look at John's account um I know there that was like a really common question and for long time the answer was no we can't but now you know we rolled that out two weeks ago so we can start giving you all access if you need um early access to [Music] it so um Kevin's question can you change the invoice reminder to per customer or account wide um I think that is a good question um you can it's it's how I how we kind of showed it here it's really it's for everybody and you can only exclude people yeah and I think for Kevin senir he's he's talking about I have a GC you know they have net 30 60 terms and like we shouldn't be reminding them at that you know every three days that you might set up for other customers so as long as you use and exclude that GC by name they just wouldn't get those reminders moving forward so it's kind of like excluding them on a per customer basis like Kevin was asking yeah I think Tom here has a good one too um is there a way to shut off reminders on just a specific job um again it's kind of all or nothing there um I would suggest if that's a specific case as in his example um some jobs put down a deposit and then come back one to two weeks later my suggestion for my seat would probably be is to not utilize uh the invoice reminders for that scenario maybe you would exclude that particular customer and you would probably have to at this time have it be more of a manual push yeah and and that's that's a good scenario for us to think about which is you know maybe excluding at a customer level isn't enough it's like specific jobs you don't want them to get reminded on what you could do is exclude that customer while those jobs are in progress um and then re-include them when when that work is complete but we we can definitely look at that as an improvement which is just this one job is the only one I don't want to remind but definitely give us feedback you know it's early on we're still going to be listening to your feedback and what improvements you want us to make with that feature um next one if you switch the mobile number to a home or work number so I'm assuming you mean more of a landline will the text messages not go out that that is true I mean they'll go out they just won't go anywhere yeah um and that that is actually a question that comes up which is do the reminders go out via text or via email how does that work um and so the way that works right now is if you are to send an invoice via email the reminders will go out via email if you send a SMS invoice the reminders will go out as SMS so it kind of saves a preference of how you initially sent that invoice it's another question that pops up I don't know if that one's like common knowledge and then yeah last question here um from Stephen um some the sum of all the open invoices or the previous four weeks also if I create auto invoice following day or in four weeks on that Tuesday um so it really comes down to I think we would have to take a look at what exactly you're trying to accomplish there but as we mentioned earlier Auto invoicing um that feature provides all of the open invoices during that time span so when you want to say hey I want it to go out you know the first of every month if that customer has five open invoices they're going to see all five on there if they have uh you know they've had five invoices for that month and they've paid off two of them that summary is going to show the three that they need to pay yep that's true and there's common misconception where PR will be like you know if I do have five five invoices that go out as part of that auto invoice does my customer have to enter five different payments and the answer is no your customer gets to see the five individual invoices that made up that that auto invoice but they only get prompted to take payment once for the total so I know that's a common concern which is I don't want my customer to have to enter their credit card information over and over again especially if you're someone who's running like a lot of jobs for One customer so just know that your customer is going to get one total and it'll say hey for all these jobs you owe you know $3,400 and they'll just have to pay that once cool and that's really it for the the list of questions we had anything no thanks for running through those um Lauren and I were just tagging all those Pros so hopefully guys if you have any follow-ups let us know um we tagged all of them in the thread um I don't have any live questions right now so you can start getting ready to wrap up Pros if you are watching if you have any questions let us know but Laura I know we wanted to show a couple more upcoming things yeah so um there's been you know part of the reasons why we do alpha and beta is it's a Pros opportunity to give early feedback on where they want that product to go and so with progress invoicing it's been great the the feedback we've gone is this is so much better than segments it's a lot easier to track um we had Pros using spreadsheets or you know a thirdparty software to handle that because it was too hard to do in house call um the main feedback we've gotten is you know I don't necessarily love the process of voiding that Phil showed when you know if you make a mistake you can't make an edit and that happens sometimes your technician you know forgets to add the attachments you've sent the invoice and you know that customer needs to see those images or you know they had a different due term than than what you said so um a couple of the sneak peek into some improvements we're working on this quarter is adding the ability to be able to edit um an open invoice and so for example what might have happened here is I sent this invoice for 550 and after the fact I realized I forgot to edit the payment options or I you know I forgot to add the attachments so this action doesn't exist today today you have to void and create a new invoice which we understand you know like is can be timec consuming if if this is happening so um PR will have the ability to click edit and let me sneak over here this gives you the ability to you know make some modifications to what that customer will see so if you forgot to add the attachments you'll be able to do that modify any of the settings and then resend that out so that that customer can still pay it you don't have to void um and then that makes it a little bit easier on that workflow so this has been a big point of feed back which is love it I just need it to not be so rigid and I need some flexibility for when I make mistakes which makes complete sense so um our team's going to be starting to work on this and this will go out to anybody who is using progress invoicing um some of the other feedback that we're getting is I really want to have my tech on mobile be the one to create the deposit so right now for for any of you that are on the fence of like should I turn on progress invoicing or not all the functionality is on web so this works really great for the companies that do all the billing from the admin side it doesn't really work great if you kind of have split responsibilities so that is a big area of opportunity opportunity that we're going to dig into which is maybe the tech can do the First Progress invoice for the 20% deposit um just to get it kind of off the ground and then you know you you can do it either via web or mobile so definitely give us feedback if that's you or you're someone who kind of splits up those responsibilities um but that's a little bit of a sneak peek of what's happening with progress and voicing and then um for I'll reshare my screen again Phil already talked about this but for anybody that's like oh I don't really want to exclude customers one by one by name um this is what'll roll out in the next couple of weeks if you're on our beta for invoice reminders where you're going to be able to enter a tag and that might exclude you know 15 customers in one go rather than having to do it one by one so that's what we've got coming down the pipeline pretty soon here on on both of those features yeah Bros keep your feedback coming too we answered your questions but we're open to getting your feedback in this thread as well and oh yeah Franklin said yes please Mobile deposit invoice is critical for us um Frank we always appreciate you being here even on these lives you're always dropping feedback so we appreciate that um but otherwise I don't have any other live questions um Pros like I said we'll monitor the threat if there's any more that come in overnight the next few days Lauren and I are paying attention we'll get it over to Phil or Laura if we can't answer it ourselves um oh Franklin says read my other question too can we please get web hooks for invoices we should have some already in progress we can talk to kathyn on our team but I know we are working on some apis for invoices which is another big part of the update you know some of our Pros wanted some of those web hooks for automation so um I could check on on the progress on that maybe we could tag H kathlyn yeah we'll tag Kath Lauren if you yeah great um all right well then we'll call that a wrap Laura Phil thank you so much I really appreciate you guys being here and bearing with me through the technical difficulties thanks for having us thanks problem thanks for having all right bye bye