Discover the Best QuickBooks Invoice Example for Animal Science

Quickbooks invoice example for Animal science

today's special episode sponsored by invoice Sherpa we're going to be talking about managing accounts receivable in QuickBooks Online and then we're gonna be talking about the third-party app called invoice Sherpa this is advanced webinars we're gonna spend a few minutes talking about the webinar series I was pretty quick then we're gonna jump into QuickBooks Online and we're gonna be covering some of the built-in features inside QuickBooks Online that we generally use to manage accounts receivable we'll be talking about the invoice enter about the send reminders feature we'll be talking about delivery methods print later and send later and how that works and we'll be doing a bit of a deep dive into about five accounts receivable related reports inside QuickBooks Online so that would be about twenty minutes then we're gonna jump into invoice share by the app and we're going to talk about how my Sherpa improves your receivables that would be about thirty minutes or so we'll talk about the pricing of the app we'll talk about whoops this is not this isn't a second let me do a quick copy paste here from this screen sorry I thought I had the same bullet points in both slides okay that's what we're gonna be talking about we're talking about app pricing for business owners we talked about the invoice reminders feature we'll be talking about payment automation how the payment automation works inside invoice Sherpa we'll be talking about the customer portal automation or late fees and then we'll talk about what app costs for accounting partners for accounting professionals that one up mix this as part of their practice and we'll have a quick Q&A for any pressing questions that we get in the questions about myself my name is Hector Garcia you can check out my youtube channel there's my email there's my office phone number if you need to contact me for whatever reason advanced webinars is my brand I'm creating this as a platform to deliver high quality advanced education content generally speaking this series is the third Thursday of every I mean the third Thursday of every month 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. scheduled all the way to April sixteen twenty twenty from time to time we have special episodes such as today's such as this one which will schedule in other Thursday's to go deep dive into a very specific apps and that's today we're going to be doing a deep dive into in voice sharp we have recorded episodes if you're a paid subscriber you can access any of those so we'll be covering today managing receivables an invoice Sherpa and there's about five more regularly scheduled episodes for every month including next weeks we're going to deep dive into QuickBooks Online payroll and then we're gonna do every other thirst every third Thursday after that we'll be covering advanced user permissions and custom reports in January ecommerce in February retail and restaurant in March and some post taxes and tips and tricks in April so let's jump right in but before we do that let me run a quick polling question and this is just to kind of get an idea to it how many clients are you managing are you working with in your firm pretty much in a monthly basis how many how many clients are you dealing with in a monthly places this will give me some context when we talk about the partner program of of employee share but I'll explain kind of some of the context as to why I ask these questions I'm actually involved with the folks of my Sherpa trying to help them launch and build their partnership program and it's kind of relevant to know how many many customers or so they're gonna have to you know we're gonna have to have access to if we have accounting professionals using invoice Sherpa so so real quick just pick the one that mostly approximates for some reason one of the one of the little ones was missing so just just pick the one the best approximates I probably made a mistake when building the the polling question so whichever one fits best how many customers are you managing more or less they don't mind all right I think that's enough I'm gonna go ahead and close the poll thank you for that and the poll and just to give you an idea or share the results real quick so in average right most people have between 10 and 20 maybe all the way to 50 that's the the vast majority of practitioners that we have here perfect all right so managing accounts receivable in QuickBooks Online we talking about invoice enter send reminders and send later and print later functions let me bring over QuickBooks to the main screen here and let's discuss the built-in features that you might use inside QuickBooks without any app of course to manage receivables so first let's go into the sales tab on the left hand side and then we're gonna click on invoices this is called invoice Center there's actually technically two types of invoice enters okay there's there's the invoice enter that only shows open invoices and then there's the invoice enter I'm calling it that when you click on all sales which is sort of a combination of invoices and other transactions but you can do a lot of the functions in in both in here okay so we're gonna click on invoices again and then this is the invoice enter and this is gonna show me all of the invoices are either overdue or just simply open okay there's actually a sort of red and orange navigation bar here and a gray one if I click on the orange navigation bar it will only show me over doing voices if I click on that little small gray bar you see there it will show me my open invoices that are not overdue so let me give you a quick example I'm gonna click here and overdue I'm gonna click on this big invoice here that's a million dollars and and that should give you a general idea what happens when you change the due date so for example I'm gonna change the due date here to sometime in the future so I'm gonna put here December 31st which is in the future based on today's date the webinar recording date and I click on save and you're gonna shift you're gonna see the shift in that bar see all of a sudden we have a big number it's great because those are the open invoices not overdue versus the orange ones which were they overdue so that gives you a quick illustration of how that bar works and you can click on any of those to filter so that's the invoice Center in a nutshell if I click on all sales and I also click either on overdue or open invoices it's gonna give me a similar screen with similar functionality depending on what you're trying to achieve you may want to use that all sales tab or the invoices invoice enter tabs I'm gonna go back to invoice enter over here and then let's talk about reminders so we have all these open invoices and if I want my customer to be reminded that they need to pay me not necessarily send the invoice again because I can open an invoice and I can click on on save and send here in the bottom and I can resend the invoice but if I already sent the invoice and what I want to send some text around the invoice saying hey by the way this is not the first time you get the invoice this is this is a second reminder whatever it is that you've already got the invoice and you haven't paid me you want to send a reminder instead of the original invoice so to send a reminder you have to click here where it says actions on the right side of the screen click on the drop down menu and click on send reminder once you click on send reminder QuickBooks will give you a pop-up menu it will say send reminders for employees 1073 I'm gonna put my customers email address up here if I don't have my customers email address saved already you're gonna see the subject line and you're gonna see the default message you can type and change the message you can change whatever text you want in that reminder and you can edit that as a default as well so I'm gonna click on send and that reminder now has been sent so now my customers gonna get an email with a copy of the invoice and also a reminder that hey this is the second time you get notified that you owe this money now when I click on the gear menu on the top right of the screen and then I click on accountant settings under your company I can go to the ways as sales on the left hand side the left tab and I can scroll down and there's a area that says reminders when I click on reminders this is where I can change the default text that goes in that reminder and notice that there's some placeholders here like invoice number company name which would look like this it will have it will be bracketed just to let you know that that data will be dynamic it will be variable and it will change based on the specific transaction that you're working with so that's one default reminder every customer gets it there are no multiple layers of reminders there are no you know warning one warning two warning three you cannot group reminders based on the customer and you cannot pick and choose which customer gets a reminder or not it's just one default reminder message so then you can pick whichever invoice you want to send a reminder and you can do it there too another really cool thing about reminders inside QuickBooks Online is I can also batch send reminders so I can sort the customers here and let's say I want to batch send a reminder for this international customer all three of these invoices so I can mark all three so I can click check check check and then go to batch actions and click on send reminder so it's possible to you can manually select the customers that you want to do a reminder and then at this point you can manually change let's put the email up here but you can manually choose who gets the reminder but this is a manual process so I can't I can't change that that's just a built in feature and also I can't change the text so if I do a batch reminder it will be the text that was in the settings QuickBooks cannot be set set up to auto remind based on due date or number of days that's what you will use an app like invoice Sherpa okay so those are invoice enters and reminders that's so quickly about send later and print later because those are actually pretty interesting so any of the invoices that you go to you can actually all right so I'm actually gonna click on any of these invoices I'm gonna click on this one here and there's a little checkbox up here next to the email that says send reminder so I can click on send reminder and they sorry send send later and once I click on send later I'm basically telling QuickBooks that is my intention to send this later and I can also filter it when I go send it later so I'll show you how that works so I'm gonna go ahead and click on send later I mark this one to be sent later I'm gonna click on save and then here where says Print Preview it's sort of hidden in the bottom when you click print preview you can also click on print later so if you want to flag those invoices as hey I need to print it so I can invoice it I mean send it mail it to my customer or I need to email it to my customer those two flags exist now let me tell you how those flags work so I'm going to get out of it and then I'm gonna click on all sales if you remember we told you that some of the features are gonna be in all sales and some of they're gonna be in the invoice center so I'm gonna click in all sales and then I'm gonna click on filter and then I'm gonna choose delivery method so I can actually click delivery method only show me the invoices marked to be printed later so I'm gonna click on print later click on apply and then I will show me only the invoices marked to be print later now let me click on this invoice real quick then I'm gonna click on print preview on the bottom right and I'm gonna unmark the print later and then I'm gonna click on save continue I'll close this transaction and then I'm gonna go to filter print later apply and nothing showed up as of now none of my invoices are flagged to be printed later but when I go back into filter and I click on the drop down menu where says delivery method I can click on send later and then click on apply and then let me just make sure that we have as to all dates go back and do all date so 0 1 0 1 2017 so today there you go so all dates and these are the ones that are that should be marked sent later let me up so this is it right here so there's my invoice I mean click on it there's my check box make sure that that's there perfect and I want to apply that filter it will say send later so that's how those check box work basically that's used for you to maybe do some batching later on like if you wanted to email the invoices and match you click on send transactions if you wanted to print the invoices in batch you click on print transactions if you want to send reminders in batch you click on send reminders now for the printing in batch that's interesting too let me click on any here and click on apply so for example if I wanted to print all of the invoices for customer a I go to filters under customer I'll type customer a click on apply there's all my invoices for customer a click on the select all button in the top part maybe I can filter and only show the open ones and click on apply and then click on select all one more time by actions print transaction so if I click on that QuickBooks is actually gonna create one PDF file for me with all of the open invoices so that could be useful for multiple reasons one maybe my customer wants me to email them one PDF with all of my open invoices ok so they can open it and print the more than one shot so if the customer doesn't want you know 10 or 20 different invoices in separate PDFs then you would do this so this is an option you can actually save it as a PDF before you print it so this is as print transactions but it also works just for straight PDF creation all right perfect ok so let's move on to a our related reports let me check the questions real quick see if see if I missed anything someone's asking can send later be set up as a default no no so there's no way to tell QuickBooks that all customers are automatically going to be sent later but that is a good question I'm going to show you something real quick here that I think it's valuable to mention let me go to any open up QuickBooks real quick where is my screen okay I might have to close there what mistakes let me open up the QuickBooks screen again let me go over here to the right side and I'm going to show you something that's really relevant when it comes to that the question about the default the default let's call it the default preferences for for the customer so let me go into my QuickBooks Online file and log in so when you create a customer I'm gonna go to sales customers so when you create a customer and you can pick any of the customers here so I'm gonna pick this one here called Assembly Bill and I'm gonna go into the Edit Settings here on the right hand side I'm gonna click on edit there's a tab here somewhere where is it right here payment and billing so there's a preferred delivery method print later and send later so you can actually go customer by customer and set up the preferred delivery method but I can't do a global setting for all the QuickBooks for all customers to be on send later so as long as you go to each customer and click on send later you can set up that as the default setting for it so next time I create an invoice for that customer it will be on that send later by default okay so that that should answer that question alright so let's move on to a our related reports let me go into QuickBooks here and give me one second for some reason every time I switch screens my mouse goes away but it's it's back so let's go to reports I'm gonna click on reports and then we're gonna talk about a couple of reports related to customer receivables so that that's gonna be a our aging summary and detail all the customer balances reports invoice list open invoices and invoice and receive payments um we're gonna go by order so an accounts receivable aging detail report it's focused around showing you every single invoice that is open and it's grouped by aging now I can collapse all these aging and get basically sort of a sort of a vertical AR aging report instead of having a horizontal one so I'll show you that the summary one will be more horizontal then appear there's two really important settings is the aging going to be calculated based on current date or is it based on report date okay so let's see if we can understand this I'm gonna go into current and then I'm gonna open up this one invoice here for November 27th 29th is I'm going to open that invoice for a million dollars I made a really big on purpose so it's easy to look at so if the invoice date is on the 27th and the due date let's say for example the due date is on November 30th technically if today is December 12 that invoice is late right so the image is gonna be late so I'm gonna click on save and close it and then go back into the report and see if I see that million dollar invoice what I'm expecting it to see so perfect I am expecting it to see as one to thirty days past two and that's how this works right it's all based on due date however that due date is going to be based on report date so if I actually switch this and run this report as of November thirtieth and then I click on run report then I'm gonna just condense these notice that my invoice is now listed on the current why because it is running the aging or calculating the aging based on the report date so that invoice is due on November 30th the report is November 30th that invoice is technically still current now if I change the aging method to current what QuickBooks will do is it will recalculate it will recalculate the aging based on the current date instead of the soft date so then it will it will calculate the number the number of days that is late based on today's date not necessarily based on the current date so all the aging the numbers of the aging so let me just click on the gear menu on the right and click on show more and we should have the ability to whereas aging well that's gonna be in a different report so I'm gonna show you that the aging aging tab is in a different in a different report which we're gonna jump to so that's in a nutshell the aging report in detail let's go to the the aging report summary and we can see this is gonna work the exact same way the million dollars right now is sitting as 1 to 30 because as of today's date that invoice is late but if I change the report date to November 30th I'm gonna expect those million dollars the minute I click on run report to shift from 1 to 32 current so I'm gonna click on run report and there it is and that's exactly what I'm expecting it to do them that's what I'm expecting it that's what I'm expecting to happen there so that's just really important to just kind of understand exactly how that how their AR aging reports work ok let's jump into another report which is called an invoice list I love this report because it's very customizable so I'm gonna click on invoice list and this is gonna give me a list of all my invoices right this is straight all my invoices that are in in QuickBooks now a couple of things that I can do is I can customize this report I can click on the customize button on the top right I can click on filters I can go down to a are paid so a are paid and then I can click on unpaid and click on run report and this only going to show me open invoices now and you notice that all the invoices have an original amount and they also have an open balance so if I have any partially paid invoices let me see if I can spot any partially paid invoices right here is a good example so I notice this invoice for $25,000 it's partially paid and the open balance is 20 to 500 so it looks like we really put a $2,500 payment on that invoice I'm gonna click on that and I should confirm that there is a payment right there I'm gonna click on that and then there's a payment for $2,500 so that confirms how the amount and open balance work together now when I click on the gear menu there's a couple of settings that I like to work with one of them here is either the AR aging filter let me show you how that one works and then here we have sent the same check box that's whether or not invoice has been emailed and then I wonder I really like here which is a customer and vendor message so I'm going to show you how those things how those things that work together so I'm gonna go ahead and click close died and now we can see let me just get rid of a couple more let's get rid of location let's get rid of transaction type that's pretty obvious let's get rid of amount and just leave open balance and let's work with that let's work with just those columns so we can see how this report works a little bit different now I'm also going to change the order of the columns and I'm gonna go ahead and put customer message next to memo in the description because I want to show you those two those two are key so QuickBooks doesn't have necessarily a note-taking system for you to take notes of what invoices are hoping or what invoices are due but this would be the closest thing to it so for example I want to add a note to this invoice has been open forever and I want to add a note to that so I'm gonna go ahead and open the invoice and there's potentially two places to add the notes I can add it on their message on invoice or I can add it on their message on statement so there's two options or where I can add the notes so I'm gonna put here customer said check is in the mail and then I'm gonna write a different message here customer said they will never pay us and I'm just putting two different ones so we can see them there somewhere I click on save and click on yes there I'm gonna go ahead and close that excite of that and now you can see that in my invoice this report I can kind of use this as a collection with report right so I can I can pick and choose which of these two fields I want to use to collect to collect data ok so there's some consequences to picking which one to use so if I use the one that says message on an invoice when I go printed that's gonna show up in the bottom of the invoice so do we want that you're gonna have to decide okay so are these notes for internal use only and then this one that says customer said they will never pay us that doesn't show up on the invoice but does show up on the statement so if I actually try to create a statement I'm gonna show you this real quick I'm gonna go ahead and create a statement for customer a so I'm gonna create a statement for customer a here's customer a and then I'm gonna click on printer preview so we can see what the statement looks like and let me just click on all dates here because we have 0 1 0 1 this one's from 2014 I believe 0 1 0 1 2014 right so I want to show all of the open invoices for this one so let me just look at customer AIDS statement and then you will notice I'm gonna go down and then somewhere here this should be that note on that on that invoice it's not showing up not sure why what invoice number was that my picking the correct customer let me just go back for a second and check that okay maybe I didn't hit save okay actually let me go and run all dates make sure I got the right customer always customer B okay that's why so this was custom maybe actually so let me go into new and go to statement and then I'm gonna uncheck this and only select customer B and then click on print preview and I also have to change the date range so it's a really important point so because I'm going back all the way to 2014 with this open invoices so click apply again uncheck select customer a print preview and they should work now so somewhere somewhere here there should be the notes on that invoice I'm still under customer a customer B print preview and there it is customer said they will never pay us so that's just a really good important thing to keep in mind if I'm gonna add notes to the invoice either in those two places and I want to see it you know let's call it a collection reports this made-up collection reports I'm showing you here you can use that now QuickBooks has a built in collection reports that works a little bit different so I'm gonna open that real quick so the collection report will show you basically the same information the open invoices but there's no additional notes we can add other than that client vendor message or the invoice memo description that we that we mentioned earlier so unfortunately that's just something that you have to deal with QuickBooks is not meant to run collections but this is the closest thing we get to that so that's really what I wanted to show you there's one more report I'm going to show you in the QuickBooks world that's worth mentioning because it's really cool QuickBooks desktop doesn't have this it's called an invoice and receive payments report so when I click on that I basically get it breakdown per customer okay there's no totalization because these are balanced transactions and you can see the invoice and the payment associated with it so this is more like a linked transactions report if you want a full list of every single payment you receive and every invoice attached to it this report could be useful notice that the memo on the description also shows on this report alright great so all right let me go ahead and get out of QuickBooks Online and we're gonna jump into invoice Sherpa but before we do that let me talk about a couple things that QuickBooks can't do versus what in worship I can do and they should add some context so invoice sharp I can do what quickbooks online cannot automate delivery statement so you saw me create a statement in quickbooks you still have to go to create statement select your customers press a button in order to deliver the statements if you want to avoid all that you can use invoice sherpa to automate customer statement delivery the second thing that you saw me do you saw me change or potentially change the default text for the reminders but that's one for across all customers so an invoice Sherpa you can actually create different levels of reminders and different text and assign them to different customers depending on your relationship so some of the examples of having different levels of reminders so I had a customer that that first sent a friendly reminder then he sent a late fee warning saying hey if you don't pay but this day will charge a late fee then we'll have a stop service warning where essentially they will stop the service whatever it is I think it was a landscaper oh sorry let me spell that correctly I think it was a landscaper that if they it was a landscaper right where they were warning them hey that we're not gonna service your house any more until we get paid then something that may be saying hey warning we're gonna send you to collections and hey we're gonna send you to legal action so you can actually do this and you can do it 30 days for friendly 60 days for late fee 90 days for service warning whatever you want to do you can create all different levels of reminders and it's just totally customizable you can also set up payment plans you can set them up as daily weekly monthly and you can have an optional down payment so if you have a customer that needs to collect a payment for one big invoice is maybe 20% and the customer agreed to pay within six months or within three weeks or whatever you can split up the payments out a credit card an invoice Sherpa will automatically do that in QuickBooks Online you cannot automate payment plans that's just not possible technically you can create sales receipts but you're gonna do a mess in the accounting if you have a big employs and there are sales receipt that charges against that so if you want to do a payment plan in brochure plus a great great choice for that also you can automatically collect payments based on a do they employ state or any other conditions so you can actually collect the credit card from the customer put it in employee Sherpa and then look automatically if the invoice is open 30 days after the invoices issued in moisture pad will charge the customer still giving the customer the choice of paying via check and if and if you mark the invoice paid invoice chirper will not automatically collect payment on that so it talks to quickbooks online 100% and is only driven by open invoices basically it's it's more driven towards open invoices then lastly one of my favorite things it's having a customer portal so having your customer be able to have a username and password you can put a link right off your website they can log in they can see their open invoices they can pay they can see the history see their statements credit memos any sort of a self-service platform you as an accountant if your accounting firm as a payment portal that makes you look like a hero and obviously for your customers having payment portal it just makes them look a lot bigger a lot more organized so let me talk about invoice Sherpa now so we're gonna open up the app and do that but let me run a quick polling question so just to kind of get general idea that what percentage of your customers are on a fixed rate on a monthly sort of value price fixed rate engagement and the reason for that is because I think that yes you can have your customers buy invoice Sherpa and user on their own but it might be more powerful if you include it sort of as a total a are collection type of service right especially for the full-service accountants that do a lot more for their clients than the average accountant does this is a great service you could potentially add us as one way you can differentiate yourself not a lot of accountants help their clients truly help their clients with cash flow I know I don't that's not my area of specialty but for the few clients that want to increase and improve their collections invoice Sherpa it's great option for that so that's why might be kind of relevant for those clients specifically you know if they if if you if you if you give charge a fixed rate maybe you want to be part of our partner program okay all right thank you for your answers and that let me go ahead and close the polling question I'm gonna go ahead and share the results it's kind of interesting here so about 34 to 26% of you have more than 75% of your clients on a monthly engagement that's pretty cool and then 56% of you have less so this is probably zero or less right you know on that so we can all over the place you know it's still not a normal looks like to have a client's on a fixed most of your clients on a fixed monthly service but you know that's something that depending on the practitioner of course you they may or may not want to focus on that all right so let's talk about employee Sherpa now so we will talk about the app pricing for business owners we'll talk about invoice reminders all in product we'll talk about payment automation we'll talk about customer portal late fees and then app pricing for accounting partners so right off the bat if you were to go to invoice Sherpa if you're a small business owner and you go to invoice Sherpa to purchase it you're gonna pay either fifty hundred or two hundred dollars a month for this app so these are not an inexpensive app this is certainly a an app that's just more for the customers are really serious about managing the receivables the price difference is based on number of invoices so if you have 100 open invoices a month generally you will go 50 dollar plan if you have 100 to 500 you go with a 99 dollar plan if you have a limited invoices for some of those larger clients you would pay 200 hours a month for the app so I should create some some context now the the customer portal just in case I don't get a chance to show it live it kind of looks like this the customer logs in they have the total amount do they have sort of an AR aging table under it they can see every single invoice credit memo and they can click on pay and they can pay any of those invoices individually and they can also manage a payment plan you can do that in your site and the customer can also manage a payment plan also in worship automates an email with the statements you choose how how it will work and I'm going to show you that in the product and you also can set up the payment plan in behalf of your client so let's jump on the product here you go ahead and open up invoice Sherpa I'm going to click on refresh like right and login and I'm logging in with my QuickBooks Online ID so if I have a QuickBooks Online ID I can use that to to connect so once I connect my QuickBooks Online to invoice Sherpa I don't have to remember my username and password for my Sherpa it just connects with your invoice with your QuickBooks Online ID let me just make sure I'm still connected to QuickBooks Online because I can refresh ok I'm still connected perfect and let me go to invoice share calm click on login or sign in and and there is now a couple of things to mention top left it tells you when it was last synced ok so you see right here that I have million dollars in invoices or a 1 to 30 days do I'm gonna click on invoices I'm gonna go ahead and open up that million dollar invoice ok and I have that in there so it kind of stands out and I'm going to change that from a million dollars to let's say five thousand dollars and then I'm going to click on save and then I'm gonna go back into invoice Sherpa and English are Pat those auto sync doesn't do it automatically it syncs but you know whatever frequency quickbooks online pushes the data or invoice sherpa pulls the data but you can always do a manual sync if you need to so I'm going to click there and sync and then this is going to update all of the open invoices so any updated invoices will show usually takes about 30 seconds or so and you should immediately see that million dollars change and go down to a much smaller number so once you get that sync you notice that the numbers essentially are changed okay so let's go over a couple of things here that are worth mentioning so I mean I'm in the home page and in the home page I get a couple of important metrics so average days past due I obviously have this test account so I have a couple of all the invoices in there total amount outstanding and the total invoices outstanding so quick stats right that's quick information for small business owners to see right off the bat then we have sort of a graphical a our aging screen here and I can click on any of those in the group and it will show me the open invoices that are part of that group so the minute I click on those open invoices here's the list of those open invoices so I see my my two open invoices there and I can take some actions right here on the fly so for example I can click on choose action here and I can either send a manual reminder send a manual late fee pay the invoice so if you have your payment portal set up you can pay straight from my Sherpa so I actually have a client that doesn't want one of their employees to access QuickBooks Online to process receivables and manage manage receivables so so they only do all the payments through invoice share plus so that one employee that's all they do the receive payments or the use invoice Sherpa so they never have to go into QuickBooks you can also get a payment link and you can copy and paste it if you want your client to pay through invoice share power with payment link you can pass invoice reminders so if you want that invoice to stop sending client reminders maybe because you you run into an agreement with a customer and they said look stop reminding me I'll pay you whatever it is so you can pass reminders on that specific invoice and turn orange just to let you know that regardless of your reminder rules that specific invoice will not hang on now take note this is pretty cool so you can actually add notes so if your customers say it said I will pay you Friday right you know you know I can quote that I will pay your Friday and it was Hector who said that I click on save note and then that now that's in my note so I can always I'll go back and add more notes or take a look at my historical notes for that customer because that's a really important thing you can add notes without having to modify the invoice itself like in QuickBooks we had to literally modify the credit memo I mean that the memo section or the statement section in order to add notes so that's pretty neat as well and so you get up basically you get all the sort of high level information it's gonna be here on the home page let's go to invoice reminders and this is sort of the meat and potatoes of it this is most of the power of embrasure but it's on this screen so we can do here is we can you can do any of these actions so we have invoice reminder we have invoice ready we have invoice paid we have SMS invoice reminder internal staff reminder like if I want to remind someone to call customers so let's do that one so I'm gonna click on send internal staff reminder I'm gonna click and drag that either on past do or do that right so I can pick and choose which side I want so I'm going to click on pass-through and basically I'm saying look immediately one day after a pass to let me take let me send an email to Carlos ok from my team like with a with the invoice itself and I can edit a template right so I can edit the template to say hey you need to call this customer so you need to call this customer ASAP right or something like that so basically this is a reminder for your internal team to to get an email automatically when that customer is past due so as I really just an interesting concept and there it is so there's reminder is set up in there okay so that that creates that and that basically that action it's created now this is for all customers you see up here on the button in the top right as for all customers I can maybe do that only for my bad customer so I want to go to create new customer group and I'm going to call this bad customers right then I'm gonna click let's let's put okay customers because we don't have bad customers so I'm going to go ahead and click on OK and then maybe that reminder I want to set it for ok customers I'm gonna come in here click and drag that there and then I'm gonna edit a template and say one one this customer that the service will be disconnected whatever it is as of tomorrow right so maybe I want to give different instructions to my internal employee on how to handle these in particular so I click on save template so now only for my ok customers so for my ok customers let me go here ok customers that has its own reminder I click on edit there's the text for my ok customers and I'm gonna go back and then on my all customers or my best customers I can click on edit and get a completely different text and i'ma show you how to group customers later on so that's how reminders work you can also automate statements so let's say for all customers I want to automate statements I'm gonna click on send statement and I'm going to send that into the green side so before invoices do ok because I don't want to wait for invoices to be passed to so I'm gonna go in for invoices due and then I say days before invoices due let's say within 10 days of the invoice do I'm gonna go ahead and send a statement so I'm gonna click on edit template and then I'm gonna put here here's an updated statement ok there it is I can add my phone number there my email here's what the email looks like alright so there's a cost come our company name and then the worth and the word month statement so I can put here current statement if I want to put monthly there right whatever whatever you want to do in there and I'm gonna go ahead and click on save and there's my template so now all my customers across the board within ten days of any any invoice in the due date it's automatically going to trigger and send the customer a statement okay so that's actually pretty interesting there and I can add the type of statement so I go to add statement and I go to edit and I can also do just a generic statement message here if I want to edit it so there's a there's the setup for that and that's generally speaking what we do with reminders now when I'm gonna click on reminder settings to show you a couple of things you can also pause and unpause the system so if I actually click on this check box that says send last reminders when system is passed I can actually pass the system you'll accumulate all the all the reminders and then once I um pass it it sends them all in one shot I can also hold actions on the weekends or some customers get annoyed to get reminders on the weekends okay so I can also attach a PDF copy of the invoice so that's a I can also hide you know the powered by invoice sharp a logo if I want to it's a couple options here either really interesting to see we can also pick the specific time that the reminders are set up so it's gonna be 12 p.m. on Monday okay so 12 p.m. on Monday Monday through Thursday okay I can just say Wednesdays and Fridays I will be sending a reminder so basically pick their which ones are one click on save settings and that's how it gets set up so terms of flexibility around how we can automate our reminders let's talk about automatic payments so once I set up my payment portal so I'm gonna click on automatic payment settings I can either say look automatically all invoices to have a credit card on file charge right so I could do that one option right and I can say charge from the date of the invoice or in charge one day before it's due or on the due date so that's a basically a general setting I can do assuming that I'm maybe dealing with homeowners association with that that's gonna be unilateral everybody will be charged at the same time or I can click on specific customers and then I can create on my own custom rules so I can go to add rule and I can pick a customer group and I can pick for example my okay customers okay my okay customers and click on save rule and then for the okay customers I can have its own its own rule to automatically charge so I'm only gonna automatically charge my okay customers in this case and I'm not gonna automatically charge everyone else I can pick and choose who gets automatically charged I'm gonna click on customers here for a second so we can see all of our customers and this is how I I can pick and choose which customers going to which group so for example let me go ahead and select these two customers who are currently part of all customers I'm gonna click on choose actions change customer group and I'm gonna put this into my okay customers group the concept of customer groups is extremely important because you can set up your payment automation and reminder automation based on the customer groups you can also set up your late fee set up based on customer groups it's like it's kind of important to know you know what groups are they belong to because every customer is potentially are different now I can also go into each specific customer and I'm gonna go open up customer B for example and I can actually unilaterally turn off reminders for these customers if I do that regardless of the rules this customer will not get reminders and I can go back and turn it back on or maybe this customer doesn't get late fees all right so then I'll automatically is for all customers but this customer will be temporary removed from that until he gets turned back on inside the customer you also get sort of an AR aging chart you get a list of all the invoices you can you can do all the things that we talked about earlier ID reminders payment link take notes and if you have any invoice notes you're gonna see them right there and you also keep a history of every single time that customer was reminded Sammy go back for a second and I think hats and a reminder to this customer so I'm gonna scroll down for a minute and see if there it is so here's reminder history so this is when a reminder was sent to this customer and for which specific invoice so as you can tell I mean this is as powerful as it gets and we're going to talk about some additional topics let me check the questions box real quick just to see if I missed any important concepts one is can the quickbooks online customer data be input into invoice sherpa QBO has a sub customer does invoice sure purdue sub customers so the answer is yes invoice sherpa supports sub customers and projects all the same a lot of those invoices that are there I actually are actually four sub customers or four projects and it you can group them by project or used to have to set up your grouping rules the same way but that's but but it does support that it does support that okay let's see what else we got here let me run let me go to customer portal okay my favorite feature of my Sherpa customer portal so for example I can pick and choose which of these customers get potentially get a portal right so I can invite every one of these customers to a portal and and I can basically go into the customer click on invite so I'm gonna click on invite and then the customer gets an email that says you know join our portal and then once the customer joins the portal they'll set up a username and password I can click on preview and specifically see what what their portal looks like so for customers calling me saying hey I have a question about the invoice maybe confused what they're seeing you can come in here click preview and you can see exactly what is said that they'll they see so this is what our customer see so I'm gonna show you how how I used to have used that in the past let me show you real quick I'm gonna open a new screen I go to Hector Garcia comm /p ok so that's how I do it I basically created a link on my website I've forwards to the portal okay so that's log going straight into my portal then my customers gonna put their their user name and password click on sign in and they said what my customer sees I they can see all of the latest invoices they can see any credit memos they can click on invoices they can pay any specific invoice so they can click on pay so our customers can pay with a check if they want to or they can pay with with a stored payment method so I've already set up a credit card like for example I have a credit card on file they'll just click on the button pay and it pays immediately so it's really powerful giving the customer the choice to either enter the credit card information or bank information as well or use a credit card that's on file to pay so I'm gonna click on pay real quick ok I don't have the payment connected I just have it in this is a dummy account but that's once you click pay your process the invoice shows pay it will send the information to QuickBooks letting letting QuickBooks know that they paid and it will process the payment for you and using whatever merchant system you have so if you have QuickBooks Online payments it will connect to QuickBooks Online payments if you have authorized net it will connect to that too and then if there's any payment plan setup your customer can see it here on the screen so that's the customer portal let me go ahead and show you payment plans which I love to I think it's just a great feature as well I'm gonna go to payment plans and let's say for example I want to create a payment plan for one of my customers so I'm gonna click on add payment plan I'm gonna search for customer a and then I'm gonna go to save payment plan actually let me go to a customer egg I think that's the one that I have quite a column file form and let's see customer a okay I should have me see which customer I have a payment plan on file for let me see let me go to customers and we've got a customer a okay I think this is the one that I have a payment plan for customer a okay so let's go back to that so let me go to payment plans add a payment plan search for customer a okay there it is okay so there's my credit card on file I'll click on that and then which employees do I want to set up a payment plan for so as long as I have an invoice let me just see what employees have open let's say this one this invoice for 1755 so I got a credit card on file I'm gonna set up a payment plan I can start by saying okay let's go ahead and take a down payment of $100 and that's gonna start today and then the entire payment plan is going to be ending let's say June 30th so I'm gonna say I'm gonna get payments from this customer every month so it's really really cool is invoice chirper will schedule the payments for you would tells you exactly when when the payments gonna come out the exact dollar amount I would put my customers email there for the customer to get a confirmation that this payment is about to come out of the bank account I can call it final and confirmed and then I would click on save favorite plan and then immediately the hundred dollars will be charged and then you will schedule all these payments with the card on file it could either be the Cardinal file or it could be the bank account on file okay so let's go through the questions here so somebody saying can invoice sherpa do automatic payments via ACH and what is the fee so the answers yes and I believe the fee it's about $0.50 so if I'm wrong someone from my shop I will tell me immediately so I can correct myself but from what I remember is somewhere around 50 cents that they charge so there is a fee for ACH now if you get paid through credit card what is the fee so invoice Sherpa doesn't have its own payment platform you will connect your own payment platform so if you have QuickBooks Online payments it would use the payment platform and they would charge the same $47.50 fee whatever to process the the payment so so that's kind of how it works let's see can you go over late fees yes I'm gonna go over late fees let me run one more polling question here and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna run I'm gonna I'm gonna go over late fees and then talk about the accountant program you're gonna be excited about the accountant program because I'm actually helping my Sherpa develop it and they ask for my advice hey how what would benefit accountants of using employ Sherpa for their own practice to add their their clients to it you know you know if they were worth the value price some sort of monthly service that will that will that they can be attached to some advisory or or cash flow type of service what would that look like and I'm actively advising them taking information from my fellow accountants as well so I'm gonna show you what we came up with and what they came up with with a little bit my help and then and then how you can get more information about being part of the program because they are going to leverage accountants to improve the tool invoice sure powers but there's a new management team this app has been it's been there for a long time I think maybe three or four years and and I think it was kind of neglected by the old management team so they sold it's a new management team that's really wanting to take this thing to the next level and they brought me on board to do that so so basically I told them it sponsor one of my webinars we can showcase it to like 200 people 300 people whatever they can give us their opinion on the on the app itself alright let me go ahead and close that polling question thank you for that answer and just to give you a general idea the vast majority of you don't have that many on the need cashflow automation but there is some interest here like some people say three percent of you said seventy five percent plus needed so I think to be honest with you right off the bat it feels like maybe not all the clients need it but I discovered that when you showcase a tool like I have this little hidden video that I sent to my to my customers it's like my own demo of invoice sharp a ten minute video when they see it they go yeah I definitely want to do that because it's really difficult off the bat for a small business owner to look at $100 tool $50 tool and say yeah I definitely wonder right usually people don't want to just pay money for no reason but once they see the tool going and they try to do it through QuickBooks Online which quickbooks online is a wonderful tool but in my opinion just it falls short of automation and i think there's just a lot of manual steps and like most of my customers they just forget right they just straight up forget all right so I'm gonna show you late fees real quick and and see how that works so I'm gonna go ahead and click on add late fee and then I can say all right so whenever you're 10 days past two I want to I want to charge a recurring fee every 30 days and I want to charge either the higher of $50.00 or 5% of the invoice and then once I click on save okay that's the late fee is set up and that's a cross it's across all customers when I click on all customers so if I click on OK customers I can set up their own late fee I can make okay customers the same way but maybe I want to charge them let's say the higher of $100 or 10% because I personally have different engagements with different customers and some customers get a higher late fee than others based on the agreement that we did on our engagement so this is really neat to be able to group customers based on that okay so one of the questions I get often is can invoice Sherpa do the opposite of a late fee can it offer a discount if customers pay early the answer is No quick quick books online doesn't support early payment discounts and invoice Sherpas trying to tack on to QuickBooks Online but I will take that suggestion up to management to see that something that they can develop alright so we're here in the last last couple of minutes here so before we finish let me cover something that I think it's gonna be important and valuable for you guys so for the customers invoice Sherpa is 50 100 or 200 dollars based on invoice volume we were thinking what are different ways that invoice Sherpa can add value to accountants and in any way shape I had already set up a a service that is two hundred and fifty dollars a month for 10 up to 10 customers which made it effectively about 25 dollars or more a month per customer which is half the price of the $49 service plus it's unlimited invoices so from the customers perspective if they're gonna pay $400 a month $200 a month I'm sorry $200 a month for invoice ARPA they're paying you whatever they're paying you and you're building it into your services that could be really high value but I you know one thing I told the invoice Sherpa folks is when people get started they don't really you know have ten customers immediately they just kind of start building customers so they've actually they're introducing starting January 1st 2020 a $600 a year plan for partner advisors and the only thing they're asking in return is that you do give give feedback to improve the software so in not everybody's gonna qualify so they're gonna have folks express their interest and the way you do that is by going into that link that's on the screen bit that Lea /is partner is for my Sherpa I'm gonna go ahead and copy and paste that into the zoom shot so you can see it on the soon chat as well and I'm also going to do a opt in question so I'm gonna run opt in questions so if you don't want to do that and you just want to get an email from them all you have to do is say yeah so if you interested on getting an email from one of the folks from my Sherpa with more information about the partner program you just get an an email with the link and you don't have to remember you know which link you have to go to and there's no cost right all you do is sign up and and you become a partner advisor now I'm going to show you something else that we're working on or they're working on with my help which is a no-cost service that we're putting together something to just kind of get people into the partner program without paying any money and I'm gonna show you what that looks like so that's something that they're developing now hopefully they'll be up and running in in January which is like a one-page receivables diagnostic report and everybody that's that at least signs up for free to the partner advisor program will get access to that so I think that's gonna be useful regardless so if you don't have any kinds on in boys share plan you at least want to get a taste of what it looks like to basically have sort of an AR management you can connect your clients account and get a a a I diagnostic report which I'm going to show you in in one second okay one of the questions I have here is those in voice chirp a sync with QuickBooks desktop I think and I'm gonna ask Sarah to see if because she's on she's on the line here I think they not supporting the QuickBooks desktop sync any more I know it did it at some point and it was kind of messy so they disabled that and they're only doing QuickBooks Online but I'm not sure if there's if that's backup so Sarah if you can give me that that answer via the chat box I could answer it live here on the screen so will they connect with QuickBooks desktop say for now she has an answer I'm gonna say I think the answer is no okay alright so that so yeah so the answer is no so that's been confirmed and that's because the the desktop sync was a mess and that's why I think it's one of the things that my Sherpa did you know it's just focus on what they do best which is getting the quickbooks online connection up all right you got to close the polling question I'm meeting a few people asking to put the pricing up in the screen so again pricing for small business owners if you go into employee share become it's gonna be $49 a month for low-volume up to 100 invoices $100 a month for a hundred or 500 and for unlimited invoices $200 a month and for accountants the current program which is $250 a month for up to 10 customers unlimited invoices so it'll be 10 of the $200 a month accounts for your customers is 250 a month but there's an introductory promo for the whole year for $600 for qualified partner advisors and in order to become a qualified partner advisor just apply just go to that link that's on the screen you can go to invoice chirp and go to accountant and add your information and they will contact you with that and this is a quick preview or something we're working on this was something that I've been consulting with them on and I said look I think in Boise sharp I in order to add value that should have at least a free product a product that accountants can get to say if their feet wet with the software and and what they're doing is they're building a one-page AR diagnostic report so all you have to do is connect the quickbooks online file and i give you a one page diagnostic report you can put your company information your company name there your logo give it to your customer at least get the conversation started on a on if your customers is then interested on doing an engagement where you deliver this type of reports more insight on receivables and all the automation that we talked about then at that point it makes sense for you to get the app in behalf of your customer or send your customer to getting their own app also I mentioned the QuickBooks desktop is not available but what 0 is some people asked you know is it connected to 0 and it also connects to clear for for law firms in worship has a lot of law firms that they serve and probably one of their their strengths you have any questions for invoice Sherpa specifically I would I would employ I mean a email Zara so Sarah at my shop at common there's 800 number if there was something that I wasn't clear on go ahead and contact them so it's Sarah that's my contact over there she's wonderful Sarah at my shepherd I come and there's the one 88 number that you can use so that's it that's the presentation for employed Sherpa so for upcoming episodes next week we'll be doing a deep dive in QuickBooks Online payroll and then we're going to follow the every every third week of the month schedule until end of tax season if you have any questions or comments for me specifically my email is Hector Garcia CPA calm if you have questions to my Sherpa email sara sara at my Sherpa calm that being said thank you very much and I'll see you next week