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Retainer invoice example for corporations

all right hi everyone i want to thank everyone for coming to join us today to talk about invoicing uh specifically related to your retainers and your recurring billing um so to kind of get started my name is sophia wilson i am the customer success team manager here at function point and i am joined by my absolutely wonderful colleague jenny lee who is one of our excellent uh account executives here jenny just checking in can you hear me okay i sure can i'm ready to roll and halo everybody wonderful uh so let's get started um so to kind of start today we're going to have our agenda so with the invoicing especially related to retainers and recurring billing there are a few key pieces that i would really like to make sure we cover today first of all is of course the organization of your jobs i'm going to show you a kind of a pretty key field and the suggestion that i make to all of my agencies that i work with on how to organize your jobs to make um the invoicing for it easy for your accountant then we're gonna do just a quick overview of invoicing in general uh because when it comes to the the retainers and recurring i'm going to show you kind of a couple of uh shortcuts it's going to make it easier but ultimately if you don't understand sort of the basis of all these things it's going to look confusing so i want to make sure that we do a quick overview of that for you then we're going to go into our multi-job batch for a single invoice and then of course our batch invoicing for multiple clients so these are the shortcuts i was talking about so if you were to have a scenario where you would invoice multiple jobs for a single client but you'd like to make sure it's just on a single invoice we are able to do that for you as well as batch invoice all of your all of your jobs for all of your clients at one point as well so we'll definitely go through that today questions so jenny is here to answer all of your questions uh i will be checking in with her periodically on if there's anything that she feels is uh relevant to show on screen with us today if you have any particularly um unique scenarios to you and your agency please we may not be able to answer them today on the webinar but we will make sure that your customer success manager or a member of the customer success team is in touch with you to make sure that we answer those because invoicing is a pretty key piece of the workflow and we want to make sure that those are done correctly so if there's any time where you're you're unsure uh never hesitate to chat with our success team we're here to ensure your success so learning more with fp obviously first of all congrats you came to the webinar it's one of the key pieces to continue that learning but we also have other tools and resources available to you um and of course uh q and a our product input uh there's lots available and i'll make sure to point that out when we get into the system as well um of course we also have our fp referral program so if you have any other agencies that you would like to refer reach out we definitely have um some some bonuses for you if you do that our next session is going to be two weeks from now same channel same time uh and we're actually going to be reviewing invoicing more again as well uh this is going to be concentrating more on fixed price and your time material work we do recognize that there is a bit of a difference between those types of invoicing so we'd like to break them out into two separate invoices okay awesome so let's jump in uh to kind of get started i just want to again make sure that you are aware of where all of our extra resources are so when you do log into your function point for the first time you're going to see the information icon up here next to your name uh this is where you can then access our help center which is of course our never-ending area of documentation webinars you'll be able to access everything we've even set up some crash courses based off of what your key roles and jobs will be in in function point and of course if you're wanting to stay on top of what's new uh particularly our new bi reporting uh we do also uh do do some updates here as well for that now if you have any brilliant suggestions or ideas on how you think we should continue to develop the software we definitely want to hear those too our product team actually loves to talk directly with our customers as well so it allows them to really dig deeper into what your idea and requests are so don't hesitate to submit those and you can do that through submit an idea here uh just underneath the help center okay great uh jenny you know i'm just checking in usually there aren't any questions at this point yet but just wanting to make sure that uh you are all good to go from your end i think you might still be muted jenny because i can hear you talking on the other side of the room but hello everybody so it looks like we have no questions in yet but i'm here looking at the question panel so if anybody has questions feel free to type them in there and um yeah okay awesome yes please everyone send in those questions jenny i know is eager and and very able to answer those as we go through this awesome so kind of to get started of course i really want to talk about that organization of your jobs so when you first initially create your estimates there is a pretty key field that as you go through implementation with us here at function point we usually recommend be used in in a way to organize how you're going to invoice jobs and that is your category field here now mine's been set up a little more uniquely you will find in your own system this will probably be set up differently as well again usually based off of how your onboarding has gone and as we've dug into what your team's uh workflow and needs are we've probably rearranged this but this is how me and my demo system i would plan on invoicing for different pieces of work within the system so i've organized it based off of my monthly retainers my quarterly retainers my time and materials jobs so again anything that i would invoice for uh that is just strictly timesheets and expenses and then of course uh all my fixed price work so we definitely have those different options there uh available to you to make sure that you are invoicing how your accountant would like to be able to just organize see and invoice um ingly so that is again really key piece for you so another quick run-through that i wanted to do is just invoicing in general so you can invoice uh just directly here through your main navigation bar and we can add invoice so everyone should be able to should be familiar with this workflow um you do have to have a job to be able to create an invoice but what i wanted to go through is and this is of course just our single invoice that we have so it is one of the most basic ways oh jenny something uh is going on you're not able to see my screen yeah sophia i just want to check that were you showing slides or anything that sorts it just on my screen that says waiting to view success team screen of course it is i was sharing all sorts of slides so that's embarrassing all right are you able to see my screen now i sure am okay we're ready to roll okay okay got it um yeah it i do apologize everyone let's just take a quick step back uh again information and some megan idea up here in the top right hand corner and then of course we do have um our our main page here so what i was just speaking towards when it came to creating those estimates and uh utilizing this category drop down as you are creating your invoices so that sorry as you're creating your estimates so that you can invoice ingly later uh something that is a pretty major pain point that um most uh accountants will just say is that sometimes they're not really sure and when there are multiple ways to be able to invoice for work uh it's just key to really make sure that these are organized in an easy fashion um so as we have these different categories labeled we're easily able to come in and say do a job fine based off that category uh you know i'm going to want to do a search based off of all of my monthly retainers and find i can either choose to find all of them or just find all the active ones so again for that accountant they're wanting to pull all those monthly retainers that maybe need to be invoiced this month or next month uh we can pull those we can see that there are the four and we'll be able to invoice ingly so with that uh then of course we're going to want to touch on again just the basic ways of creating invoices so you do have to have a job to be able to create an invoice i'm going to just come into my mac and co seo retainer here we'll be able to take a look at our retainer um you know again do that review i'm not sure how many people that are attending today were able to attend the retainer webinar a couple of weeks ago but um certainly if you have any questions regarding your retainer we can we can tackle those but uh this is just a basic uh retainer that i have set up here um you know i have the amount of 20 hours uh totaling two thousand dollars that i plan on invoicing for we can come up here add new ad invoice and this will take us to our basic input invoice page so when you land on this invoice page we will have the different types available now these are very basic types of course the deposit invoice anytime you plan on taking a certain um amount of dollars uh prior to beginning work on on um on your job that you have and making sure that uh you know you you have that sort of um reassurance that there's going to be payment for that uh this we definitely recommend uh anyone that really practices um a proper accrual based accounting uh can we can practice this with with these deposits and apply them to your interim and final invoices later then of course we have our interim invoices so this will allow you to create an invoice for any job that you have as well as keep that job open so anyone that would practice you know um different time based invoicing uh maybe invoice uh every quarter or in thirds over a certain span of time you can do that use this invoice type and continue to invoice ingly moving forward from there we then have our final invoice and what the final invoice will do is it's similar functionality as the interim invoice in the type of invoice that will be created but what is the main functionality of it is that it will then shut down the job that you are invoicing so that no one can track any more time and material against that job something i always like to take note of as well when it comes to your invoicing is this invoice date now this is kind of a a a little bit of a funny functionality it will always invoice all time sheets and expenses from that from that date since the previous invoice date or the start of that job so i have um spoken with some accountants in the past where you know they do all their invoicing on say the fifth of the month but it's for everything from the previous month so you know they're going to do their invoicing on february 5th uh what a week and a bit from now but it's for all of their january work that they accomplish now what they're probably going to want to do is back date their invoice date to january 31st so they make sure that they only capture all the timesheets that were put in against those dates and none of the timesheets or expenses that were inputted from feb first to feb 5th are not captured on that invoice so just something to always kind of take note of it is a it is something that that um i've seen some issues in the past because there were items that didn't want to be captured so that that invoicing date's actually pretty key what we then have is then our calculated from so you have the ability of calculating your invoice from different key pieces of course your estimated amounts your actuals uh your remainder from actuals and your remainder from estimated so if you have invoice for it previously and maybe it wasn't the full amount you want to make sure you only capture what is remaining and then of course if you leave it as none it will allow you to also completely override the invoice into what you want however don't worry if you were to choose something and it's not exactly what you wanted you do also have the ability to make those changes ingly on the next page as well all right jenny just checking in any questions kind of coming in as we go through today no so far so good in regards to invoicing we did get a couple of retainer specific requests and so we'll just circle back and um approach those questions directly after that after the webinar yeah no and and uh yeah feel free to send through any strange scenarios um and if for some reason you happen to have a horrible dream about them later this evening while we're not on the webinar uh feel free to email success at functionpoint.com as well uh we'll we'll still help even even outside of these things okay awesome so let's dive into a pretty specific scenario um first of all there are times especially with retainers where what you're going to have is is a set amount that you're invoicing your client but of course that could result in any type of work that that is happening and in those cases your customer is still going to want to see what it was you are working on but you still need to make sure that they see this specific line item of whatever the agreed-upon dollar amount and and hours were agreed upon previously so i've already set up a project here and it is my safeway retainer and what we have in here is the different pieces that are related to this work i'm actually going to jump into the job financials here so with this retainer we've got our safeway monthly retainer so no matter what we plan on providing 90 hours worth of work and we're gonna invoice for ten thousand dollars worth of that now again safeway can come at any point and ask for different pieces to be done recently it looks like it's been an entrance sign a flyer redesign and of course a website so within here we're still able to come in and review what those actuals were what we had tracked and of course to make sure that we were still um on on track with with our what our budget was because with retainers in most cases you still invoice based off what your agreed upon amounts were whether you're under or over so it looks like in this case unfortunately we were a little bit over um so also a good time to just double check that we are um profitable on all of our jobs and and aren't taking on retainers that are not going to bring in money but of course um it's it's from bringing on function point that you're going to be able to have that view so what we're able to do is come up here under add new because we're going to create an invoice specifically for safeway for this retainer and we're able to come in and click add invoice so you're going to notice a slight difference in this invoice now compared to the previous ad invoice screen and that is this new batching section here and this is where we are able to define if it is a single multi-job invoice so again it would be a single invoice for a single client but it would include multiple jobs on it or the multiple invoices in a batch and multiple invoices in a batch what that allows you to do is actually create single invoices for each job and they would each be printed individually which you can do for a single client in most cases i usually see agencies i work with use that in cases of multiple clients and just wanting to create multiple batch invoices at once so for this scenario we're going to create a single multi-job invoice uh the invoice name will automatically pull uh this year and this month with the title of the project but if you needed to change the invoice name you can definitely do that you can create a specific contact that you want to make sure that this is going to be emailed to directly out of here and then of course that invoice date we're going to want to just uh i'm going to follow my own best practices and i'm going to do it for the last day of the month so that it's going to capture everything there what we're going to want to do is calculate this based off of estimated because that is where we have that 10 000 included in there and then of course for billing percentage i'm going to bill for the full 100 so i can leave this blank however if in a scenario where you were only wanting to invoice for say 50 of the retainer you could do that at this point as well you also have the ability to add in tax groups just but just for ease of this scenario today i'm going to leave that blank and we're going to go ahead and add invoice um sophia just did it yeah quick question just came in it was quite a good question um that little tax group box there um someone just asked that their agency does not apply taxes can that be removed or how would that look like in that scenario yeah good question jenny um yeah and you know what there are there are times where maybe taxes aren't being included you cannot remove that box it is hard-coded into the system so we won't be able to remove it however you can just make sure that we leave say what we can create for you is a no taxes uh tax option and move that as the default so that if you wanted to show on your uh printouts that you're not charging taxes uh you will be able to do that or again leaving it blank and then that will just be blank on the printout depending on if you are using our quickbooks integration you may need to create the no tax tax uh since uh quickbooks does still require you to communicate attacks over even if it's a zero percentage one jenny does that kind of answer the question or i think it did thank you awesome glad to hear it yes and i love that you just jumped in please please do that as we go you know that okay great so again as we go through here these are going to be your options now of adding in a few other um items so if you need an activity description you are able to create these by default through the lift maintenance in in your system as well as the payment notes again just for ease of this example today i'm going to leave those blank and of course you're able to change whatever accounts receivable this is going into in your quickbooks accounts so for those of you using our quickbooks integration um you know just double check these and make sure that everything's mapping to the correct spots now the next piece when it comes to creating uh these batch invoices is actually making sure that you're including the jobs that you want to account for so when we created this on that page we had those four different jobs available to us but of course now we need to actually add them into the invoice now you can do that in a couple of ways first of all is just add all and if you go ahead and click that that will put all of those jobs into that batch invoice for you or we can go through and just take a look at all of them now what is really handy about these plus signs especially if you're adding in each one individually is that you can get a little bit of an overview of what has happened within these jobs during that time frame that we had put in so with the safeway entrance signs i can actually see that we have nine uninvoiced timesheets now of course for this scenario we're invoicing based off of estimated amounts so this isn't really as necessary however in the next scenario that i'm going to show you where we're going to invoice for multiple jobs at once it will be a little more key to pick and choose what you want to go through so for this i'm going to just click at all we're going to submit them all and you can now see that everything has been added in what the next stage kind of is is you can just go ahead and finish adding to invoice again if everything is set up correctly there should be absolutely no hesitation in going through and doing this um however if you're at any point unsure and just wanting to double check you do have the ability of coming in here and actually editing um the different uh invoice lines and services so you know maybe for some reason today's example uh we're wanting to only invoice for fifty percent of the estimated amount so we're not going to invoice for that full ten thousand dollars i actually wanted to make sure that we were only going to invoice for 5000 of it you could go ahead and make those changes as you need again just for the accounting package i need these filled in so again you can come in here you can make those edits uh similar to those single invoice pages we can override everything as we need we can go ahead and just click um go ahead and click based off of actuals which of course will clear it all out i'm gonna go ahead and click on the estimated amount which is again pulling fifty percent off that estimated amount for us totaling that five grand whenever you're ready you can click save and close and then the final step of course is finish adding to invoice um something else now before i do this that i do regularly see as well in a bit of a unique scenario from other agencies is yeah you know we're invoicing based off of that five or ten thousand grand that sent that set amount however we also invoice for all expenses above and beyond that amount that is really just for our time is what we're planning on invoicing for so in a scenario where you might have a safeway entrance sign with an expense that maybe is against it uh you could come in and edit that to make sure that you're going to invoice for that amount so maybe even for the design piece here i'm going to click invoice and i'm going to put in uh 500 for that so that this invoice will now equal that five hundred dollars we're going to save that save and close that and you'll now see that the amount that we're about to invoice is actually now at fifty five hundred dollars rather than just the five grand so if any little changes need to be made to one of the associated jobs you can go ahead and make those changes so i'm going to now finish adding this invoice because it is at that dollar amount that i know i'm going to want to invoice our client for and this is now just that overview of that multi-job invoice that we have uh if you wanted to click through you can see the different jobs that are also associated to it and then what we're going to want to do is actually take a look at the printout now of course this is just a basic printout that we have available to you um if you wanted to make any changes uh we can certainly do that but what we have of course is that five thousand dollars for that agreed upon monthly retainer uh the additional five hundred dollars for the safeway entrance signs uh and then of course the other two that we don't plan on invoicing for but we wanted the um the safe way our our client to know that we had been working on it during that time and that it was associated to the retainer for for this specific month great jenny just check it in again any questions at all so far not yet um just but just asking sophia you mentioned earlier we can have this on separate pages as well too it doesn't have to be all grouped together right there was an option for that that you showed earlier just confirming yeah good question uh so that's actually gonna be the next scenario that i'm gonna walk us through um but yes we can create um in the batch the standard batch invoicing scenario all of these jobs would be in separate invoices uh rather than just listed in this view okay awesome okay great so let's go into that sort of next piece which is the uh batch invoicing for multiple jobs and scenarios that i regularly see with this and this is more in like your recurring billing so it's not necessarily a retainer so it's not necessarily a set amount that you have agreed upon but it's just a job that um you know safe for uh your your seo and you're always going to work on seo and based off of how much work they needed done you're going to invoice based off the actuals for that for that client so at the end of every month you're always going to invoice based off of however much time material had had incurred against that piece of work and we may have multiple jobs like that for different clients so with something like that we can come underneath our jobs and find jobs and this is the quickest way of being able to accomplish this again we're going to utilize that category drop down that we have and uh for our option today i'm actually going to do fixed price so this is all of our fixed price jobs actually you know what no i'm going to continue with the same scenario we're going to do time material and what we're going to be able to do is we're going to be able to i'm going to search for all of our find active today so within this now i have 13 jobs 13 open jobs that we have an agreed agreement with all of our clients that we're going to just invoice them based off of whatever actuals had been put against those jobs during uh during that specific month and your your account is able to come pull this list as long as making sure that everyone's all up on their timesheets as well as expenses please everyone make sure you're always on top of those uh you don't want the account coming after you i know i wouldn't want my account coming after me so um just a word word of caution so what you're now going to notice is this ad invoice option up here so this is that batch invoicing that i was speaking towards and again with this ad batch invoice page that we've now landed on of course it's going to give us the option of an interim or a final invoice here these are the only options um it's not breaking it out based off of that multi-single job sorry multi-job single invoice or the batch because in a case like this there are multiple companies that we are invoicing for so it can't be a multi-job single invoice because those can only be done for single clients the batch name is always going to pull the date of the day again if we need to edit this slightly we can but this is going to be the batch name that is going to associate itself to pretty much every job um as well as of course the job name later on so keep it generic i have seen scenarios where people are making it a little bit too specific and it's more specific to a single job rather than all of them that are in there so for time material i know that i'm wanting to invoice based off of actuals uh since that is what all these are based off of our agreement is time material uh and i'm going to want to do it for 100 so i'm going to leave this blank and then of course just for the scenario today for simplicity's sake i'm going to leave taxes off then we're going to add the batch invoice so again similar page as what we were looking at before we have that batch name option to change activity description of course payment notes uh we can edit those in the in the list maintenance if any changes need to be made and now here's where it's a little more important so this is when we're now adding in those different jobs so in the scenario that i was speaking of before where we're actually reviewing each of the jobs and and what had been applied against it uh we were able to see of course um we have that overview now that there are four uninvoiced timesheets for this job so i'm able to go ahead and just click that so we're able to do a little bit of a review here you know that summer micro there's even an expense against it great however this branson financial website there's nothing against it so i actually don't need to invoice them this month so i'm going to skip that so again your account is able to come through and just make sure that everything they can do the review at this level rather than having to go into each job individually to make sure that everything is is being invoiced correctly so again just a nice little overview here we're just going to add everything in that one zero and 79 on invoice timesheets that's great so of all of these we're going to be leaving three of them out um again if we needed to make any changes maybe we'll even go ahead and find that one that had the expense against it i believe that was this one yeah so we even had our printing expense here against this uh and and making sure that we are invoicing for that later um maybe for some reason the expense wasn't applied against there so i want to make sure that this is applied against that we'll save and close uh because now we've boosted up this this invoice from 250 dollars to 2050. right great and then whenever you're ready you can go ahead and finish adding to batch and this is now all of your individual uh invoices that are for all of the different uh jobs that we had just pulled in that previous list now just by default the system is going to show the first one for you in this however if you come underneath this batch section you'll then be able to go into each individual invoice and have that option now a lot of you that are maybe sending single invoices out of the system uh you're familiar with the notify client option where you can actually email it directly out of the system to them so if for some reason there's some of these that we don't want to email uh this would be where you would remove it and of course notify the selected go ahead send that email out of the system or if they have a link to the fp portal you can do that as well now for this printing we're just going to do the summary view and this of course is just that first invoice uh but this is what they would all look like for those individual ones and if you wanted to check out any of the other ones we could just come on in and print and now we have that second invoice for us for invoice number 145. so again in this case we've invoiced multiple clients for multiple jobs but they're creating a single invoice for each of those jobs uh because they're not going to the same client and we needed individual invoices however we wanted to make it a little bit easier for your accountant so jenny just check it in again um i know that this can be one that blows some accountants minds thinking that it's gonna make things a whole lot easier any specific questions that have come in um or is there anything that you feel like i didn't cover that i should make sure i touch on nope i just feel like something worth mentioning i get asked a lot as an account executive is the address is up there like knowing that you can save multiple contacts because sometimes you might be sending that invoice to a different team member that wasn't involved in a project so maybe you can touch a little bit about how much control they have over that yeah that's a good point um so you have lots of control when it comes to a single invoice when it comes to those items not when it comes to the batching uh batch invoicing will only pull based off of your original estimate contact that you had applied when creating the estimate so a really big best practice that we always recommend to everyone is when you're adding in the estimate make sure you add in that estimate contact so that would be your main point of contact at the client because in those cases then you can send out the estimate printout directly to your client and then of course the invoices especially in that batch invoice scenario that we just went through where we have the where we have the notify client option again through this batch it's automatically going to pull that estimate contact that we have for you so um yes make sure that those are filled in correctly of course uh if you needed to come into a specific one and change that it's just a little more time consuming to have to go through each individual invoice that you have and change that but you could come in and change whoever your main point of contact is to make sure that that is who uh the invoice is sent to so if you if you do notice any changes uh just come underneath basic info edit and just edit whoever the invoice contact is jenny i know you're talking about a much more specific workflow in regards to being able to invoice say 50 to one person and 50 to another one um that is certainly more um i find that more regularly used in the fixed price and time material conversation that we will have a couple weeks from now so uh you know what's a really good point i'll make sure i add that to my agenda then awesome thank you sophia okay great uh is there again that was really everything i wanted to make sure i covered today uh if there are no more questions jenny that you want to make sure that we touch on um i will log off for for the morning again everyone uh thank you so much for joining us today it was a pleasure having you if you do have any questions concerns uh we'll stay on the line for another minute or two uh just to continue answering those but of course again if you wake up in a sweat later tonight uh unable to think of a solution do not hesitate to i if you know who your customer success manager is reach out directly to them or email the entire team at success functionpoint.com uh we're here to help with all of your training and workflow related questions and needs okay awesome jenny thank you so much for joining me today it was lovely hosting a webinar with you for the first time and i look forward to doing more with you again in the future i would say it was a success and thank you everybody for submitting your questions i know there were some very specific ones and we'll circle back i just took note of those and we'll contact you directly awesome okay thank you everyone happy wednesday