Explore Our Retainer Invoice Example for Production

Retainer invoice example for Production

hello this is mark wilson with functionpoint thank you very much for checking out our webinar recording uh this is actually a re-recording of webinar that we did last week which was invoicing part two unfortunately we did have some technical difficulties in the the audio recording on that webinar uh which is causing me to need to recreate a a new version of that so that everyone will be able to check out the recording and get the the benefits of reviewing that content so this this recording is a reproduction of the webinar that is again invoicing part two so if you haven't seen the webinar recording or we're not able to attend the invoicing part one webinar i do recommend checking that out you should find that on the youtube channel and in the the on the website on the previous webinar recordings uh list under resources but if you have checked it out or or even if you haven't you still you still should be able to follow along in this webinar which is really focused on batch invoicing so we're going to be looking at two different circumstances two overall different types of circumstances that batch invoicing might be uh necessary and how it can assist you uh those two different types of batches are going to be multi-job batch invoices we are creating a single invoice for multiple jobs to a single client and we're also going to be reviewing batch invoicing across multiple clients where the purpose of the batch invoice is really to be more efficient and to save time in the creation of those invoices we're going to be looking at different types of invoices for each of those batch types so fixed price will review first i will then take a look at retainers and recurring billing uh in the concept of a single client multi-recurring job scenario we'll also look at time materials jobs where you want to include multiple time materials jobs on a single invoice to a single client and then we'll take a look at a combination where you might not have you know circumstances that are so easily labeled and you may need to be combining multiple different types of invoices time materials or recurring or fixed price uh all onto a single invoice we'll take a look at how to do that and then afterwards we will then move on to batch invoicing across multiple clients which again is really around creating efficiencies and cutting the time it takes for you to to accomplish your billing most of the time applicable for recurring billing retainer scenarios uh and also time materials so without further ado let's go ahead and jump into the actual content so the first example that we're going to be looking at is it's going to be pretty simple it's a batch invoice for a single client for a fixed price project now in this example i actually have a project that i've created where there are multiple jobs underneath the project so the project is from my client north shore auto group and it's a video production project includes multiple videos it's called the north shore auto group summer blow up video campaign and i have four jobs on the go for that project there's three 30 to 30 second tv spots and then a job used for the media placement for those those media uh for those those spots that we'll be will be producing for the client so in this scenario um pretty straightforward we're going to be charging the client 50 uh of our budgeted amount for for these videos uh not including the purchasing and the placement of the media in this case i have fifteen thousand dollars as my estimated value for each of these videos and i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to bill 50 of the grand total of that forty five thousand dollars so the way that i'm going to do that is from the projects details page up at the top right i'm going to select to add new and select invoice so invoicing from the projects details page to include multiple jobs when i do so it's going to bring me to the add invoice page with some information that's specific to the batch for example notice that we have a check bar radio button giving us the option to create a single multi-job invoice which is what we want to do in this case we're creating a single invoice with multiple jobs to a single client the invoice name will fill in with the name of the project i can maybe drop a date on there or some other information if i want to maybe 50 percent down something like that and then choose our contact at our client and this is important as it will then control the name that shows up on the pdf as well as the ability to send them the invoice to the system the billing percentage in this example is going to be 50 percent so i'm billing 50 percent of the three 30-second tv spots i'm going to leave tax groups off for now just just to keep the math simple i usually do that in demos and webinars and things like that as taxes are so different across different regions but of course you'd want to select your tax group if it's applicable in this case select that invoice and this next pages can usually be skipped uh you know it'll show you the description that's come from the project you can update that or delete it or modify it whatever you want you can include some payment notes on your invoice if you want to but for the most part you can generally just select next and add jobs to invoice and then this is where you get to the actual list of jobs that you want to put on the invoice now sometimes it might be all of them and notice that there's a button that says at all but a lot of cases it probably isn't in this case it isn't i have my three 30-second tv spots i want to invoice each of them for 50 percent now i put in 50 when i got to the first invoice page so when i click the plus icon here this is going to add this job to the invoice for fifty percent of the estimated value fifteen thousand dollars the estimated value fifty percent of that is seventy five i can go ahead and select add the second one and the third one and i now have an invoice that equals 50 of my total budgeted amount for those three those three tv spots now if i want to modify or make any adjustments and this will become very important in some of the other examples that we look at that aren't this simple there is an edit button here that gives you full 100 control over the invoice this is essentially the um the invoice creation page for a single invoice you just have access to all of them on this one page so once you're satisfied with this in this case it's just 50 percent i'll select finish adding to invoice and i now have a single invoice so i'm looking at invoice uh b142 it's a batch 142 and i can see the jobs that are on this invoice i'm invoicing each for 7 500 the grand total equals 22 500 and i can produce my client facing pdf so there's my invoice i can go ahead and save that and send it to the client or i can select notify client and have it sent to them via the system so that's a you know a pretty simple example when i say simple i just mean that it's very predictable we have an estimated value and we're invoicing 50 of that estimated value it's pretty easy later on we're going to use this job again as an example of of a hybrid where we need to build a remaining 50 uh for this job and then also some media that we've purchased uh with relation to um uh you know purchasing the media for the for the tv spot but before we do that we're going to look at a recurring example where we have a recurring billing model for one client with multiple jobs and we want to invoice them every month for the value of a recurring bill this is also pretty straightforward so we're not going to spend too much time on it should be pretty easy all we're going to do is we're going to look at another project i've created to show an example of this and you know this is something i'm seeing more and more these days with the agencies that i'm speaking with is is a a common scenario like this that's coming up quite a bit uh in this scenario in this example i basically have three recurring billing jobs for my client i have a social media management retainer i have a search engine optimization retainer and i have a web maintenance retainer so we manage a social media account we do seo and we also do any kind of maintenance work on their website and for each of these jobs i've created an estimated value that represents the amount that i bill them each month i build them two thousand dollars for social media management uh fifteen hundred dollars for seo and a thousand dollars for maintenance on their website this is the total value of the invoice they get each and every month so invoicing that very simple all i need to do just like before i select to add new invoice from the project choose my contact as we did before and i'm going to choose my billing percentage or leave my billing percentage as blank which defaults it to be 100 it's very easy all i need to do is click add invoice uh select next and from here i'm just going to select out all because i want all of these jobs in the invoice select that all and then choose finish adding to invoice that's our our batch invoice created for recurring jobs we can see the jobs themselves and then the invoice amount that we're building which in this case is just a hundred percent of the estimate so that's you know pretty straightforward if you have that type of scenario uh occurring a lot of a lot of agencies speak with also have multiple um you know retainers where they just have you know one retainer ongoing for a client for a month but they have a whole bunch of those for a bunch of different clients so we'll take a look at that example uh in this video as well in just a bit but the next thing that i want to i want to touch on is the the other billing type for a single client which is going to be a time and materials multi-job batch so in this scenario and this is this uh used to be a bit more common than it is now i find this is a kind of a traditional um way of charging clients uh and i know a lot of agencies still still charge this way some um you know some have less cases like this but you know really the situation is we have a whole bunch of jobs for which we are going to bill our client for a hundred percent of the value of the time and the expenses incurred in the previous month so come june 1st i'm going to bill them for all of the unbilled time and expenses that have occurred between that day and the previous most recently created invoice and that will equal the total value of all of our unbuilt hybrid expenses which equals the value that we want to build our client um much more common historically for agencies to be building a lot of their work like this i find in this day and age a lot of agencies are moving to more of a fixed price uh or recurring billing models just based on uh the you know the the requirements from their clients but in this example we're going to pull up a list of jobs and we're going to do that job find based on category so this is something that i i mentioned in the previous webinar as being very important and that is making sure that you choose your category drop-down the category is an item that you select when you're opening up a job and it typically represents how you intend to bill for something you know what is your intention for how to charge a client for this piece of work and it's a really important field to select when you're going to be doing batch invoicing later because it allows us to do something like this i can say i want to see all of my time and materials jobs for a specific client so i'm going to choose a client to grade atlantic insurance and then i'm going to so i've narrowed it down to the category of time materials specific line of grain atlantic insurance and then i'm going to select find active now selecting find active is going to pull up a list of all of the jobs that have some sort of status that is considered open your statuses might be custom to your own circumstance but they're either considered open or closed by the system that's why you know it's really really important to be maintaining job status accuracy closing down jobs when they're done updating statuses where applicable it's very important to keep on top of that so that when you do a fine active the list that you get is is is accurate and up to date now in this case we have six jobs uh that we are going to be billing our client for that are time materials and i can see some information here that allows me to know uh you know which jobs i'll be billing and what to build them for now these are these values are flown automatically but get an idea for for what we're seeing here so we can see that we have an estimated value an actual value the variance between those numbers previously invoiced amount and our difference here between the value that we've previously invoiced and the value of our actuals there's actually one job here that i'm looking at that i want to take off our list because it's not really the best example is one that i was kind of playing around with earlier but there's another one that i'm going to keep on to to show what would happen if you don't have unbilled time and expenses but i want to get rid of the other example so let me just do that i'm just going to refresh my view here and that's now gone but let's so let's take a look so the value that we have on the far right is again is the difference between our invoice amount previously and the value that we've done so far now in case where you see a negative that's letting us know that there's a value that needs to be built if you see a positive which is unlikely you'll more likely see a zero that's letting you know that that you don't have anything that needs to be invoiced for and you don't need to memorize that but it'll show it to you here and we'll see it the system will help us to identify that on the next page but what i'm going to do is from this job list up at the top right i'm going to select to add invoice so i'm invoicing from a job list as opposed to the project because i'm invoicing for jobs that might be across multiple projects or might have not have any projects at all and then in the batching selection i need to make sure that i choose single multi-job invoice because i'm only intending on creating one invoice i might call it greatlantic insurance um you know may 2017 invoice or bill choose my contact on my client i'm then going to choose to calculate from actuals because i'm wanting to bill for my actual time and expenses i'm going to leave the billing percentage blank because i want 100 of everything it takes to take the tax group off to keep the math simple select that invoice like just like before i can update descriptions on this page if i want to select next and i then have a list of all the jobs now this is where you need to kind of pay a little bit more attention than the other cases where it's just a fixed price or a pre a predetermined recurring amount in this case we're billing based on time and expenses that are unbilled and the way that you can see that is just by going down the list and hovering over this little these little plus icons when i hover over this plus icon it tells me that i have four uninvoiced timesheets so i'd select that and it adds the invoice on to the next one i can see that i have zero on invoice timesheets or expenses so i would leave this off the batch next one there's 44 on invoice timesheets so we'll bill it we then have our fall signage 1890 voice timesheets so we'll bill it and then lastly the corporate website we have 22 on invoice timesheets so we'll choose to bill it every time you click the plus icon it's adding the job to the invoice however if you want to make any adjustments or you want to know you know what were those 22 timesheets you can of course select any of these and open it up and see exactly what's what's occurred so in this job and this job's actually quite quite service heavy there's a lot of line items here but we'll see that we have two values production and coordination they each have time sheets we can look and see you know what those timesheets were who entered them their description of one was entered and choose to make any adjustments whether we don't want a bill for it or we want to build a different value we can make any adjustments to any of these jobs that we want to once we're ready select finish adding to invoice and i now have my invoice created i can see the jobs and i can produce my client-facing version so this is going to have all the different jobs you know it's just one page there all the different jobs and then their descriptions if you want one of course and the value that you're invoicing for those jobs now you can also include a report as well that downlines all the timesheets and expenses that you're billing for if that's the type of detail you'd want to provide to your client so having the category selected again it's very important so that you can do a job fine for time and materials if it's if it's a way that you bill and it's going to seriously save you some time if you can batch that but another common scenario is where we have sort of like a combination of a fixed price and also some sort of time materials or perhaps expenses on top um and that could be across multiple jobs for different projects so you may initiate that invoice by doing a job find or it could all be related to a single project we're going to jump back to the project example that we were looking at earlier the summer blow video campaign we're going to use this as our example and the example that we're going to use is we're going to we're going to actually add in some expenses here so i have some expenses for our media so we're just going to go ahead and add those in so let's leave this in fact maybe we'll adjust this a little bit actually we'll just leave it we'll of course have the description so that's we know what this is for save that and then let's go ahead and just add the other expense as well so we've added both expenses i was thinking about making the value of the expense differ from the estimated amount but we'll keep it really simple we'll just say that the amount that we intended to purchase for the media was the exact amount we ended up purchasing so now when we look at this project what we'll see here is that we have values in our actuals column here and and typically we'd also have values in our actual columns for the actual spots because people will have tracked their time for that but in this example in this case let's say that we are now ready to bill for the second half of this work which means that we need to bill for the full value of expenses that we've incurred on the job so the actuals not the estimated but the actuals and then we need to build the remaining 50 of all of the tv spot jobs so it's a combination of fixed price and time materials all in one batch the way that we would do that is select add new invoice up at the top right for the project or from the job list we have our single multi-job invoice choose our contact and we're now going to enter 50 of our estimated value because that is the more common of the combination i have four jobs in billing for three of them are 50 of estimate one of them is based on actuals so we're going to put it as 50 of the estimate add the invoice update descriptions if we want to and then from here for these four jobs i'm going to choose to add all and that's going to put in 50 of my estimate for each of these jobs however the media placement job i don't want 50 of my estimate i want i want base and actuals so i'm going to choose to edit this i'm going to clear out the column so clicking on the invoice word will clear out the column and i'm just going to click on the actuals column that's going to automatically fill in and of course we want 100 it's not 50. but we'll put in 100 select actuals and that'll fill in the value of our actuals and we can then look and see you know what is it that we're billing you know what's the description so you'll see that description answered a minute ago you know the quantity and the rate and markup and so forth and we can make any adjustments to this or just choose to bill it uh select save and close we've now altered the value of our invoice select or alter the value of the job on the invoice to reflect the actuals select finish adding to invoice we now have our invoice created so we have our three jobs at 50 and our one job based on actuals so it's really just about you know kind of staying on top of each of the job lines on the invoice and knowing why you intend to bill it and what you intend to bill it for any kind of you know ambiguity there is not really going to not really going to help so you typically want to make sure that you are estimating things correctly labeling things correctly um and that especially if you have let's say you know account executives opening up jobs and they are not the ones that will be doing the billing maybe a bookkeeper is going to be doing the billing later on it's really important that you provide you know some context you provide some descriptions perhaps in the job description um or in the date description from the list view just somewhere that lets the bookkeeper know hey this is how this job is going to work this is how we intend a bill for it this is our our plan for what we intend to build and why we intend to bill it and when we intend to bill it so that the person who's creating the invoicing has a solid understanding of what what's what's uh uh intended um [Music] and can can go ahead and create the invoice ingly uh and and and if you have you know things set up correctly like if you've put in your estimated values if you've put in your actuals and you have a good description of of what to invoice and why then the whole process can be very very quick and especially once you get the hang of it this batch invoicing stuff you can really fly through it pretty quickly although you usually want to give it a couple months uh you know of doing invoice cycles before you're really really going really fast just to make sure that you're you're catching everything and that you get into the getting the hang of it the right way but i digress um we we've taken a look let's just take a look at our agenda here and catch up to where we are so we've covered these items here um and we did our fixed pricing of recurring we did our time materials from the list view we also just did that combination of time materials and a fixed price next we're going to look at batch invoicing across multiple clients and the first thing we're going to look at is is the recurring billing type of work where we have let's say our our retainer examples so in this scenario i have a bunch of jobs that i have labeled as retainers they're really just recurring billing you're you're building a job for a predetermined amount uh that is entering the system and you're going to build them every single month for that pre-determined amount and you have a bunch of jobs that meet that criteria you want to be able to build them all at the same time send the invoices to the to the respective clients uh and then of course go on about your day so what we're going to do is we're going to do a job fine and we're going to use the all important category field to make sure that we are choosing the the right billing type so retainer and all i'm going to do from there is just select find active i'm not going to narrow it down by client or anything else this retainer and find active i then get a list of all of my retainer jobs that i have on the go each of these jobs has an estimated value that equals the amount that we intend to bill each month i have a bunch of kind of standard seo and smm retainers and then i have a big retainer here for our client safeway that's a creative services retainer it's for ten thousand dollars a month it's a larger account and we do a lot of different types of work for that account but it all rolls up into that ten thousand dollars what we then do from here is up at the top we're going to select add invoice now when i select that invoice you're going to notice that a lot of the options we've been seeing on the previous examples are not here one of those is create a single invoice batch with multiple jobs on it we can't do that because the list of jobs we were just looking at came from multiple clients so you wouldn't have one invoice with multiple jobs from multiple clients uh you know each involve each client is going to want their own stuff on their own invoice um so we're going to be batching multiple individual invoices as far as the creation of them but they won't be connected uh in a batch themselves we're just batching it in the way that we're actually generating the invoices also the name fill it doesn't fill in it's blank typically what you want to do is is given a name of what it is and when it is so what it is is your retainer billing and when it is uh is in this case um april 2017. i'm then going to choose my billing percentage which is 100 therefore i leave it blank and leave it as estimated and select add batch and voice update descriptions if i want to we then have a list of all of our jobs again these are jobs for different clients and in this simple example we're billing 100 of estimate so all i need to do is select add all and it's going to generate all those invoices but that being said you may need to make adjustments even though this should be a scenario where you're not really making many adjustments very often but if you do of course you have the ability to open up and edit that invoice in any way that you see fit select finish adding to batch and that is our that is our invoices created because multiple invoices have been created in this example now we are looking at one invoice in the batch but we can select the batch to see a list of all of them see these are all the invoices that we've created we can then choose to post the invoices as far as syncing them with quickbooks we can also choose to notify selected as far as sending them to our clients so any jobs here where there's a contact selected you'll be able to notify and clicking notify selected will send an email to the client contact with the pdf a link to the portal if you should choose to do so and if that's a feature that you're using and they will then receive the invoice of the pdf or the the pdf invoice through the system email and you can one thing i should mention as well you can choose which printout they're getting so you have control over that as well so that's a way that you can if you set things up correctly and you think about when you're opening up your jobs am i setting this up to assist me with my billing workflow um you know is this conducive to an efficient invoicing experience and if you have if you have a scenario where you have a lot of jobs that are billed for the same amount each month then having those jobs in the system as the category of retainer or recurring with an estimated value that equals the amount you intend to build will allow you to significantly improve your efficiency and the time it takes for you to generate these invoices the next example that we're going to look at is similar but a little bit different it's going to be time and materials jobs across multiple clients now this is um probably a little bit less common but if you have uh you know a lot of jobs you're just billing every single month for the value incurred in the in the previous month then all we would do is choose our category of timer materials select find active and i have a list of all the jobs that are active time materials jobs there across multiple clients so just like before when i select add invoice the only option i'll have here is just to give it a name so i'd call it your time and materials april 2017. choose to calculate from actual so that's going to choose to add up all of your unbilled time and expenses building percentages blank and select add batch invoice we can then update the description select next and we then have our list now this is typically a little bit more tedious you have to spend a bit more time on it because it's not as predictable it's not as predetermined as the fixed price jobs the value that you intend to build here is based on your actuals and i find that agencies that have this type of scenario are often needing to make minor adjustments here and there adjusting the value of this time sheet or choosing to not bill that timesheet or that expense whatever it may be so what we'll do is just hover over the plus icon where we see cases of anything on build we'll select it there's two uninvoiced timesheets for this job so we select it for the next job we have 34 or sorry 37 on invoice timesheets so i'd select that and as you go down the list we'll find some that probably don't have any um so oh here's a perfect example so branson financial website there's no timesheets or expenses so we skip it and we go to the next one one in an invoice timesheet so we're just going ahead and adding in any case where there is unbilled time or expenses we'll add a couple more here so there's a bunch with zero there's one with 18 timesheets we'll add that in here's one with 79. add that in i think that that should be it this last one might have a couple as well one on invoice timesheet for that job so you'll notice how we have a bunch that we've added in a bunch that we haven't select finish and we've now generated you know uh 10 odd invoices might be a bit less so we you know generated seven invoices for different clients and we can then choose to notify selected and that'll send out an email to each of those clients with their respective invoices and and the pdf and all the detail that they need for those we can then jump back to our job list and see you know cases where i you know we have where you see zeros is generally what we just invoiced and and some might be small bridges and under um uh jobs that are under budget as well just depending on if we build things for discounted amounts on expenses or timesheets but this column here really gives you a clear understanding of how does our invoice amount differ from our actual amount and then from here if any of these jobs need to be closed we can select editable list view and go ahead and close those jobs down well that is you know really the the gist of the batch invoicing i mean i think that a lot of this is just about uh just about experiencing it and and you know try you know just just learning a little bit from from from doing it and and i find that when you first get into the batch invoicing routines for the first couple months it's just important that you're really keeping on top of things you're really looking at what it is that you're doing and making sure that you know if there that you're making any adjustments you need to make and that you're handling um you know the general organization of these jobs uh in an effective way so you're you're putting an estimated amounts your updating status is where appropriate you're making sure the time goes in before you do your time materials invoice and then when you're doing the batch that you're you're taking a look at each job in the list once you've done it for a few billing cycles it becomes you know you'll get a lot more comfortable with it and you'll become a lot faster as well um i've seen some really great success stories of agencies taking their you know monthly billing routines down from you know 10 hours down to you know 20 minutes um so it can be it can be quite effective and i do i do recommend uh investigating your um you know your billing routines potentially being done in batches so that concludes the you know the the kind of the rehash of of our invoicing uh webinar um that we're re-recording today um of course this this is a little bit different than other webinar recordings and that there were no questions because it is a re-record um so please if you do have any questions if you need to get in touch with anything uh please e you can email the success team here at success functionpoint.com again that's success functionpoint.com uh and just let us know if you have any uh questions or issues around invoicing in any way that we can help out so we'll be happy to to provide some some options for different ways that you can get the answers that you're looking for the or the assistance that you need so thank you everyone for your time today um we do have our webinar our webinars going on a cycle right now of every wednesday at noon pacific 3 eastern time so please do check them out you can register for them by going up into your system hovering over the little information button and selecting the webinars button that's going to bring you right to the page on the website where you can see a list of the previous webinars and then also see the schedule for the new webinars coming up so you know please do check that out and we look forward to seeing you on future webinars take care bye now