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Retainer invoice example for Public Relations

and that that recording will go out after this session um and will be available for anybody that wasn't able to attend today so i did mention that i was wanting to point out the training site so in your function point system up at the top right you are going to see a little question mark and that is going to allow you to access the training area so i like to show this off the training area and i prefer to go into the fp library the mothership of how to's this is where you're going to find information on all the modules organized by what they do you know companies and contacts notes briefs estimates jobs schedules projects all that stuff and with a good search functionality um so there's there's documents cheat sheets workflows videos webinar recordings uh everything that you might need and a good search functionality so um what's one i'd like to show off you know how to submit staff expenses even if i spell a word wrong let's see if i still get it um so you know i really thought i was going to get that even though i spelled that wrong there we go um oh it's not actually pulling up at the top normally that would be right at the top though let's just search staff expenses there's staff expenses so i mean it might take you one or two tries but no matter what you're searching for you're going to be able to find it in the help site next thing i want to show off really quickly is the product request area the feature requests please do feel free to submit feature requests we do take them very seriously we do log them we do look at them all they don't just go into the ether and we are very actively working on a way of bringing those requests to the forefront so that we have more visibility into what those requests are for all of our clients and you can see some responses i know that our product team is working hard to to respond to many of those but we're trying to make that more visible so please please please do feel free to send those feature requests and the last thing you know i'm kind of getting carried away here and we got to jump into it the last thing i want to show really quickly is we did have a release last night that is just about a preview to the schedules module if you navigate to a schedule in your system you're going to see the current schedule and this may not be the best example there's not a lot of complexity to it but you're going to see the current schedule layout and then on the right side there's a button that says preview new schedule and if you select this you get a preview of the new scheduling module that's coming out now even this itself is really just you know the first of many steps there's a lot of different really cool stuff coming this you know in the in the coming months but this just allows you to see how you can do certain things like having all the information and being able to side scroll you know better more improved views into things and uh significantly better functionality when this is released so this is just a bit of a preview okay so let's get started here we're going to be taking a look at creating a fixed price job and then invoicing that fixed price job so we're going to go through the creation pretty quickly it's pretty straightforward as many of you of course know we're going to start off by adding an estimate and let's just go ahead and do this for safe way so the first step in creating a job is is creating an estimate now this may not be an estimate that you present to your client but it does represent the scope of work structure that you'll be tracking against and it represents the structure that you'll be using for the per for the purpose of invoicing so let's say that this is a ten thousand dollar job and this is going to be the um the christmas entrance signs or something like that so we have you know safeway uh christmas let's use holiday super pc safeway holiday entrance signs that's the name of our job choose our type of course this would be your own we're going to choose display and signage you know choose our contact at our clients myself as the ae our rate category is filled in if you have different rate categories you can of course select it we're going to enter our due dates so you know they want this done by these let's say the 13th of november although realistically they probably would have wanted it done like three weeks ago so they could get it out on november first then we have the category drop down now this is really important this is the default list in all new agencies systems so if you're new to function point this is what you'd find in this list you of course can customize it in the admin section under list maintenance it's very important that you label how you intend to bill for this work in this case it's fixed price now if you want to rename that to be fixed price plus expenses if you have different types of retainers that's all fine and well just make sure that the category is labeling how you intend to build this some companies do use work type but the defaults for for how you intend to build things is the cat is the category drop down so make sure that's filled in even though it's not a required field we call this branding and design and let's say that in this case is going to be let's just use an easy number let's say it's ten thousand dollars so i'm gonna choose creative services i'm gonna say uh you know research design and copy and client management i also have some printing going on and it's going to be um you know some printing happening this can be like let's say a thousand dollars worth of printing just keeping the numbers easy for me to calculate my head submit that and that brings us into the details page of the estimate now you might be wondering this is an invoicing webinar why is he taking us through estimating and as i mentioned earlier it's so important to set up the job in a way that allows you to invoice it correctly later now in this case if i'm doing a job and it's going to be a ten thousand dollar fixed price i i really really should have the value of the estimate be the value of the fixed price now if you don't know or if you don't care about the hours that you intend to work on these things be you know feel free to just type in ten thousand dollars into a single line item in the override field we now have a ten thousand dollar bottom line on this job as you get more you know knowledge and as to you know the time it takes and as you get more a bit more sophisticated i do highly recommend you break that out into the different services now if you know that that's going to be then you know two thousand dollars of research uh you know three thousand dollars of design uh three thousand dollars of copywriting and two thousand dollars of client management then great you're you're getting more you know you're you're planning this out in a bit more of a detailed way it's going to help in your reporting if you want to go even further then you know the preferred method here would be of course to enter the hours that you expect it to take so we expected 20 hours of research 30 of design 30 of copy and 20 of client management and that brings us to our 10 000. now let's see that's you know we really only think it's actually going to take us about 15 hours of copywriting and you know this client's pretty easy to manage there's probably only going to be 10 hours of client management and that brings us to 7 500 but we know that this client is willing to pay us 10 000 plus expenses then find another place to put that 2500 so maybe you know i want my team to stay within 20 hours of research but i'm just going to drop in another thousand bucks there bring it up to 3 000 and i really want them to stay within 30 hours of design but i'm just going to drop another 1500 in here and i'm going to bring that up to 10 000 so this bottom line is our fixed price enter our expense so it's gonna you're gonna be a thousand dollars of expenses we're gonna mark that up by twenty percent so it's ten thousand dollars plus expenses we're expecting about twelve hundred dollars after markup on our printing save that the client has approved it and we're going to go ahead and add the job we now have a fixed price job with a value of ten thousand dollars plus twelve hundred dollars in expenses and i can see that in my financials tab ten thousand dollars of creative services twelve hundred dollars of expenses and we're ready to go ahead and we're we're gonna do a fixed price invoice on this job uh before i do i just wanna check in sophie any questions or anything so far probably not but you never know you know what we're actually doing really great over here right now you've been a lot of detail it's great thank you no problem um okay so the next thing we're going to do is of course we're going to invoice this fixed price job now in our example we're invoicing this for 50 of the 10 000 we're not going to invoice anything for the expense because we haven't incurred it yet so we're going to invoice 50 percent of our fixed price of ten thousand so i'm going to do is up at the top i'm gonna select add new invoice and it defaults to interim this is not a final invoice because we're not done yet it's just the very first invoice that we're doing on this job and it's a billing percentage of fifty percent click add invoice and we have an invoice that is fifty percent of our estimated value so we can see five thousand dollars for our internal services but we did also estimate twelve hundred dollars for our expenses and we haven't incurred any actuals yet and i don't wanna invoice this six hundred dollars so i'm just gonna delete it out and that brings us to our five thousand save that and i can produce my client-facing version so there's my invoice of course yours might look significantly different depending on how you've customized your printouts so you know really simple really straightforward uh you know you're just invoicing the portions as you need to and then perhaps we're gonna do another 25 percent later and then we're going to do another 25 upon completion and we'll invoice the printing when we get our invoice from our vendor and as far as how you invoice that printing or the expense when you get your invoice from the vendor uh we'll take a look at that when we're doing our our fixed price job uh which we'll go into now so the next thing we're going to look at is the process for setting up a time materials job and then putting some time materials against it and invoicing those time materials we're also going to look at that a second time towards the end of the webinar when we're looking at multi-job invoicing so in this example i want to i want to set up another job but i don't really want to go through the process of the whole process again for the sake of time and also for the sake of showing off a feature around copying a job structure i see the word job structure really we're copying an estimate but i like to think of it as like the job structure so in this case let's say we're doing another type of job that's going to be really similar to the one we're looking at it's for a different client but it's going to be roughly about ten thousand dollars but we're going to invoice them based on the time and expenses that we incur so i'm just going to click on the estimate here for the one we just created and up at the top i'm just going to select copy so on the estimate details page select copy and it copies all the information in this case we're going to change it up i'm going to say that this is for a client called northshore auto group and this is going to be the new uh let's say the new car lot banners so they're you know they're putting together a new lot and we're going to design and uh get printed some banners for them um so it's still display signage it's for our client knows your auto group choose our contact.clients you know we wanted let's say we want this one due around you know a little bit later let's say the 19th of november and the category in this case is fixed is uh time materials for invoicing based on the time and materials that we incur now notice that there are no services and expenses and that is because we are copying the structure of the previous estimate for the sake of time so we'll submit that and that brings us to the details page of the estimate and notice it's exactly what we created a few minutes ago so let's say in this case you know we're you know our relationship with this client we're we're billing them time and materials for for the work that we're doing for them uh in this particular case and we expect it to take you know maybe around twelve thousand dollars plus let's say three thousand dollars worth of expenses so i'm going to take up my overrides here you know i expect this to take about 30 hours of research maybe less maybe we'll say about 20 hours of research but it's going to take about 45 hours of design it's going to take about 20 hours of copy probably you know this client's a bit more difficult to manage so we're going to say 25 hours of client management let's see what we have for our fixed price there so we have 11 1100 so you know i know that i can get 1200 for this plus the expenses side of things so i'm just going to bump up let's say the the copy here the 3000 and that brings me to 1200 for my creative services and then it's probably gonna cost about three thousand dollars to get all these banners printed they're massive they're huge they're really thick too we got to go to a specialized printer we don't normally work with in order to get this done so it's going to be expensive so it's going to cost us three thousand dollars and we're going to mark this up by a little bit less so we're going to mark it up by 15 so my total price now is fifteen thousand four fifty and i can of course produce my client facing version that is just an estimate we are going to invoice them based on our incurred time and expenses so the client has approved this market is approved and we're going to choose to add job so we have our job open we've estimated 15 450. now of course we need to put some time and expenses against this so i'm gonna do that pretty quickly this is job30351 i'm just gonna open up my timesheet window here and i'm gonna say that uh you know today for job 303 5 1 and we're going to put in some time against research and i'm just going to put in uh let's say 10 hours but i'm going to put some time against design and yeah it doesn't matter that i'm going way over the 24 hours that exists in a day we're going to put in another let's say 18 hours here and then we're going to be putting in some copy let's say we have another six and then client management we have five hours in there so we've put a bunch of time against this job let's quickly add an expense let's say that we've you know we've gone ahead and we've gotten you know all of the we've paid for all of the banners uh even though we haven't actually finished the work yet you know we paid for everything and we've incurred that expense we've gotten the invoice from the vendor in advance so i'm going to choose to add an expense now instead of adding an expense from the main navigation bar i'm actually just going to look at my financials tab and on my printing expense i'm going to click the plus icon from the financials tab that's going to bring me to the exact same external expense ad page it's just going to automatically fill in the job the expense type quantity and the rate and the markup percentage all i need to do is choose who my supplier is so we're working with a company called starboard custom printing reference number so they just sent me an invoice it was invoice number 90356 we have the memo description excuse my typos it's always handy for myself to be able to right click those i need that a lot um we then have our original quota for po which was three thousand dollars our description of the actual expense we then have our quantity and rate let's say it was actually two banners and it was 1500 a pop big banners so that is then three thousand dollars marked up by fifteen percent this came from our estimate if it didn't exist on our estimate and we had a then the standard markup of twenty percent would have popped in save that we now have our expense added so if we navigate back to our job here and we look at our financials tab what we're going to see is a good example of a case where we have a time materials job we've estimated 110 hours that's coming out to twelve thousand dollars of creative services plus three thousand dollars of expenses marked up to 34.50 we have 39 hours against this and there's a cost to our company of eleven hundred dollars a billable value of thirty nine hundred we've also purchased all the expenses coming up to thirty four fifty and we can see that we have not invoiced for anything yet so we have 3 900 outstanding of creative services and 3450 outstanding of external expenses you are going to see this layout very often in the system for any new users on the webinar today the concept of estimate actual variance invoice and plus minus a remainder this remainder of this plus minus is the difference between how much you've invoiced and the value of the work that you've done so you're going to see that all over the system so from here we're going to go ahead and we're going to invoice for all the work that we've done and maybe there's some kind of weird stuff that i got to do in the invoice i'll talk about the ramifications of that so up at the top just like before we're going to choose to add new invoice and we're going to choose to invoice based on our actuals now i'm going to talk about actuals and remainder from actuals in just a minute but we're going to invoice based on actuals what that is is basically saying include all of the unbilled time and expenses on this invoice and notice it's showing me right right here on by today's date the 28th of october we have four invoice timesheets and one on invoice external expense if i change this to yesterday because we entered everything today there is no time of materials against this as of yesterday it was all entered today so therefore our invoice date today has four uninvoiced timesheets and one on invoice external expense we'll leave the billing percentage blank that makes it default to a hundred percent the building percentage is just adjusting you know what the the value that you're calculating from hit on invoice and that brings us to our created invoice and notice that our invoice value has filled in the exact amount of the actuals if i wanted to see what that is then i can click on the arrow beside the service and look at all the timesheets it doesn't matter if you're invoicing based on estimated or actual you'll still be able to look at the timesheets that are being considered invoiced now if you have a fixed price job for ten thousand dollars and you have fifteen thousand dollars worth of time against it and you invoice for just the fixed price of ten thousand dollars then all of those timesheets are now considered billed and the total value of what they were built for when you add it all up is of course ten thousand dollars because that's what you invoice for if we're invoicing based on time and materials we're invoicing based on their actual value so in this case we have nine hundred dollars against this now if you start to play with this or manipulate it there are ramifications to that so i have eight eighteen hundred dollars worth of design if i choose that you know what i i really only want to invoice fifteen hundred dollars for this design time this is an invoice timesheet this is in this case just one time sheet you know of course i could if there was more i could manipulate more of them um but this is you know just a single time sheet and if i override it it's still a build timesheet if i ever do an invoice based on actuals again it's never going to come up again because i'm invoicing for it i'm just invoicing for less than what it's worth if i invoice this timesheet for less than what it's worth that's going to have ramifications later on when we look at our total actual verse total invoice if i were to click save here i will have invoice 300 less than the value of the time that's been put in and if i continued along by the end of the job i invoiced everything else for the full value at the end of the day i will have invoice for 300 less than the total amount of work i know this sounds pretty obvious but we've been having some some issues lately and it has called issues we've been having situations where you know clients have been coming to us and agencies have been saying hey you know why does my actual not equal my invoice amount and we go through we do a bit of investigation and then we look and we say okay well here's a time sheet where you only invoice your 1500 and they'll say oh yeah right the account executive let me know that you know really we weren't able to invoice for that time so i needed to make an adjustment there when you make adjustments which is you know totally just based on the real world situations that agencies face you know you have to you know adapt to situations but you also need to understand that when you're invoicing for more or less the value of the work that you're doing and that has you know far-reaching impacts when you're doing a time materials type job so it's just something to keep in mind you know all of us i'm sure every agency on the webinar and in the world would love to just be able to you know say invoice for all the time and expenses and save senator the client and they pay it but that's not always the case even in time materials jobs so you just you really got to keep in mind that what you're doing has you know long-term ramifications later on um so we're going to leave it at 1800 bucks here and actually you know what maybe we're not maybe we're not let's actually let's let's do something here let's let's take a look let's let's go a bit further let's say that we are actually only going to invoice 1500 for this still a build timesheet but we're invoicing 300 less save that we now have our time materials invoice and we invoiced for all the time materials but that one time sheet we invoiced for 300 less and i want to show off actually this has been coming up a lot recently i want to show off what that means later on so our invoice is done we can then produce our client facing version and go on with our day so let's jump back to the job here notice that our financials tab is showing us that i have in total seven thousand three hundred and fifty dollars worth of actuals and i've invoiced seven thousand fifty dollars worth of time and expenses it's a three hundred dollar difference there as i mentioned so now let's just go ahead and say that we're we're actually done with the job maybe we were or maybe we're not done but we're ready to do our next invoice so i'm just going to pop some time in here and to make the math really simple i'm going to put 10 hours into design 10 hours in the design is going to come up to a thousand bucks so when we refresh the job here notice now that we now have thirteen hundred dollars worth of uninvoiced time and we can actually see that right here my non-billed timesheets and my build timesheets so we can see the non-build and the build now let's go ahead and say that we want to invoice now for all of the unbilled time and expenses so up at the top i'm going to choose to add new invoice now notice that it shows me one uninvoiced timesheet what do we know right now we know that there's 100 an invoice timesheet for a thousand dollars we know that the total difference between the actuals and the invoice is thirteen hundred dollars if i choose actuals here what that's telling the system is include all of the uninvoiced time and expenses on this invoice so when i select add it's going to show me a thousand dollars because it is invoicing all of the unbilled time and expenses it's not 1300. that timesheet was invoiced but we invoiced it for 300 less so if we click save and we go back to the job financial tab we're going to see a difference between our invoice and our actuals of 300 however if we do it a bit differently we add our invoice here and we say remainder from actuals what that is doing is that is telling the system i want to invoice the full financial difference between our invoiced and our actuals i'm telling the system i don't care about whether or not the timesheet was already built or not i want the full financial difference between our invoice and our actuals so when i select odd invoice it's showing me 1300 instead of a thousand and that is a difference between actuals and remainder from actuals so you can see that because i manipulated the invoice in the first round that has ramifications later on if i didn't manipulate the invoice and i didn't invoice a timesheet for less than what it was worth then the actuals and remainder from actual drop down would have done the exact same thing but because i played around with it i need to keep my eye on it so it's just something that you know all of your all accountants and aes and client managers and office managers and everyone who's invoicing out of function point you got to keep in mind that you know what you do is going to affect how you see things later on in this case we'll save that and when we look at the job we can see that our invoice to actual comparison is zero that's an important item i wanted to touch on probably spend a bit too much time on that specific job uh or that specific type of invoice but i think it's important so if you have seen a couple questions come in anything that you think we should answer on screen um you know what i think the question that was just asked you actually just answered so well it was awesome a little bit of clairvoyance there i guess okay all right so let's let's go ahead and jump into the retainer invoicing so we're going to look at retainer and my example i'm going to show you is going to be this is going to be pretty straightforward and simple and then we're going to jump into the concept of the multi-job invoicing so we're going to set up a retainer and the retainer that i'm going to create is going to be really really basic and then i'm going to show you a more robust retainer as i like to call it that's already been created so i'm just going to choose to add a nest i'm not going to copy this time i'm going to add an estimate for grade atlantic insurance and i'm just going to call this a great um let's just call it you know gai great atlantic insurance i like to put the client info and the job name there even though their code is gad for some reason so great atlantic insurance monthly s m social media management retainer choose our type now i actually have the the type of retainer in here it's not necessarily needing to be there in this case i'm actually not going to choose that i'm going to choose social media because where i'm labeling this job as a retainer is in my category i'm saying that this is a retainer category billing job the delivery date for this job is one let's say that this retainer goes until the 30th of september 2016. so this retainer we're going to bill them this exact same amount every single month the you know it's a maybe there is no contract it will just go forever or maybe there is a contract and it ends one year later but it's going to go until the 30th of september 2016. and this is a really simple retainer here i'm going to choose let's see what i want here well there we go i'm going to choose social media management as my service and submit that this is a really simple retainer it's just we're managing the social media for greenlandic insurance and we expect this to be about 20 hours per month it is a 2 000 per month retainer save that the client approved it and then we're going to choose to add a job we've now created a job with an estimated value of two thousand dollars that is really important the estimated amount in the case of a retainer really should be the value that you build monthly now if so if way back you know however many thousands of years ago somebody had decided that you know we should have 10 months in a year instead of 12 then it would have been really really easy to have the estimated amount equal the amount you intend to build them for the entire year and then every single time that you do an invoice you would just do it for 10 percent but there are 12 months in the year and isn't it is impossible to do that as a percentage so we have a really good way of managing this instead of having the the estimated amount equal the full amount the estimated amount equals the amount that we intend to build monthly i'm going to show you two examples of this that already exists and are ready to go so but that's the process for setting it up in a simple case where it's just you know the estimated amount equals the amount that you intend to build each month now let's take a look at an example that i already have some time and some invoices in and i'll show you what i'm talking about so i'm going to do a quick job find i'm going to do it based on category of retainer and i want to see everything that's open it's a retainer and open and find i think there's like three or four of them so i want to look at this one i want to look at mac and co seo retainer so i'm going to click on that and we're going to look at our financials tab so i can see that this is a 20 hour 2 000 monthly retainer we have forty hours against this so far in its entire lifespan and that equals four thousand dollars we've invoiced for two thousand dollars i wanna see and let me just check and make sure this is to work out and yes it is so i want to see how did this retainer perform in the month of september so i'm going to and it's been open just since september 1. so i'm going to put in my date range i'm going to say from september 1 until september 30th show me the performance of this retainer so in the month of september our 20 hour 2 000 monthly retainer we put in 24 hours worth of work and we invoiced or sorry so we put in 24 hours worth of work comes up to twenty four hundred dollars we went over budget by four hundred but we only invoiced them the agreed upon amount of two thousand dollars so there's 400 left that we didn't capture because we went over on the retainer how are we doing in october so from october 1 to october 31 i can see that our 20 hour 2 000 monthly retainer we've put in 16 hours at 600 bucks so we're 400 under budget there's only a couple days left in the month we'll see what happens but we have not invoiced for this yet so therefore the 1600 outstanding invoicing for this is very simple because we set it up in a way that allows it to be simple all we need to do is choose add new invoice and then all we need and i'm going to take the taxes off because i find taxes kind of confused when you see a different total even though taxes of course are a real world scenario for most agencies that are using the system i like to take them off in demonstrations because i want the numbers to be nice and even just for demonstration purposes let me take that off but all we need to do is hit on invoice and then click on invoice on this page it's going to default to be 100 of the value of the estimate and because we've set up the job to have an estimated amount that equals what we invoice every single month i can see that my invoice is automatically generated for my two thousand dollars produce my client facing version and move on and now when we look at our mac and co seo retainer and we can see that in total for its entire life span we actually are now completely evened out so we've put in 40 hours come up to four thousand dollars it's been two months so we've invoiced for four thousand dollars and that exactly matches the amount that we of the work that we've done so our balance is zero but upon further investigation i can see that as we look before september 1 went over budget october 1 or the month of september 1 over budget october 1 to october 31 the current month you know we have 400 left in the budget 20 hours in the month 16 actual so there's 400 left in the budget you know we need to spend you know less than well ideally we'd spend no more time because we went over last month but if we want to stay in budget this month we can't spend more than four hours working on their uh seo for the next couple days or we're going to end up over budget again so that's how we can look at their performance on a month by month basis now if we want to look at this in a more robust way and we're we're not going to go too deep into it but i want to show it off real quick you know this is a really really simple retainer you might have retainers that are significantly more complex or i i called it once in a meeting a robust retainer and that word has really stuck like i made fun of it made fun of uh i got made fun of for it all the time there we go so if we take a look at an example of that i have a project here called safeway retainer and this project is a large retainer it is a ten thousand dollar monthly retainer for a year total budget of a hundred and twenty thousand dollars when we look at our financials i can see that our safely monthly retainer has a hundred dollar per month ten thousand dollar per month retainer and so far because it's only been a couple months so far all we worked on was some entrance signs a redesign of the flyer and a new website for the rewards program those are the three jobs we've worked on now if they call us up tomorrow and say hey we uh you know we need a another web page added for something else then we would add another job to this project and it would just be for the purpose of tracking time managing tasks and you know perhaps even putting expenses against those as well if it's applicable but i have my billing job and that equals the amount i built every month that if i want to see just like before how do this perform in september you know september 1 to september 30th i can see that our 100 hour ten thousand dollar monthly retainer we put in 112 hours at 12 000 we went 2 000 over budget we invoiced for 10 000 and therefore we lost out on 2 000 and i can see that we spent a lot of time on this flyer redesign we spent 52 hours in the month of september you know where did we spend that time and we put a bunch into design you know that's probably you know where we went over budget is in the design aspect of the flyer redesign and i can see that's that number is higher than i think it should be and then of course we look at october and when it's time to invoice this all we would do is choose to invoice our safeway monthly retainer billing job which equals the amount that we intend to bill every month we follow the exact same process i showed off a minute ago i'm just invoicing 100 of the estimate so you can see that the way that we set these things up initially really impacts the ability to invoice them later on now we're going to take a look at the concept of invoicing multiple jobs all the same time and there's a few different purposes and reasonings for this so let's say that we're invoicing all of our time and materials jobs so you know the my agency and my demonstration here my example agency that i'm that i'm managing we have retainer jobs we have time materials we have fixed price we have all the above we have a bunch of fixed price jobs and we like to build them at the end of every month i know that i'm describing a perfect world scenario for those time materials jobs that isn't always the case you know sometimes you might have an agreement with the client where when you reach a certain milestone upon delivery then you are able to bill for the value of the time that you spent so it's not always cut and dry it's not always you know bill all the unbilled time and expenses at the end of the month but for the purpose of of this example i'm going to show you a case where we're just you know we're billing all the unbilled time and expenses at the end of the month so the way that i would do that is up at the top i would do a job fine and i would say i want to see all the jobs that are time materials i want to see all the jobs that are open and i can narrow it down by anything else but in this case i just want to see open time materials jobs click find and that produces the results of our search you can see here that i put in the job category when i was kind of organizing this a little bit before the webinar i'm going to take that out real quick and we're going to talk about that actually in just a second but this is going to be the default view of what you're getting here so this is what you're going to see so this is showing me you know the client is for the name of the job the type the status the due dates estimated actual variance how much you've invoiced and then the value here of course comparing what we've invoiced to our actuals when you see a negative number that is letting you know you have invoiced less than the value of the work that you have done so if we were to just invoice all of these for the time materials we didn't voice this one 1200 this one 225 this one and so forth and so on and then when you see a zero it is of course letting us know that we have invoiced the exact amount of the time and expenses or if you were to see a positive number then we would have invoiced more than the value of the time and expenses probably not going to see that in the case of time materials jobs that's more of a fixed price job thing um so you're not really going to see that very often in this example that we're talking about but let's say that we want to go ahead and we want to invoice all of these jobs for all of the unbilled time and expenses all the same time and we want to have that done in a couple seconds or a couple minutes at the most so up at the top i'm going to choose batch invoice ad this can ask me but we'll give it a name i usually i usually give the name a date so i'd call this like tnm time materials october 28th and we're going to invoice this based on actuals now here's the kicker notice actuals and remainder from actuals so you have to make a choice about how you operate your time materials billing if you're constantly going in and manipulating the value of time sheets and expenses and invoicing more or less than you know i shouldn't say manipulating the value of time sheets because it's actually not what you're doing invoicing for more or less than the value of what the timesheets and expenses are worth then you just have to be cognizant of that you know it has to be something that you're aware of the fact that you're doing that if you are aware of it then you're going to understand that when you choose actuals it's calculating all the value of all of the unbilled time and expenses if you have expenses that have been time and expenses that have been billed but they have not been billed for the value that they were worth they were built for some other value that you came up with based on a conversation with the client or what you thought it should have been worth or whatever it is then you have a chance of things not adding up at the end of the day when you look at total actual versus total invoice if that's something that you never do then you never have to worry about it just choose actuals you know so you have to keep these things in mind that if you're doing a lot of manipulation of the values of the invoices but you still consider it time materials then there are ramifications to that but in this case we're going to choose actuals and we're going to hit add batch invoice this next page is really just asking you around you know the base of the details you just entered maybe an overall description that type of stuff but then we're going to hit next add jobs batch you very rarely need to make any adjustments on this page we then have all of our jobs now you'll notice here that we can see all the amounts that we're just looking at and sometimes i might even like to have these this other page open like a different tab and just look and kind of see what we're what we're going to end up with but what i would do is i come in here and i would say add all and that is going to generate an invoice and this invoice column right here is about to pop in with all these values generates an invoice for the value of the unbilled time and expenses now that was quick and easy because i just hit out all but i don't want a zero dollar invoice for online survey invitation so i'm going to get rid of that and then i don't want and then and notice that the dollar amount went away or the dollar figure i don't want a zero dollar invoice for galaxy for display for galaxy notes so i'm going to get rid of that and i don't want an invoice for new car lot banners because it's already equaling the total amount so i'm going to get rid of that too so we now have all of our invoices and they're all just based on time materials if i click finish adding to batch i can move on but i know that that mall brochure job this one job there's some weird stuff that happened on it and unfortunately i can't invoice the client for 42.75 i can only invoice them for 3 500. or there's some timesheets in there that don't make sense or something like that so i need to edit this one so i'm just going to choose to edit this invoice and it brings up the exact same invoice edit page that you have when you do an individual invoice you just get to do it right from here for all the jobs really quickly this whole batching invoicing thing when you get the hang of it it is a huge time saver you know i mean if i was actually managing my own agency through the system and i didn't work with function point i would do all of my invoicing via the batch even my fixed price and i would just manipulate each one from this page because it's such a huge time saver um but then i can come in here and i say you know i know that we spent way too much time in production so i'm just going to come in here and say you know we really can't invoice for these timesheets right now maybe we'll look at them later but for now i'm just going to take these off make some edits you know save and close and that then affects the time share the invoice value so you can make any adjustments to any of these jobs right from here i'll click finish adding to batch and that just generated however many it was like 15 or 20 invoices and i can look at the batch and i can see all of them and then there's you know a bunch of different things that i can do here i can produce printouts for every single invoice save them and then send them to my client myself or up at the top i can hit notify selected and the system will send an email from you to your client with whatever content you want you know first name and last name is gonna fill in the name of that of that client invoice number who it was created by you can fill in all of these different details you can choose different templates uh you know fp invoice attached um you know you can you can do all this really cool stuff around the email and then send it out i'm not most well none of the emails actually exist they're all so i'm not going to click send but you can then send all those emails out and and then all of those clients then get all their all their invoices that's actually how we do our billing at function point and it is highly effective so that is the process for doing the batch invoicing for timer materials and i've seen some questions popping in i should check in sophie anything that you think that we should address on screen you know what there's some really awesome questions coming in right now but i think i got it thanks for checking in though yeah no problem so we only have a few minutes left i want to i want to show i want to talk a bit more about batch invoicing um and and also some of the job fine stuff so another thing that batch invoicing is really useful for is where you are able to invoice a predetermined amount now the most common scenario of that is going to be a retainer so every single month i'm invoicing a set amount and i know what that amount is so i might do a job fine and this is something that you're going to do if you have a lot of retainers and you build them the same amount every month then you're going to do this most likely on the last day of the month or the first day of the month or maybe you do it on the you know the sixth of the month because you didn't get around to it but you do the invoice date for the first so but typically it's going to be you know the first of the last day and we're gonna do a job find and i'm gonna say show me all of my retainers that are open now you can multi-select for the statuses here if you need to but show me all of my retainers that are open click find and i have four so i know that that makes it pretty easy for me because i only have four um you know you might have a lot more but then i can easily invoice this now the concept of retainers i have a lot of agencies tell me you know all the time that their retainers are nowhere near as simple as what we're talking about um you know i i've seen a lot of different stuff going on with retainers a common thing is someone will say to me you know we have a retainer with a client where it's ten thousand dollars a month um but you know at the end of the month if we put in eight thousand dollars worth of work then we build them for eight thousand and if we put in if we put in twelve thousand dollars of work then we build them twelve thousand and and really that's not really a retainer it's basically a time and materials contract where there's an agreed upon goal for for the amount um if you're constantly adjusting the invoice based on what you actually did not really a retainer although i totally understand that you might have an agreement with a client that they've signed off where the word retainer is involved and you might actually label that as a retainer as your billing category but you know keep in mind that it's it's not really a true retainer because you're not billing the exact amount that you agreed upon um something that was once that was taught to me um by the late great tony mikeys at second wind was a really really good way of thinking about retainers is that you should have an agreement with your client that you're going to look at look do an evaluation of the retainer and maybe you know the first three months and then every six months after that and you know you're gonna build them you know ten thousand dollars every month and if after three months you know the first three months of that relationship you see that you are consistently only doing six thousand dollars worth of work then re-evaluate the retainer do you see that you are consistently doing sixteen thousand dollars with the work then re-evaluate the retainer and then if it looks like it's good then just keep going and after every six months use function point generate the reports and show your clients hey this is what we're spending every single month and if it deviates from what you're billing then have a conversation with them but the more standardized and streamlined you can make this retainer invoicing the easier your life is going to be and if you have a retainer situation and i've seen this before where you have a client that says okay well you can bill is 10 000 for october 2000 for november 25 000 for december and so on and so forth um then you know that's just something that you need to have you know an understanding on so that every time you go to generate an invoice you manipulate the value for what you need to build each month but in a case where you can bill a set amount every month it's really really easy all you do is you pull up the list of retainers you hit batch invoice ad call it retainer october 28 and then just hit add batch invoice because you're just invoicing 100 of estimate that's the default you know you just hit at all it's a you're you're just going through the motions because everything is already set up to you know create these invoices for their amounts and when you look at that batch you're invoicing them for the exact amount that each one is supposed to be invoiced for every single month and then of course you can choose to notify the client if there's if there's no contact of course there's no one email so you might want to have a job contact if you're going to use that or you can produce the pdfs save each of them and then email them to your clients you know manually if you wish the very last thing i want to talk talk about really quickly in the last two minutes here um is the concept of batch invoicing for fixed price you know if i do a job find basic category of fixed price and it's a status of open i'm gonna have a bunch of jobs here in my system you know we're mostly a fixed price agency so you know i have 15 jobs here that are fixed price and you know in a lot of these cases the agencies i speak with where they're building based on fixed price is usually based on some sort of agreed upon deliverable so it's like okay you know when we you know when we get sign off on you know the the first version of the website um before revision round two we're going to invoice you this you know the the third 25 percent we'll invoice you the final 25 upon final launch of the website you know that type of thing and when it's that type of situation it's really difficult to have an easy automated batch invoicing process because they're all different you're invoicing them with different percentages at different times for different reasons so you know for myself what i would do and this is a bit more of an advanced user kind of tactic but what i would probably do is i would look at these jobs and i would ask my aes to come in here and update what can i bill for this you know put in you know you um can invoice uh 2500 you know when ready and then i'm just looking at a report then telling me you know what i can invoice for each of these jobs so as the other person coming in and doing the billing you know i might choose to you know maybe customize my list a little bit i'm gonna i'm gonna manage these columns i'm gonna take out some stuff i don't need i'm gonna put in some stuff that i i do want um so i want my date description in there that i was just customizing i'm gonna drag that over and then maybe you know i'll add it subtract some columns i need or don't need and so forth and then all i'm going to do is i'm i'm just going to generate a report and that report is then showing me you know at the end of the month okay you know you can invoice 2500 when ready and i'm going to have this report telling me all the jobs what i can invoice from them it comes from my account managers you know telling me exactly what i can do and then i'm just going to have this report kind of off in my other monitor yeah i like to use two monitors so i'm going to have this report you know off to the side here and as i have it off to the side i'm going to do a batch invoice and then i have all those jobs listed and i look at my report and it says okay for job 302.90 for the employee handbook and training guide you can invoice 2500 when ready so you know and maybe that's a certain percentage so i'm going to come in here and i'm going to you know go just go down the list you know here's my employee training and handbook guide i'm going to add that in and then i'm going to generate the invoice for the amount that i that i need so i'm going to put this in at you know 20 and you know get my 2500 and save and close fill in my account there it should be filled in automatically save and close i now have one invoice for 2500 and i would do all of my billing like this um but you know if you're just starting out you're just getting used to the function point system probably best to do them one by one until you kind of get into a rhythm but the whole concept of the badge invoicing is is highly effective uh if you have the information on hand for what you can and cannot invoice for each of these jobs so just something to think about you know the first part of this of this webinar was was looking at invoicing those jobs individually one by one uh for fixed price time materials and retainers and that's probably how you want to do it while you're just getting used to the system and then as you get a bit more comfortable you can look at the concept of doing things in a bath uh so we're over by three minutes um my old co-presenter emma would probably be like waving at me right now like you know demanding that i end this thing soon i can see sophie sitting there contently um she'll i'm sure so i'll give you a bit of grief for it afterwards but i can see that there's a couple questions that came in sophie anything you think i should address at this time no again i think uh you really went into some great details today mark so thank you for that no problem i hope i didn't go into too much detail on that final point of the batch invoicing for fixed price because it's not usually something i show and not usually something that i i really get into but i wanted to show it today because i thought we had the time and you know it's really how i would probably you know work the system myself about if i was managing um and i do actually see a lot of a lot of people doing that it really just you know depends on how used you are uh how use of the system you are and how confident you feel in doing that and not doing them one by one um so you know i want to thank everybody for the webinar today and for joining in i really appreciate all of your time i'm gonna run a quick poll uh just to see um you know how valuable everyone uh you know found this webinar um so you know please uh you know feel free to uh you know being honest if you found this valuable great if you didn't you know totally understand uh and if you do have any suggestions any uh requests or or you want to talk about the webinar at all feel free to email success at functionpoint.com again that's success at functionpoint.com and that will come to sophia and myself and you know if you have any feedback or requests for new topics later on or different ways you think we could do this or if you think i just talk too fast or you don't like my voice or something like that feel free let me know and we'll look at ways that we can we can improve and just let everybody know we are looking at some new topics so we're going to be running for the next cycle coming up most likely starting in the early new year so if you do have some requests for topics now would actually be a good time to be sending those in so feel free to send those my way and uh you know again i really appreciate everyone's time as of right now the next webinar is scheduled for the 25th of november um same that time same about channel so uh if you're registered for that webinar i look forward to seeing you then and uh otherwise you know we're gonna keep this thing running for the next few minutes if any other questions do pop in that we can answer um and and then we'll close it down once uh once we see people starting to file out so again i want to thank everybody for their time today and have yourselves a great rest of your wednesday be safe this halloween have a good time eat bunch of candy uh it's on a saturday so feel free to let loose i know that i will and oh and you know what if you want to um go on the function point facebook page and maybe share your office halloween costumes you know we would we would think that would be so cool i know that we'll be sharing ours um so you know i'm hoping to be able to get my costume all set up i know what i'm going to be i'm not going to tell you um but i'm hoping to have it all set up and ready to go so yeah you know go on our facebook page and and show us your office uh you know all your costumes that you guys put together we would love to see that i think that'd be really cool so again thanks everyone have yourself a great wednesday great rest of your week and happy halloween [Music] [Music] you