Create Your Retainer Invoice Template for Planning with Ease

Retainer invoice template for Planning

all right everyone let's get going thank you for joining us today for another episode of excel Oh best practices today we're gonna be focusing on retainers my name is Tom I'm an account manager here at Excel and I'll be your host I'm also joined by my colleague Peter who'll be presenting today and he works in implementations awesome hello everyone my name is Peter I'm gonna be your presenter for today as we go through this wonderful journey together of retainers inside of Excel Oh so what is this meeting going to pertain to mainly we're going to be speaking about retainers and the agenda is we're gonna be first looking at what are retainers I'll give you some examples then we'll start talking about pricing and scope of work role over and over jiz reoccurring an ad hoc work so how we link those tickets or reoccurring tasks to our retainer and then we'll even dive into triggers a little bit at the end so setting up those if-then statements so if a certain set of rules are met on a retainer we are taking the appropriate action whether that be to notify someone if our attainers going over budget or when the retainer expires we're letting ourselves that know that hey we should probably renegotiate a new contract now at the end please do have some questions ready for me I'll try and answer all of them together with Tom go ahead and submit those through the webinar and we'll answer them shortly after the presentation in fact I'm not even not jumping in chat to you guys if you've got any that I can answer via the chat but if it does require a little bit more of a detailed explanation well we'll come back to it at the end cool exactly so the big question of the day what are retainers retainers our ongoing work with a client with a price for our with its contract and there's a set of deliverables so let's talk about setting up a retainer together first so I'm going to be kind of tabi back and forth between this presentation and my test deployment within Excel so we're going to set up a test retainer on our own that we're going to do live and I'm going to be walking through the steps as they pertain to the slot so we're going to go ahead and drop down our create option inside our Excel deployment and we're gonna go ahead and hit create retainer this will take us to our retainer creation page now you'll notice there are three separate columns here on our retainer creation page we're gonna work through each one together on the left-hand side you have that retainer information it's pretty general stuff we need to define what company this retainer is against I'm gonna go ahead and put it against my company oneplus you have a title of that retainer and that is just how should we name this if you have a set of terminology that you use or naming convention between you and your companies you can go ahead and use that here we might call this one monthly support annual contract all right then you've got the company contact so who from this company are you working with we'll go in and set that it is true you've got your manager here so who from your company is gonna be managing this retainer asides from all of these ridiculous names I have here let's go ahead and select me here well go ahead and select the type of retainer and now one thing to note each different retainer type can have its own preset values so the moment I select my type here some values are gonna populate in my right hand column period and allowances so I'm going to select prepaid monthly work that's going to populate some values for me so that's the power of the retainer types inside of Excel oh you already have those prices set for you all you need to do is select the correct type some ways I've seen this utilized really nicely with some of my clients particularly the MSP clients or marketing agencies who have different packages for their SEO and analytics they might have different tiers so I'm talking about bronze tier silver tier gold tier platinum tier each one of those different tiers entails a different level of work each different tier with their own price so when they select that correct retainer type for the client the price populates for us two hours populate for us and even the set of tasks populate for a specific - that retainer type I'm going to go ahead and tab back over into our slide and we've talked about some of the examples already right now what we're setting up is a prepaid support contract so the one I'm going to be setting up right now it's just a monthly support contract and it's going to last for exactly one year so twelve different periods are going to be generated throughout this example jumping back to our slide we're gonna go through the pricing now now I've already talked about these common details on the left-hand side we're gonna go ahead and finish up with our status we'll make sure that we're defaulting to an active status right away now that might not always be the case for you I have come across some clients who like to default retainers into a status of pending payment so they don't want to track work they don't even want to think about this retainer until it's been paid so some clients have implemented a status called pending payment to account for that most clients though they just a fault it right into active because they're gonna send an invoice right away we have our commencement date here this is the day we want to define this retainer began we're gonna set this one on January 1st 2018 and we're gonna have this run for exactly one year and it's gonna end on January 1st 2019 we have some tags down below that you can implement if you want to tag it with any specific information that you can then filter on at a later point in time but now that's going to take us to our main column here periods and allowances now in the period allowances this is where we'll be setting up the following information our duration is it a fixed period so are we going to be billing our client on a cadence of monthly yearly bi-weekly weekly annually or you can have it set to unlimited now I'm sure you're wondering when am I ever going to use an unlimited duration contract or retainer now when you would use that is if a client has paid upfront for a large bulk of ours so this is mainly looking at you MSP IT type companies out there a client just writes you a check for let's say five thousand dollars and with those five thousand dollars they are permitted 250 hours of your time now they can chip away at that block whenever they want we can set those hours to not ever expire but that is their block of hours and they do not run out within a period they are unlimited so the only time you're really going to be concerned about those hours is when they are almost used up so that's an example where you would use an unlimited period duration in the example we're giving today if we're gonna stick with fixed and we're going to keep it monthly next you've got the period billing so are we going to be charging our client before the period begins or are we going to be charging them at the end of the period and that's going to be captured within prepaid or post paid prepaid we're gonna charge our client before the period begins and post paid we're charging our client at the end of the month that way we're only charging them for the work that was completed now with prepaid we're charging them this flat fee no matter what and that's because you've probably agreed upon a fee with a client that you'll always be billing all work under this contract at a specific rate or you're just giving them a set amount of hours every month based on what they're paying coming down below you have the period allowance and you have the options of unlimited hours fixed hours or even fixed value now unlimited hours might come into play when a client is paying you a large amount let's just say six thousand in this scenario every month that client is paying you six thousand with that six thousand monthly reoccurring revenue they may just become your largest client so you really don't care how often they reach out to you because they're paying you the most well go ahead and set that to unlimited hours but we still will keep track of how many hours of work we're doing because maybe we need to change that a year from now when we have other clients who are paying us just as much but using a lot less hours now next you've got the fixed hours again this is used when a client is purchasing a fixed amount of hours per month so no matter what type of work comes in the main thing we're keeping track of is the amount of time we spend working with this client so for each hour we log it's going to chip away at this block of 10 hours now whenever a new period is generated those 10 hours are going to refresh the last option you have available to you here is your fixed value now I'm sure you're wondering how we can utilize fixed value and it's actually really clever so we're going to go ahead and say our fixed value is $2,000 our client pays us two thousand dollars therefore instead of a bucket of hours they now have a bucket of money so whatever work comes in the value of that work will slowly chip away at this bucket of money now a scenario where you would use fixed value over fixed hours is when a rate hasn't necessarily been pre negotiated so you're charging them exactly on the work that you're doing so let's say that we have this client one plus now their monthly support contract entails them to two thousand dollars worth of value in the middle of the month drew from oneplus reaches out and says hey I need some remote support your rate for remote support is 100 dollars an hour you create that ticket you link it to the retainer and all the work for that ticket is captured at $100 an hour at the end of the day you've logged two hours which is $200 taken away from the value of their retainer two thousand dollars now using that same example we're going to say that this time drew has contacted us about on-site support he needs someone to come out there to look at his modem his internet stopped working so we're gonna go on site and we're gonna charge him more for that because that's gonna be $200 an hour of our time we spend three hours on site so that's $600 taken away from the $2,000 that he's allotted every month so hours are gonna be useful if we're negotiating a fixed hourly cost and value is going to be useful if we're going to be charging and based on the work that they're soliciting from us awesome down below that continuing on fixed value you have expenses consume prepaid value and materials consume prepaid value now what you have either these options selected that means that any expenses incurred for the month will take away from the value of that month and any material cost will take away from the value of that month as opposed to adding on top of them on top of the $2,000 all right so we're gonna make this one fixed hours now that we've talked fully about fixed value and we'll go ahead and move from here now one thing that I hadn't covered just yet our materials and I'm gonna get to those in just a second right before or right after I talk about rollover so down below we've defined that our periods are going to be monthly we're gonna charge our client two thousand dollars and they're going to get ten hours of our time now the next option we have is where new periods zero days before latest period expires if I were to set this to let's say three that means using January as an example January 28th a new period will be created in Excel for February 1st to March 1st and the action that will happen is we will create an invoice now you have some flexibility here in terms of what happens you can have an invoice create you can have an invoice not create we can create that invoice and send it directly to the client you can create that invoice and fax it to them if any of you still have clients who use a fax machine and then we have create invoice and notify account user what that bottom option does is it creates an invoice inside of Excel and it notifies the manager of the retainer that an invoice has been created now that one I find pretty useful because some clients want to see the invoice before it gets sent out because they just want to double-check it make sure everything's accurate so they find that option working pretty well for them if you want to fully automate the invoicing of your clients you would go ahead and select create invoice and send email now down below you have rollover when you have rollover selected that just means that if Drew has only used 8 of the 10 hours we've allotted him for the month those additional two hours are going to roll over into the new month of February all right so coming up above you have your rates and invoicing this is where you can set a defined rate for the retainer now this is useful if you have any tickets come in and you want that ticket to always default at that rate and retainer rate is especially useful when you have your period allowance as fixed value as opposed to fix hours that way you can say that ok no matter what we're always going to charge at this specific rate you can drop down and select a set of rates that you have already predefined in your deployment or you can set a custom rate by just selecting the option here on the right-hand side below that you have excess retainer rate this is where you'll define the rate at which you'll be charging your client the moment he goes over 10 hours so when Drew is coming up on his 11th hour we're going to charge him 50% more we're gonna charge him 150 dollars now below you have an option for applying retainer rate for issues and projects linked to this period so within your retainer contract if any tickets come in for this client or any projects come in for this client and you link them they will inherit the rates you've defined here which is your retainer rate and your excess retainer rate we'll go ahead and select that you have your billable contact here this is who will be receiving the invoice every month for this we're caner or support contract well go ahead and say that's going to be drew again and then we have our invoice template we'll make sure we select retainer work because that's one that I have set up in my test employment to always bill for the correct and open periods next you have service item now I'm sure a lot of you use different service items and this is to make sure that the revenue generated on this account gets allotted to the correct account ledger within your chart of accounts the way we pull your service items in are from your accounting platform so whether they be zero or quickbooks online that's where we get that information from so i've went ahead and selected account 1,000 general tax free lastly I've got my description on invoice line item here this is just how this line item will appear on the invoice when I send it to my client so finally we'll get to materials so our material cost can be added on top of our monthly prepaid costs so common material costs that I see those are going to be subscription costs monthly so you have to use a specific set of software for the client and you want to charge them for that it could be server hosting could be website hosting server maintenance anything like that we can add that in as a material so we'll select add material template select from our list of materials and again these materials are being brought over from your accounting platform so whatever materials you have stored inside of Xero or QuickBooks Online those are going to sink over seamlessly into Excel oh and you'll be able to apply those materials to your projects to your tickets or to your retainers so we'll go ahead and select one of our materials down here as you can see I have a few well go ahead and call this one coffee mugs the purchase price is 75 and the sale price is 100 and we'll say that the client is getting five we'll go ahead and remove our AdWords budget and now we have our material cost here which is adding an additional five every month so our client will be billed $2,500 so we've talked about materials we've talked about roll over and over jizz now I would like to talk about reoccurring work so in this example we are setting up a monthly support contract within that monthly support there may be a few things we need to do every month some items that I've seen for digital agencies or marketing firms might be search engine optimization contact pay-per-click campaign PPC analysis so drawing up those reports and sending them to the client at the end of the month so they know exactly what's going on with their retainer now for you MSP is an IT companies out there what I've seen are tasked monthly for system health checks and this could just be to make sure that the server is healthy everything on the website is working correctly no widgets are broken and we'll want to draw up a report and just let our client know that hey things are running at 100% capacity so we'll go ahead and drop this title of the task will call it systems health check we have our manager here so who from our company is going to be managing this task will default that to the retainer manager and then we have our assignee so who from our company will be handling this task every month if you've defined a specific user to do this task every month you can go ahead and set that here on this task creation well go ahead and select Hugh here and he's gonna be in charge for this task every month now you've got your start and you've got your due date this defines when the task should begin and when it should be due for this one we're gonna go ahead and say that this TAS should begin on the expert date - seven days so a week before our month of January expires this task will begin and it will be due on the period expiry date so January 24th this task we'll begin and it will be due on January 31st you can set it to find rate if you want to charge this task at a specific rate for now though we're gonna go ahead and use our retainer rate you have required skills here if you want to set a list of skills to further organize and granule eyes this task so only people with this set of skills can accomplish this task you can tag it with anything you see fit it's what you can then further filter on at a later point in time and then you'll just include the description of the task so Ronna systems health check and report to client will leave the status as pending and then we have the estimated time we'll say that's going to take one hour we'll save that and we've just created our first templated task now looking at both tasks and materials these are on the retainer level think of this as the top floor any items we add here in terms of tasks or materials will be recreated on all following periods now you have an option one more here at the top one periods are closed do you want to auto complete this task or not other complete it so if you don't do it at the end of the month and it's not a big deal we can go ahead and up to auto complete it because it's just gonna regenerate on the next month so we've just successfully set up our first retainer we've gone through all of our columns we set our reoccurring tasks and materials and now we're gonna go ahead and hit save and move on and actually create this retainer inside of Excel so before we start talking about triggers I want to talk about a few more things on this page now for those of you who are still really new to excel and kind of fully understanding the power of the retainers I want to just give you a brief overview of what we're looking at on the screen right now this is the retainer page of Excel oh it's for a monthly support annual contract on the left-hand side you have tons of information that helps you identify bits of information relevant to you for this retainer such as the company the contact our manager our billable contact our renewal terms and our team feature now if I could draw some examples here for both digital agencies and MSP companies how can we utilize this team feature now for digital agencies you may want to add people in as a team and you'll include anyone who is helping out this retainer so if this specific retainer has a dedicated SEO person or a dedicated web analytics person or dedicated tech lead you can go ahead and define their role via the team option now the beautiful thing about the team option is it doesn't have to be specific to someone inside your Excel or user base it can be an outside contractor or outside contact and they could be contributing to this retainer in some way shape or form in this example though I'm going to go ahead and add in so on on my team or within my company I'm gonna add in Julie look let me try that again I said I'm gonna head in Julie there we go and I'm gonna define her role so that's categorized under her type and this is fully customizable right now I just have advisor or vendor partner so I'm gonna say Shirley is going to be an advisor and she's gonna be the one I want to talk to you whenever there are technical issues dr. Shirley and then I have an option to auto CC on all activities if I have this selected that just means it's on all outgoing emails I send from this retainer Shirley will automatically be included so she's kept in the loop on everything that's happening within this retainer I'm gonna deselect that for now and I'm going to save and we've just successfully added in Chile as a team member so when I hover over her tooltip I can see her name her immediate role in how she's contributing to this retainer I have my key dates down below comments and a few more options now looking at my overview tab you see that we have prepaid recurring retainer on the left hand side this side over here this is information specific to the retainer as a whole we're charging them twenty five hundred dollars every month which includes five materials a duration is going to be one month the type of retainer is prepaid and yes we do have rollover enabled if we had any link to work so if we had a ticket or a project linked to this retainer then the budget so if we had an hourly budget Specht out on either that project or ticket would populate here so we can see at a glance that okay based on the projects and tickets linked to this retainer there are 10 hours of work remaining to get completed on the right hand side you have information relevant to the period as a whole so our current period we have ten hours of allowance remaining it's going to renew in two days and we view zero percent of our allowance so far we've use ero hours and we still have ten hours remaining down below under our remaining work we see that we have one hour and that is being pulled from the one task we have assigned to the period and that's down here under systems health check drop down below one more and you see the list of all of your periods right now we're currently looking at January 1st to January 31st now before we get into triggers and I know I'm sure a lot of you are very eager to get into those I do want to talk about how we actually link work to your retainer and how we can really leverage that to your advantage so coming over to our tabs projects and issues this is where we'll see any items that are linked to this retainer we're going to create a ticket together really quickly and we're going to link it to this exact retainer so I'm gonna create a new issue here in my new tab we're going to make sure that this issue is related against the same company and that's going to be one plus we're gonna call this linking example link this to a retainer alright we'll make sure we have our assignee selected our main contact the type of ticket so a couple of things that I've seen in terms of ticket types and how they relate to retainers is clients may have two different ticket types one for on contract tickets and they may have a progression action in there to automatically link the ticket to a retainer and two for off contract tickets so tickets that don't relate to a retainer at all and will be billed for individually in this example we're gonna go ahead and select default and the item that we're mainly looking at here is the retainer option so if you're creating a ticket ad-hoc for the client and you're unsure if it's going to be against the retainer or even if they have a retainer on file you would just drop down this option here and search for any retainer that might prompt you to go oh okay it's gonna go under their monthly support contract let me go ahead and select that well create this issue and that's going to create our issue inside of excel Oh perfect so we're going to refresh our retainer page here and we're gonna take a look at that tab one more time except this time around you'll notice there's going to be an issue there and that's the ticket we just linked so now these two are talking to each other the work you log on this ticket will now get placed against the retainer period so tickets can span multiple periods so if you logged five hours today and tomorrow and then in February you logged in another five hours it will be split up based on when you logged it so we're gonna log some time here on this ticket simply by selecting long time ever going to say three hours I'm gonna say subject ever going to say description of work log well save that and those three hours will be one captured on the ticket but the time will ultimately feed into the contract that it's linked to refreshing our page once more we're going to come down below and we see that for a period we've now utilized three of our ten hours and that value is being pulled from the ticket where we just log three hours you'll notice the values up here are populating or repopulating as well and then under issues you can see the amount of billable hours you've raced on it awesome so what we're going to do next is we're going to drop down one level and we're going to look at the period of January 1st to January 31st and the way we're going to do that is we're just going to select the January period here so as I said earlier the retainer level is the top level what we've basically done is we've just gone down a flight of stairs and we are now looking at the floor that is specific to the month of January here is where we can see our usage for the month so where's our time log coming from we see that right now of the three hours we've logged is all coming from this issue one linked issue 108 linking example if we read a log additional time it would repopulate ingly we'll call this test log directly on the period level and we're going to log two hours we'll save that that time log will populate for us and take away from the utilization we're going to refresh this page once more just so we have those values updating and boom we've now used 50% of our allowance and you see the three hours we've logged on the ticket and the two hours we log directly on the period now if you made a mistake and you see that this issue should not be linked to this retainer then what you can do is you can unlink this issue from the retainer period now when you link or excuse me when you unlink the issue from the retainer period you are removing the billable time from the allowance use so the moment we unlink these three hours are going to be added back to the pool of 10 hours and our utilization or hours used will only be two hours based on the other log that we have here so unlinking tickets is extremely useful if you've accidentally linked a ticket to the wrong retainer or you just don't that don't want that work showing up on the retainer for the month now on this retainer page or period page we have the stream again all relevant correspondents captured here catchments you'll find all attachments that relate to the month of January any tasks will be populating here now in the beginning when we created this retainer we did set a set of templated tasks now those tasks are always going to recreate on each following period but let's say you have a one-off you have a task that is only relevant for January the way you would create that task and ensure that it doesn't get carried over into February is by clicking into the retainer period as we are now and just select add tasks that'll create a task on the month of January which will not push over to the month of February that same concept is applied to materials as well so if you add in a material on the month of January that material cost will not carry over to the month of February because you're making it specific to the month of January you have your expenses here if you incur any expenses for the month you can add in those expenses and then you have your invoices where you can see all invoices as they relate to this period all right so jumping back to our retainer page now we can talk about triggers so triggers within retainers so in short triggers are an if-then statement if this set of rule happens then do this action or perform this action to give you an idea of what I've seen here's an example if 80% of the budget is consumed for the month or period of January then notify the account manager so the person managing the retainer and notify the customer as well so they know that they're coming up on 80 percent of the usage for the month and let them know too that if they go over you're gonna charge them more another one is client is using time to fast so if you notice there's a high burn rate you can set those rules up as a trigger and notify the a.m. and the customer as well if you'd like so you're letting your account meander know that there's a high burn rate there's a lot of work coming in is this normal reach out to the client and we can also let our customer know as well that hey you're using a lot of time very quickly at this rate you're going to deplete your monthly allowance within the first week next up you've got out of contract move to status expired so this is one that I really like and it's when the contract is expired we automatically move it in to retain or expired now that doesn't happen by default so if this retainer expires next year and we don't have this trigger set then it's not automatically going to be moved we'll need to set up that trigger and that way Excel will know that when the expiry date is reached for the retainer we automatically move it into retainer expired now in the same vein of that I want to mention another trigger that I find really useful especially with people who need to renegotiate their contracts with their client before they continue billing them so what I've seen is a trigger that fires 60 days away or when there are less than 60 days remaining for the retainer expiry date then notify the account manager and let them know that this retainer will expire in 60 days please reach out to the client and renegotiate a new deal that way they can just start a new retainer right away when it expires so they're not losing out on any revenue they're not wasting any time at the end trying to renegotiate in a month and then ending up losing a month those triggers kind of proactively let you know that hey this retainer is coming up it might expire soon reach out to the client see if you can negotiate a new contract and get them to sign on for another year now going through our other examples we're going to look at our templates now so the templates come into play with the types so if we edit this retainer once more I'm going to highlight the types again now remember the types altom utley decide what gets populated when you select it so when we were creating our retainer we had these values populate for us what I'm going to do now is I'm going to head into our configuration now your configuration can be found on your left hand side by coming all the way down and selecting config here this takes us to the back end of Excel oh we're gonna drop down to the bottom and we're gonna find retainers in the middle we're going to open progressions and fields and this is going to populate a list of all of our different retainer types or templates if you will so if we look at pre paid monthly work SEO PPC and we edit that type this is where we reading the template so the moment you select this type when you're creating a retainer these are the values that populate so again this comes back to my example that I was talking about earlier the different pricing structures so the silver tier the bronze tier the gold tier each one might have a different type or template in your back end each with their own monthly price their monthly hours or value the materials that get added on and the tasks that need to be completed every month some example of different types I've seen our support contracts you know three hundred dollars a month unlimited hours ad hoc tickets no rollover or a thousand dollars until purchasing another block so those are our block amount of hours with unlimited period durations you've got media management thousand dollars a month ten hours of work and it does roll over and then monthly bookkeeping outside outsource advisor so those are just some examples that you can preset within Excel now the beauty of setting up these templates is that we can then filter on them at a later point in time so we might have those different subscription tiers or whatever convention we're using to categorize our different types we can come to our retainer list within Excel again that's on our left hand side and selecting a retainers link and from here you can organize all of your caters by the type prepaid monthly work standard retainer type short term video production post paid monthly support these are just some examples I have in there right now if I select prepaid monthly work then what I am doing is I am looking at a list of all of my prepaid monthly work contracts now let's take this a step further let's say that we only want to see active monthly work contracts now we're looking at all active prepaid monthly works and again one more step further let's say that we only want to see active prepaid monthly contracts that we are the manager of that brings us down to two now seeing this information at a moment's notice is really helpful for us because maybe we want to know immediately any point in our day which contracts we need to check in on so what we're going to do is we're going to save this as a filter and we're going to name it appropriately we'll call this active prepaid contracts Peter then you have the option to share it or to not share it when you share it you're basically just allowing other people to use this filter you're created if you do not share it other users will not have visibility or will not be able to use the filter you created go ahead and save that filter and it's now going to populate in our bottom left-hand corner so the next time we come to retainers and we want to see that information right away all we need to do is select that filter boom populates those preset filters that we saved in our filter right there for us you can also find your filters under your saved icon and you can see filters here under my retainer I've got active prepaid contracts Peter you see I have some other ones set up my projects my clients my campaigns my issues kind of just to help better segment my work and what I need to see and what's relevant to me all right so I think that's all I really want to talk about today I've touched on a lot of subjects even more so than I thought I was initially going to touch on so if you have any questions now is the perfect time to bring those up I think Tom's gonna help me field those so feel free to fire away all right thanks Peter there's been a few trickling the last 40 minutes or so I've answered a few with the chat but they're probably not so I'm not a bad idea to to go back over them they do have a couple of open questions actually that I might get your help with Peter if you wouldn't mind just opening up the Edit retainers screen I got one question can we add a recurring task for every second month initially I was thinking no but let's quickly take a look so you want a task that is only generated every second month yeah yeah so that cannot be done if our contract is monthly so unfortunately right now our limitation in creating a task is what we have here are starting our due dates while it is something that I would love to see an excellent day and anyone listening right now I highly recommend you go post an ideas for them right now that you want to see reoccurring tasks like bimonthly or repeats every week within a period things like that love to see those the right now to answer your question you cannot do that if you have a monthly support contract alternatively if by chance you were to set up the period to be quarterly then of course you can set up you know a task that starts in the first month and one SATs in the third month but as you mentioned if the periods a month long can't do it yes exactly and do note that if you do switch to a quarterly cadence that is the cadence at which your invoices will be created as well awesome next one why would you create multiple periods how would this affect automated invoicing first reason that I can think of I would be you'd wonder if you've got for example lots of tasks on your period you can manually create them in advance so that the tasks also get generated and you can use that for future scheduling I know I've seen that happen can you think of any other reasons Peter why you might create those periods in advance uh I think you pretty much hit the head on the nail there yeah nothing really particular to add there it's kind of not something I see often usually I see people let Excel oh create the periods for them but if you're referring to creating the period X days before then some people just like to have that invoice generated and have the period ready to go just a few days before doctor really comes down to personal preference and how you work within your company and the way and yeah the way that would affect automated invoicing basically because the periods have already been created the invoices wouldn't be sent out just because the the invoice creation and automatic sending process is part of the period creation automation there would be potentially some ways around it if you want to automate the invoicing process but also create the periods in advance you can you can potentially use progressions to kind of make up for that but that's it's very very uncommon that people would want to create periods in advance and have the invoices go out automatically awesome what's the significance of closing periods on retainers so when you close a period on a retainer you're saying that you don't want any more time logged on that period now at the end of the month when that period expires or whenever that period expires if it's quarterly it will close by sell so once it exceeds jumping back to our retainer that we set up together here today let's scroll on down to period of January 1st January 31st on January 31st this period status will be closed because we no longer need the law of time in that month of January because we're now entering the month of February so if you need to close one early it's not something I see often but you can do that just by selecting the overflow menu here and selecting clothes now you bring up a good point in what is the significance of closing the period I can see a really good reason to use this method if you are working with an unlimited block of hours so let's say that a client has purchased 50 hours upfront they've paid you and their period will run indefinitely until they've consumed the 50 hours now when they've consumed that 50 hours and they want to sign on again for another 50 hours this is a prime opportunity to come in close that period with their existing 50 hours that are utilized and then adding in a new period with those new 50 hours which you will then generate a new invoice for and that all happens within this one retainer so you don't have to create a new retainer for the new block of hours they've purchased so I know I went off on a tangent there but hopefully the hell made sense look you should leaky initiate would you mind is quickly showing linking your project as well yeah absolutely so same constant is applied there when we create our project on the project creation page you'll have the option for retainer so if we go ahead and select one plus down below you've got your retainer option now if you would like to link an existing project what we can do is we'll come to our projects and they find one for one plus go ahead go to sprint from one plus and what we're going to do is we're going to down edit we're going to select edit project and we're going to find that retainer option once again and just select monthly support annual contract and save that's gonna link the project it's nearly identical to the steps you would take when you link an issue or ticket awesome a couple of questions around invoicing start with this one we have contracts billed in a different system and collected that way but we do want to track the retainer in Excel as a prepaid allowance is there a way that we can track that without invoicing but and also have it not appear on in client billing so I mean the first piece of it is very easy yes of course you can set up a prepaid retainer and you can just select the option to have no invoices created there's there a way it to not have a job on the client billing list I'm presuming in this case you're also logging time under the retainer so my initial thought is to log non-billable time not sure if you don't need suggestions there Peter yeah I do actually have a suggestion there so if I'm understanding this correctly you have a retainer that you're keeping track of in Excel oh but your billing for in a separate platform did I get that right wrong yeah pretty much yep and you don't want the time you're logging in Excel to show up in your client billing which is located here when you do your month end invoice it right right awesome so what I would recommend in that scenario is you have a specific retainer type that is named whatever makes sense to you so the retainer non-billable or off contract or different software however you want to name it just make sure you have a different type here that way you have all the retainers who follow that format categorize under one type now you don't want that time showing up in your company billing module which is fine because now that we have it all captured it in a separate type when we do our bulk billing at the end a month let me drop down to retainers and we have our different types we're just going to make sure that that type where we have that special case of not having it build in Excel a but it said in a separate software we're just going to exclude that type so you just exclude it let's say hypothetically that it was standard retainer type we just wouldn't include it and we would apply our filters so we can still do our bulk invoicing at the end of the month while excluding retainers that fall under that specific type like that well another just that I think that's probably the best option another option potentially also would be to create the retainer and then if you want to log the work I think let's say a project to it and just make it a non-bailable project so all the time we'll push under there tanner it'll go against the budget but you'll never have to worry about it's showing up in billing because all the owl's be logged just not billable I know that's really work for you but it else but it certainly is an option yeah that's another option as well cool what would be best practice if I wanted to create a prepaid retainer of let's say ten hours but then once the ten hours is up I want to invoice again I'm imagining probably depends a little bit so this is a monthly retainer for ten hours and that you want to invoice automatically for the next month or you want to invoice one to ten hours run out and they run indefinitely I would imagine they run out and then I mean there's the agreement in place but once you reach the agreement let's say the client wants to purchase more hours within the month mm-hmm what would be probably best practice there oh I understand so in the month of January there are a lot of ten hours they use ten hours and they say hey I just want to purchase more hours for the month of January all right that's the way that standard the question yes okay perfect what we would probably do in that case is mmm we can do this in a few ways and the first way that comes in my mind is just creating a separate issue for it and linking that to there caner now the other way is coming into the period itself so January 1st January 31st we would go ahead and just edit and we can bump up the total amount of allotted hours here we'll just say we double that we'll save and then we would just raise an additional invoice on the period level by coming to the period page where we are now and select create invoice then we'll discharge them an additional fee for those 10 hours so you'll have two invoices against this one period perhaps Tom you have another way to approach this question as well no I think also I mean nothing's ever stopping you from manually creating an invoice and sending it exactly you know particular if you've already got a invoice template set up that matches you know the ten hour period by just manually creating a new invoice and dropping in that template you're gonna be most of the way there too quickly just tacking on ten more paid hours mm-hmm exactly would you use rollover if the client has an annual amount of fourteen hours however they wish to be billed every six months so I'm imagining there's it an annual agreement in place mm-hmm however the client wants to be billed every six months if I would depends on whether they're being billed at a fixed fee or whether they're being billed on how many hours they're using up to a point mm-hmm if it's a fixed fee very easy just make the length of the retainer a year but make the period six months mm-hmm yep so that's okay so it's fixed fee so you'd want to make them commence and expiry dates a year apart and then you just make the period duration six months yep so adding on to that that's presuming that you're billing them in two equal parts yep adding under that you would roll over in that case because let's say for the first half of the month or excuse me for the first half of the year they get 10 hours and if they only use 7 you want those three to care over into the latter half of the year you would just go ahead and use rollover for that so for that second half of the year they would have 13 hours gotcha got a couple questions relating to the portal and what this looks like in the portal and what visibility clients can have a decent portal don't know if we'll have time to show you what it looks like in the portal however we can maybe show people how to impersonate a user so that they can go and do this themselves but basically you have with everything in Excel a client portal you have the option of picking how much visibility the client has it can be everything from the full budget and the usage and if you're talking about projects the schedule as well as well as email activities and time entries pretty much full visibility all the way down to literally nothing so it really just depends on how much information you want to show yep adding on to that Tom I'll go ahead and show you very quickly how to impersonate a user on the client portal so you need to navigate to the company page when you're on the company page you'll go ahead and drop down portal and you'll view and invite company users from here you'll go ahead and select that user and then drop down the cogwheel here and select view portal as that is going to generate a portal impersonation link for you and you'll now view the portal as this user sees it now in terms of permissions those are found in your configurations so under client portal you'll just select client portal you'll select retainer permissions and then you can specify like Tom said what you want that client to see so if you want them to see financials you can select what kind of financials you want them to see if you don't want them to see financials you just select show progress same goes with attachments tasks and activities as well as any fields as well but one question here which is asked a while back which will circle back to basically asking I have a bunch of retainers in Excel oh but I don't invoice out of Excel Oh at the moment but if I'm gonna move to Excel Oh what do I need to watch out for to avoid all the work being selected for invoicing it's a good question it's probably a little bit of wrecking reconciling what you've already invoiced pulling that into Excel Oh hmm it probably depends a little bit you've got any advice on that Peter not sure if I understand the situation ahead so there's a live work that's been it's been invoiced unlike tennis but in Xero this is the way that I understand it we also want to set up these retainers in Excel oh and then moving forward also invoice them out of Excel oh but just in the transition period making sure that we're not doubling up on what we what we're invoicing the client yep absolutely so I've actually got a note on that okay so when you create a retainer let's say that in this example you want to switch over start capturing your retainer usage inside of Excel oh and you don't want to build for the current active period for example with this case January you would just not create an invoice for that first month now when you create a retainer regardless if it's prepaid or post page the first invoice must be created manually so the first period invoice must be created manually now because of that that works to your advantage so you don't need to worry about creating that first invoice all following periods will be created automatically so for that next period it'll just turn off automated billing inside your accounting software and let Excel O take over and generate those invoices it's a really good point awesome it's probably a few few more things to chat about but we are running out of time so maybe Peter let's wrap this up and if anyone's got any if there's anything that was unclear or any follow-up questions on the next slide we've got our support inbox for webinars so feel free to fought with any questions if you need any direct help with anything on attenders and more than happy to help myself so yeah I mean thank you everyone for joining awesome questions great group we we do these webinars been doing them for a little while now so we do have a little bit of a library built up you can find that at that hyperlink there on our best practice video library a couple of weeks time we're going to be doing another one of these focusing on the mobile app so that does interest you keep your eye on the blog sign up for that and as I mentioned best practices at Excel kong any follow-up questions you guys might have or any challenges plus any suggestions I mean we cut we try to cover a broad range of topics here so there's anything in particular you want us to talk about we only plan these a couple of weeks in advance so they're pretty flexible and definitely all it is so yeah I think that's about it thanks Peter thanks everyone all right thank you everyone for joining along and hope you guys walked away learning a thing or two also really quickly just because I'm typing out the response Bruce Murray if a client goes over 20 hours so 25 hours and it's on roll over it will not create a negative balance that's it will close on that note thank you all so much [Music]