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Stripe invoice example for Accounting and Tax

one of the important aspects when you're setting up your business is figuring out how you're gonna collect money from your clients the simple way is you know we mail invoices but there's got to be a way for them to if the proposals over pay deposits and just in general how the money gets collected is really an important aspect of it because once you've figured out all the other fun part about starting a business and the business model you're going to use and the product or services you're gonna sell on processes and procedures and everything you put into a business this is that collection side and it's something that even I have over the time of being in business since 2003 I've changed to a lot of payment systems I've looked at a lot of systems and right now this is where we're at in 2019 I figured why not share some of my experience and maybe it will help you with some of this struggle of figuring out how to collect money from clients now we have two different systems we use we're using stripe on the back end for collecting we also use PayPal so those are the two ways we take in money for that of course we have companies that we're here in the US where they may let's check Sal OTT that's actually still probably the largest amount of our dollars come in through physical mailed in cheques that's the way a lot of our local businesses like to do business with us and we're fine with that you know it makes a mega trip to the bank deposit those are kind of obvious ones stripe we switched to this year I really like stripe I'm gonna share some of the experience of here with that it's been very good and PayPal is nice it's just really convenient four ways to get people who just need to send you a few dollars and things like that and when you have a PayPal business account using PayPal as your back-end business account not bad so we have a PayPal business account and we have our standard local way excuse our crediting and we use that as our bank account first standard banking and that's all the backend stuff so let's talk about how that money gets there and some of that process and procedure so invoice ninja we're gonna cover in a second but this is our primary methodology that we send out invoices to all of our regular clients but we offer consulting via YouTube and that has been a learning experience as well like I was always looking for easier ways for clients to find time booked us and pay us online and we were sending them invoice ninja invoices out and we realized because a lot of these are one-offs it's creating a lot more customers and we already have 6500 customers and in Boise in June when he's like well do you want to keep adding these people to that customers because a lot of them are one-offs wanted a half hour or an hour of consulting to get some tasks done or needed some help with a small project but those clients were using that you can book me you can book me system it actually is really nice this one we looked at a few different ones one of the things I liked about this is it didn't bug me about the way it wanted permissions and the permission problem was some of them wanted full access to like my Google account to link to it and I'm like no I only want them to see a calendar and share a calendar with them I didn't understand them wanting full access I guess some of them do because they want to be able to send emails on your behalf and everything else as you in your Google account or whatever account you link to it I decided not to because we do use G suite on the back end this only wanted calendar permission that was the first thing that made me happy the service is relatively cheap and it's an easy way for people to book us now you can see the booking up here it's Lawren systems that you can book me but that's not how we actually do it the our process and intake procedure it sometimes people choose not to follow is you go to our contact page you fill a form out we read what you are requesting in a form we will email you back with a link if it's something we can do or sometimes you say you've asked for something that's beyond the scope of our services we offer so I do recommend before you book and pay us because we have this up you have to pay us for the booking make sure something we can do but people are strange and will just send us money sometimes and it becomes a fusion this is what it looks like embedded in our website we call it a scheduled human interaction and you can general support with our systems one hour half hour and we set the prices in here and we're very open about how much we charge for things because I dislike companies that try to hide prices for everything we do custom quotes when it's something not just hourly but some people I just want 30 minutes of your time well no problem we have a fee for that because that's a when you book a timeslot and we like to be very upfront about it because that's that was a lot of the questions we were getting before is how much is it for 30 minutes your time like well let's just answer that question down there I don't like to be opaque about any of the ways we run our business but you can go in here and you can book pick the time slot that you want 30 minutes first name last name what would you like help with and we have you reiterated basically after even after the contact form just to reiterate well exactly what the task is that you want us to do you put your credit card in sends us the bookings we send the confirmation and done it is odd to me the number of people that want to call us and just read us a credit card over the phone we don't do that we don't support that we make you go through a system by which you fill out forms and things like that you can't just call us with a credit card over the phone not not the way we do it so let's see you can book me system and this is going to stripe on the back end so that's that's this particular system and maybe your business doesn't do this but this was kind of an easy way for us to sell time slots now there is an integration that I'm not using but you can actually have the you can book me clients auto-generate with a zapier integration into invoice ninja and have it generate the same client data and fill it all out and invoicing so we just didn't really see the need to do it there we figured we just do it this way because our one offs let me close this and now we'll jump into invoice ninja so invoicing Joe what is it it is open source invoicing and despite someone angry commenters on some of the other videos is open source but that doesn't mean you get the hosting for free someone says it's not free because they charge for hosting out of their business model um but you can have all the software and host it yourself which is what we're doing so I'll jump over here to pricing this is what their pricing is as of July of 2019 they have their free forever plan ninja pro plan enterprise plan and if you host it yourself you essentially are getting the enterprise plan because you get every feature there's no nothing there's nothing you don't get when you get the self hosted version all the features are there as long as you have it up to date but if you host it yourself think about that if you're trying to save $12 a month you have to setup your own mail server and all the functions around it and make sure you did the security right for your site and then you're on your own for updating the source code and the site so there's all the things that you should be a good system in to do I have a lot of freelance friends some designer friends and some consulting friends that you know they're not techie so to speak and as far as back end or DevOps so they choose this and they've been really happy with the version on here just like at $8 a month a lot more like you know independents have a couple independent artist friends and they're like yeah this is easy to quickly send out invoices so you can check them out I do have an offer code for them don't have to use it but you know hey whatever it helps channel out and lets them know that I've talked to the developers quite a bit and they're amazing people great I'm like I say can go through history and I go in-depth on the system of how much I love it and they're still using it since we switched it about a year and a half ago this all you gotta do is change comment org if you're wondering cuz some people said hey where is the free version it's right here and they even have a little guide on how to set up the self-hosting they have great documentation for how the API works dev guide how does integrations work and it's all on github so when you hit download you can download all the source code right away and or go on to their github and see all the source changes I love companies doing this in the public it's being very actively developed they are working on the backend of kind of like a code refactor getting a new version setup so there's a lots of active development on here and it's been great now let's get into actual invoice ninja itself and I'm going to show you how it looks in the back end here for our stripe this is our test data so this is the invoice ninja interface unless this is where most of our client stuff but this particular system is our demo system so in case you're wondering about seeing any real client information here Dewey Cheatham and Howe great law firm this law firm is the law firm and but it is a real address that's Big Beaver Road I think that actually I pulled up a Tim Horton's there's just some amusement because we have a road called Big Beaver here that is at X at 69 equipping childish and get back to the topic you can look that up though so do each even how is there's our address it nicely embeds a map and everything else so if we have to do directions to that particular client we can pretty cool and let's walk through the process of how we extract money from clients and how we give quotes and how they pay us because that's what we're here for but we're gonna start with let's give them a quote for something new quote and let's do data drops because it's easy and I have a template in here for it so data data network drops real basic you know you can set products up in all that I go in-depth on the whole thing by the way spin up the free version if you want to test any this out and just play with it I highly recommend it they have that free version it does not require a credit card on your site so if you're just curious and you're like I don't know if I should sign up use a email address if you're so concerned with it but they'd ever spam or send me junk mail or anything and I signed up with my real address and it's not because they know me they just aren't spammers so sign up with an email address you can play with the system yourself hands on without even having to download the code and like I said it's gonna well when you get the free version it is a little a few features are disabled they have the comparisons on there versus the self hosted one where everything's on so back to this so here is the Network drops walfish tested plated and this is what it looks like when you start drawing up the quote this is actually because you can customize the invoices this is what our invoices look like we have them custom you know get your logo on here kind of like to keep the theme of the orange really orange so it's got the client name that way and a little right here's the quote now let's update this quote we're gonna say they needed five data drops so you know and this is a common call we get we get a call for infrastructure and we have some pricing for installing data drops and we go out look at the look at the job where sometimes are just really simple or we have a lot of what referred to as movie add change work with existing clients and that's what this would be you know you can't say hey we just hired two more people what we realized we don't have Network drops where those two people are going to go so we'll go put this here partial deposit that is frequently a thing in here so we're gonna go four hundred bucks or partial deposit and just like that to total do it it generates the invoice now emailing the quote this hit email customize it I like to customize it an au so they have a whole lot and there's a lot of documentation here so quote from account so you can see what looks like new quote one two from LTS demo invoice inks it has our company name in here you know or data drops I like to do this because that becomes part of the email header however you're seeing there and we have a different wording that we use but it's kind of cool it's going to send them the email with an attachment with a PDF attachment so they can see it but they get to click the link and go into their client portal which I'm gonna get to here and so it's pretty straightforward but if they go in the client portal you get to see if they view the coast we're actually gonna help market is sent I'm not gonna actually send the email those email addresses don't exist it to each human house so he would be able to see it now we're gonna go view in portal so you can get their view I'm opening an incognito window so we see it exactly as a client like not logged in can't put passwords in the client portal you just do that in a custom file it's really easy to do so now here is what that looks like to them so they can see quotes sent to them and this is actually the whole client portal overall so they can see the quotes invoices documents payments payment methods they can keep payment methods on file and that's part of the stripe integration we'll get to in a second but we send in a quote this is what it looks like they go that looks good to me I approve now the approval process is only partial here the approval process is the first step the next step is paying because there's a deposit on this if there wasn't it would just be a converted quote and converted over to the invoice out so we're gonna go ahead and say pay with they can pay with a new card and we'll bring them up to put in a card in but they can keep cards on file and this is where the stripe integration comes in so it with the visa card on file and we've got all demo numbers in this so it goes through the process and pretends to pay and now so you can walk through it so now they've done that successfully applied claimant awesome so now they have this invoice actually I did this twice because I was playing with it earlier so now they actually have two of them for the same amount because I only sent one but this is the one they approved so there are two of them in here that's what looks like a nurse I'm wearing get this out of the way and we'll go ahead and just refresh this page it's converted now please note i right-clicked on this portal and each person gets their own link so you can see which one they viewed so if you emailed the quote to multiple multiple people that you can see who viewed it and who did it if you little mouse over here viewed on July 11th this person just sent two not viewed so there's no activity on there and if we go over to view the client here we look at the activity when you scroll down the activity you can see a Dewey Cheatham check out Beauty invoice here you know an entered payment and gives you a payment reference for this to let me know they entered a $400 payment and away we go and you can see how to play with this over time going back and forth with the payment system on it you can go to payments and see how the money came in and the source of the payment they paid with Visa on file so that's all cool let's look over at the invoice so the invoices are partially paid so amount and balance is 400 so now we know you know can get started on the project we know we get the money it came in because we can confirm the payment here and by the way all this is sending me an email for each step of the way you can choose it so it notifies you when someone approves a quote when someone pays for the deposit which is of course our cue to go all right it's paid and get started and when you set this up there's settings so you can set so whoever sending it because one of the ways we do things here at Lawrence systems is each one of our staff sends out their own quotes and follows up on their own projects that way when I send like Cory you do a lot of wiring jobs he goes bids it quotes it sends it email comes on his phone I'm completely out of the loop on the process that's an important part about the business is not having any barriers where unless it's some larger approval amount Sanders there's limits I have set that I Cory knows that say hey if it's this much I want to review it or I in general like him to have one of the other staff review the larger quotes but for small jobs like David data drops that are just common move ahead change orders that come in gets the call puts it in there whatever the rules are for the deposit in terms for that particular client puts it in and Cory's gonna get all the emails on his email account to say alright they approved and then he schedules a date to get the work done really straightforward and simple and that's one of the reasons we like it now at the end of it all once we're done we're going to go ahead and a you know send the invoice to him in his final balance and does the email its invoice and they can pay the final balance so email invoice but why might you hit save and voice because that's actually going to do it so they can go back to their dashboard in final pay at once the work is done let's come back over to client dashboard and show you how that looks again partial they can click on the invoice will click on this one the 13y thinks the one we just did and will enter a new car to show you how that looks and we'll put in a credit card number with an expiration date of now this is a demo card number you can do this and because our stripe for this because this is our demo account is sitting there now this is what's kind of cool is it gives them the option to save this card on file with us so we'll go ahead and pay now and save the card on file so they now have $400 it was declined in test mode but using non test card that's interesting at it that is listed as a test card right on there let's try this card I'm curious you all right successfully applied payment down there now the clients can do with the payment methods they can see cuz I didn't save that one you can I have a credit card on file right here now the other payment options it doesn't let me unlock this I believe in the demo mode are the ACH so we have that enable dinars too because it also strikes supports doing bank transfers and they can update and have all this information on file and then they can say auto bill payment method and then we can set up Auto billing for them let's get over to the X that's the other side of important aspect as well you have an MSP we have a recurring invoicing we do for clients and this is how that method is handled you go in here we let the clients up a payment method and we do make sure there's a password on portals for that lets go actually and view this client and we're gonna hit view in stripe to bring you to straight page now it actually takes me stripe and gives an error when I do this because it says hey this client is in test mode so I just brought you to the with the straight page looks like this is what we get to see this is an important aspect is how billing works with stripe so with stripe and billing we did not have the credit card credit card did not pass to our hands that is an important aspect stripe handles it they've done the integration proper with it boy sends you to hand it off to stripe to do the payment and then hold onto it for ized billing so this keeps you out of the middle of it now I mean steel obviously there's still the potential somewhere to break into our system and hijack it and change where the payment pages were but they wouldn't get existing credit card numbers because all's that we can see is the last couple digits of the card number and it has a fingerprint unique ID that's created for it their postal code whether or not it packed past the CVC or zip check and we can remove parts for them so if the client doesn't want to manage it themselves or just says keep take that card off file we can come in here and delete it if they have an ACH that shows up in here as well and I think it's kind of nice right here's how we can add it for them of if they needed help doing it but the nice thing is with invoice India and the integration stripe it'll let them add all their bank account and it does the bank account verification where it puts in stripe handles this part where it puts into two deposits and then they go back to their client portal and from there they will go and do those verifications and confirm that is their bank account and in fact they own it so it's actually really a convenient form and once they do that they can set up the billing for it now let's go over in close too many windows getting open let's look at what we do for like recurring billing we'll go over here and we'll do new recurring invoice now this is where you can choose how they want to do it and this is an important aspect you want them to have to opt in or opt out of it so please arrange this with your client don't just build them and tell them to do it you know you work it out with them how you want to do the billing and information in there so like let's just put I have a template except for MSP workstation what we're going to do unit cost we'll just say it's you know fifty bucks a month for this services and you have five workstations there's your 250 a month that we would bill you start date end date use client terms for the due date for it where we'd all you must pretend we've already arranged with the client they want to do this and this will allow it to actually once they go through here and check the box when we do this we're going to mark ready yep all right and it's gonna it's pending and we've the system's actually set to automatically do it so it'll say send on July 11th century in Senate an hour was gonna go fire this off and send out that invoice to him and when they go over to the portals we're gonna go over here and refresh because if we weren't well let's click on a place that will be enough to refresh it now they got this recurring invoice option and they can enable or disable audible this is they opt in and out so it's currently enabled and they have a payment method on file so it'll automatically build them and if we make any adjustments to this we always notify the clients and they still get this as an attachment as an email with a PDF attachment so they can see the invoice um but at any time they can go into their client portal and enable or disable automatic payment for me or update the payment method and file and then the system is gonna notify us for it so this whole workflow works really well for us it's worked well for our clients just making life easier is the goal for a lot of this as workflow and other side notes about the client portal they can come see the history of it so this helps so much with reconciliation by having clients have that portal and being able to reconcile things without bugging me so probably a great way I would say to do that so I it's important that we they you know what was paid and what wasn't paid in debt sometimes comes as a confusion to people but the other advantage of this and the of being able to have my staff quickly create invoices is and we're gonna actually go ahead back over to recurring invoices I don't want this to go out so I'm gonna delete it delete recurring invoice are you sure absolutely I don't want a bunch of notices going out to email addresses with invoice and payment options um but we do the invoicing really fast like this so we're gonna take another client real quick like Bob here and just kind of walk you through the same thing so we're gonna send an invoice to Bob and this is what also allows us to enter a past when we're doing this so fixed outlook problem and we don't do just MSP we have a lot of Reg fixed lines matter of fact we have a law firm that we've tried to get on MSP numerous times we've even said it would save them money but instead so far this year they've spent $7,000 in support fees and by the way each of their support piece are usually like this half hour or we're nice to them because they're they they're really easy problems all the time we've done quarter Billings we just do half our billing minimum but we're nice to them we'll do a quarter billing and this is a lot of what we do fix outlook whatever you do you know deleted too many emails this is the problem with lawyers any emails funny that you can't get a lawyer to put you on retainer but we like them as a client we're just always amazed at how much they spend with us for like you could save money we're being as honest as possible but they're not ready for that but this is what we do to quickly email it invoices client and because this system is so simple like that and for each person logged in I can look at all of my text and see what invoices are now how they were sent out and this whole process of ease of payment for people makes a lot easier now sometimes we do it a little bit different we have clients that we know don't like paying invoices after it works done and you can set terms in there like they must pay upfront and we'll go no problem I'll certainly help you what do you want me to do and we'll do this and we'll fire off the invoice and we'll let them know they have to pay it as soon as they pay it it's done so this whole system like I said it's really works really well it's really smooth the stripe integration is nice being able to manage your clients in the stripe dashboard to see what they have on file without having to have their credit card number that's the important part so you're not just collecting I don't have this big collection so in the terms of like a data breach which is always the worst case scenario but that you hope never happens but you always should plan for making sure that you aren't the one in possession of any more data than you need I think it's hugely important is one of the reasons we chose like the stripe system like I said - you can integrate PayPal when you're setting up the payment gateways in here and we did that too so some people go I just like paying things out of PayPal that's fine what it does when they send it invoice out to someone and they want to pay it and there's PayPal involved on me bring up an invoice when I go to pay it it says MasterCard on five credit card it'll actually show two more well one because stripe it'll say setup Bank ACH and the other option sisters pay with PayPal and oldest land on the PayPal page for them to log in to their PayPal portal and it does the same thing but that I know of there's no easy way there's no integration currently with PayPal to do any of the recurring payments and hold the card on file like there is with stripe they actually when you're setting up the payment gateway and invoice ninja over here and we go to the online payments we pay straight Braintree cardless is when you're doing the billing those are the current supported ones for that did I know a paypal doesn't have an option part but PayPal owns Braintree and I think that's why there's not a PayPal option so because they own Braintree instead of doing it to PayPal you just use it in your brain tree account so assuming that's how it goes and there are options in check legalities of this but you can add fees if you want so you can set up a fief when they use certain types of payment because maybe there's a gateway or origination fee or something you want to add to their it does have that option there we don't do it nature of our businesses we don't add like an extra fee to use credit card versus mailing a check to us that seems like it would be I mean yes there is a fee associated with stripe there are fees but for the most probably don't see we don't pass that directly along to the client as like a line item because mailing us a check would slow the process down and someone goes oh I'm going to save money doing the check and that would just a little whole thing down be a pain so we just it's worked into our margin its way that's fixed well let's give an overview of how we use them boy Sencha to collect money and you know and of course on the side how you can book me it all that goes into the stripe and PayPal but the whole process is you don't makes us easy to interact with and I'm gonna be mailing this videos who people email me randomly going I have my credit card number or calling it in or you know because some people we meet on YouTube are a little strange so you sometimes call us to just want to start reading credit card number to get going with us I'm like I appreciate the excitement there's a process fill the form out we'll send you a link you can pay online and these are the ways that you'll pay online so they're going to be a recurring customer we'll get you set up an invoice ninja you'll beyond the recurring invoice program if your one-off customer you're more likely to go through you can book me just for that service but some of the starts with you can book me they become recurring customers that we then go in and add to invoice in ship because we have a recurring engagement with them or they end up signing up for one of our managed service plans and we take care of up in there but like I said it's important that you have easy ways to interact with your clients and to collect payment because payments are what keeps the business blood flowing alright thanks and I'll leave links to all you know everything I talked about I have no offer codes for you can book me your stripe I do have an affiliate link if you want to sign up with it for invoice ninja but it's free and alls it really does is let them know if you signed up via one of my videos and if you buy they tossed me a small with they're only charging $12 a month it's not it's not that much money that I get from it but it is appreciated anything to help out the channel alright thanks thanks for watching if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content hit that subscribe button and nabela icon and maybe YouTube will sense you and notice when we post if you want to hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video head over to Lauren systems comm where we offer both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you want to throw at us also if you want to carry on the discussion further ahead over to forums at Lauren systems comm where we can keep the conversation going and if you want to help the channel out in other ways we offer affiliate links below which offer discounts for you and a small cut for us that does help fund this channel and once again thanks again for watching this video and see you next time