Effortlessly Create Your Time and Material Invoice Template for Public Relations

Time and material invoice template for Public Relations

hang on let me go back to showing there how are we looking now oh if you could just just hop back one that would be awesome back one more one more oh there we go there we go all right i just wanted to quickly quickly cover that again so um first we're going to go over the um setting up jobs uh as we mentioned um then we're going to cover the the process for invoicing fixed price jobs time materials jobs and retainers uh individually one by one and then we're gonna look at multi-job invoicing in fact it might even actually cover the retainers in the multi-job invoicing and just combine those so that's the order that we're gonna review things today cool fancy uh well shall i make you presenter you can go for it oh my gosh so exciting mark okay so let me know are you able to see my screen with the system up here yeah i do i see your demo system there okay great i'm going to zoom in a little bit that's a little bit better okay all right great um so yeah so a couple things that i want to mention really quickly uh if you do want to go into the support site the help site i do recommend it up in the top of your your system there the little question mark you can go into the training area uh you can also contact support you can see what's new that's where you're gonna find the recordings of all these webinars you can enter feature requests uh we do read those and we we do take them very seriously and we do catalog them you know we you know organize them into patterns and see what people are asking for so they don't just go into the ether um they actually are reviewed uh very closely and then within the training sites we can go into the fp library which is a great resource i believe it's called the mother of how to's and um here you're going to find areas that are focused on different modules and different features and all the different resources that are available on you know including invoices here and a variety of different things on invoices and then also you know all the training videos just lumped together down at the bottom they are in the separate areas as well so i do recommend checking out that help and support site it's a good resource for a lot of information and emma is actually the one who uh creates most of the documentation that goes into that support site she does a fantastic job of it she does it very very quickly as well pretty much the the day something is released you can find documents on it which is great um okay so without further ado let's jump in we're we're going to be going for about an hour today we try to end it at 45 minutes but i usually i usually use the full hour and i have a i have a suspicion that i will today so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go through the setup of each of these individual individual jobs and as i mentioned earlier i'm going to i'm going to plow through this pretty quickly here but i want to focus on a couple key points so let's start with the easiest let's look at the concept of setting up a time materials job and my example here we're going to be setting up a time materials job we're going to be doing it for uh our client um let's say canon and we're going to estimate about 10 000 worth of work for them but we're going to just bill them uh you know based on the time and expenses that we incur so i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to choose to add an estimate i'm going to call this the time and materials example job choose our type we'll say that this is just a brochure make it really simple uh company this is for our clients not conan it's canon there we go not doing it for economy of the barbarian uh select our contact our client ae fills in rate category fills in if it doesn't you can select it put in the description in this description you may want to include how you intend to bill for the job so you know this will be billed 50 upfront and 50 upon completion and having that you know how you intend to build the job in the description is very helpful if you if you do intend to send this estimate to a client and you don't want that in the description uh then you can always add it in afterwards after you produce the client-facing version go ahead and put that in but that's really helpful in knowing how you intend to bill for this job we're going to make it really simple we're going to say that this job is due end of august and we're going to be doing some design work and some copywriting and uh you'll say we'll say that's about it we're also going to have some expenses we're going to be purchasing some printing for example submit that and then we'll put in our values now we intend to build this as time and expenses so the values that we have here are are an estimate for the clients and they are truly in this case meant to be an estimate because we're going to build them for time materials but we're going to have about 50 hours here 50 hours here uh and then maybe we're estimating about a thousand dollars worth of printing uh we're gonna mark that up by 20 so go ahead and save that and i'll choose then to add the job so i now have a job with a value of you know eleven hundred uh eleven thousand two hundred dollars ten thousand of that is our services and um eleven uh sorry one thousand two hundred of that is external expenses so there's our value we're just going to invoice that as we incur work against it setting up a time materials job is really simple you're just putting in an estimate if you have a value that you need to share with a client if you don't then the estimate would just be for turtle purposes for your own reference and then you just bill it as as you track time which we'll see in just a minute the next thing that's um and actually my apologies i just realized that i was i was actually completely cross-pollinating my my different types of of jobs here when i put in that description so my bad for um for confusing that i was talking about uh putting in a time materials job and i entered a description that would imply a fixed fee so jumbling house up a little bit i do apologize the description in this case um you know would be something related to time materials so if you did want to put in a description that relates to how you intend to bill for the job then at this being time materials you know this job will be billed monthly for time and expenses incurred i'm glad i caught that because that wouldn't have made a lot of sense so i'm putting a description as to how we intend to build for the job one other thing that i want to point out actually since we're looking at this edit job page is the job category now you are going to find this drop down on the ad estimate page and we'll see it in just a second but this is very useful and it's actually something i highly recommend that you use the default values are what you see here so anyone who's on this webinar and your function point system you should see by default retainer time materials and fixed price you might actually see fixed price plus expenses i think is the default in our client systems so in this case we're going to choose it to be a time materials job and what this does is it just allows you to search based on this category and know how you intend to bill for this job so that's something that you'll probably want to include is the job category and again it has those default values already so you don't need to do anything you can start using that field right away and this is a time materials job so the accurate description is in submit that and that is our time materials job entered i then want to put in a fixed price job and what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to copy the estimate from this and just show some of the variances some of the differences but there aren't too many you know the first job we had a case we're going to be building time materials we estimated about ten thousand dollars of services uh you know to twelve hundred dollars worth of expenses i'm looking at the estimate for that job and i'm going to choose to copy it and in this case i'm going to call it fixed price example job fixed price i hear a lot of different terms for that project base progress billing um there's a lot of different words i hear or terms i hear thrown around to to describe this but it's really just a case where you have a dollar value that you've proposed to the client and you intend to build that dollar value regardless of the work you put in now if there's a scope of work change halfway through when the client requests a whole new you know aspect of the project that wasn't originally agreed upon maybe that fixed price or that that project fee adjusts halfway through but for the most part you have a dollar amount that you've agreed upon with the client and you intend to build that amount with the client usually at different intervals i would say this is the most common type of invoicing i see for most agencies uh these days is fixed price or project base so we're going to call this our fixed price example let's say in this case we're doing it for a different client we're doing it for um let's say this one i do a bunch of work with here let's say north shore auto group so we think with north shore auto group choose our contact the description in this case would be the one i put in first so this will be billed you know let's say 50 up front and 50 upon completion let's use my typos there which you can right click all is handy for myself category i'm going to be choosing fixed price say the delivery dates the same click submits and we've simply just copied the estimate so i didn't have to go through and put values in again maybe in this case let's say it's going to be a 15 000 fixed price plus expenses so we're going to have 75 hours here 75 hours there if the expense in this case is going to be maybe about 500 and we're gonna mark it up by a hundred percent coming out to a thousand so we now have fifteen thousand dollars of services and a thousand dollars of external expenses we're gonna build fifty percent up front and fifty percent upon completion save that and we'll choose to add job now the last thing that we're going to do is we're going to set up a retainer job and before i do that i just want to talk about the different ways of managing retainers really quickly you know there's a lot of different ways of managing retainers and a lot of different scenarios for agencies that i hear about all the time you might have a really simple retainer like the one i'm going to create in our example today where there's just simply a flat dollar amount you build a client each month and it includes a set amount of services and the set type of services that you provide for the client i'm going to use like a social media seo type of retainer other cases you know you might have a very large retainer i've worked with agencies that are billing clients a very substantial amount every month or every quarter and that client is able to request any number of jobs from them in that time ranging from the you know the full spectrum of the services that the agency provides and we do have videos that show you the different ways of setting up these retainers you know simple retainers or other termite coin to while back robust retainers depending on on the structure that you need but there's a very very common theme in the setup of these retainers and that is that in order to be able to invoice them effectively and efficiently you need to have the estimated value equal the amount that you intend to build upon the billing period of the retainer whether that be monthly or quarterly i never really see anything else i never see annually or or or six months i always see monthly or quarterly usually monthly but the value of the estimate needs to equal the amount that you intend to bill usually every month or every quarter so in that case we're going to go ahead and we're going to choose to add an estimate and let's do it for uh great atlantic insurance and this is going to be called the retainer example job and let's say this is like a social media marketing retainer and again it's important um that you will choose a type let's just say social media but it's important that we choose the category to reflect what how we intend to build this what's a retainer the delivery date is the end of the contract so we'll say that's the last day of the year everything else looks good and then we'll keep this really simple we'll just choose a single service we'll just use client management in this case we might even rename that on the next page we might even just call this like for example social media marketing management and this is you know retainer services and let's say that this retainer is two thousand dollars per month and our rate is a hundred bucks so we're gonna have about you know 20 hours per month coming up to 2 000 per month for this retainer again the estimated value must equal the amount that you intend to build every single month save that and then add job and again you might want to put in the description how you intend to build that and when you intend to build it can be helpful for you later on so we now have three jobs that we've gone ahead and set up in a way that allows us to invoice them effectively moving forward and that's what we're going to view next is is the process of individually invoicing each one of these jobs before we take a look at bulk invoicing the jobs to save us time and become more efficient emma i want to check in with you any questions that i can answer on anything we've covered so far any any kind of you know questions people are raising that you think would be good to answer uh hey mark thanks for checking in yeah we haven't had questions yet which is fine um people are obviously paying detailed attention so that is wonderful uh questions are welcome and and as marcus said he'll do his best to answer if we can during the session today so thank you awesome okay so let's go ahead and let's take a look at the time and materials job and how we intend to invoice that and before i do of course we need to have some time materials so if i go to my time materials job you'll notice i'm just hovering over jobs and view and i've looked at it recently so there it is my turn my you know tnm example job here so i want to put some time against this and i want to do that pretty quickly so it's 303 50. so let's say that we've actually had this job open for a while now let's say hypothetically it's been open since the start of june so in order to make that look realistic i'm going to open up a weekly view timesheet i'm going to jump back into june let's say like the second week of june here notice i have a bunch of time in there but that's okay we'll we'll add more so i'm in the second week of june of my weekly view i have job you know 30350 so i'm just going to choose job 30350 and i'm going to say that i did some design work here and i put in uh you know 25 hours on this day and uh 12 hours on this day unrealistic but let's just say that that's what i did maybe we'll actually drop it down a little bit maybe we'll say 8 and 12 that's fine maybe actually we'll say 7. and then perhaps i also had some other work on this as well and instead of design i was working on some copywriting for five hours and three hours so i have some time against this job perhaps i have also incurred the expense as well i'm going to do that pretty quickly here we're going to add an expense to this job on the job we estimated printing to be a thousand dollars marked up to 1200 let's go ahead and let's add that expense really quickly let's say that we have purchased half of the printing from our supplier starboard custom printing they gave us a reference number for the invoice and then let's say we purchased 500 of the printing i know we've purchased 500 you know copies and a quantity is 500 the rate is one we're marking it up by 20 percent and we save very simple to add the expense so we now have some time materials against this job so if we navigate back to it we can see that we have 11 200 estimated we have 2 900 actual 8 300 left in the budget we have an invoice to anything we have a bunch of cost against the job so there's our profitability we're currently negative if we look at the financials tab it's going to show me and we've estimated 100 hours against this and we've put in 23. 100 hours coming out to 10 000 we've put in 2300 worth of work we haven't invoiced for anything yet therefore twenty three hundred dollars is currently outstanding in this time of materials job we also have a thousand dollars estimated for our printing we've purchased five hundred units at a cost our company of five hundred dollars and they a postmarkup bill over value billable value of 600. we have an invoice to anything so there's six hundred dollars outstanding on this time materials job 2900 2900 total and we want to invoice that to the client let's say it's july 1st we're invoicing at the end of the month so we want to invoice that to the client so we're going to go ahead and we're going to choose to from the jobs details page add new invoice so we're going to add an invoice for this job we're going to leave it as interim because the job is not closing you only choose final if it's the final invoice you'll ever do on this job if you're not sure when in doubt choose interim you can always close the job manually it's very easy when in doubt just leave it as interim let's say we actually invoice this job on the first of july so you know that you can invoice you can change the invoice date and that will reflect the the the different the different timesheets and expenses and actually i i should point out i put in that time in june but actually didn't backdate the expense so notice we have zero on invoice external expenses if i actually change that back to today's date notice that that changed to one on invoice external expense the so the date of the invoice is is helping you to manage that time materials job to make sure that you're you know invoicing things within a current billing period so we'll leave it as today's date actually calculate from we're going to choose either actuals or remainder from actuals this essentially does the same thing that can cause a little bit of confusion to some people way back when it actually used to be two different calculations but we had many agencies tell us that there was never a time that they were going to double bill their actuals and if they did so it's usually something that they want to have more detailed control over so you can choose actuals or remainder from actuals and the system will automatically calculate the value of all of your unbilled actuals so all of your unbilled time and expenses this is very simple you're just adding invoice tokley from actuals and select on invoice now we should get an invoice here with a value of twenty nine hundred dollars here's our twenty nine hundred dollars and it's laying out for me exactly how we're getting that value so we have fifteen hundred dollars worth of time so we're invoicing fifteen hundred we have eight hundred dollars worth of time here invoicing eight hundred six hundred dollars of expenses invoicing six hundred if i want a detailed overview of what is making up this time i can click the drop down and see those timesheets now i can select or deselect those timesheets if i should choose to do so same with the expense by default everything is selected and all i need to do is produce my client facing version and go on with my day but i can you know review the details of this if i should you know choose to do so and if i decide you know what perhaps i don't want to invoice this timesheet i just deselect it and then it's now 2200. we'll say in this case we're going to voice everything and choose to save and that is my invoice created now moving forward and we're not going to go through another time materials invoice on this job for the sake of time but moving forward if we were to add more time and more expenses against this job then the next time we go to invoice it the system is only going to fill in the value of the unbilled time and expenses so it really helps it keeps it efficient and quick and easy you just choose invoice from actuals and it automatically generates an accurate invoice which you can manipulate in any way that you choose all the way down to putting in your own custom values if you should do so if you should choose and i'm not going to click save i'm going to leave it at 2900. so the next thing we're going to we're going to look at is going to be the fixed price invoicing that's going to be a little bit easier and quicker than what we just took a look at but i want to check in any questions or anything so far oh hey mark uh yeah we got a question in just about uh you know some of these values being concerned about not wanting necessarily all of your team to be able to see all of this information and i had just typed back that uh you know if the permissions are there you should be okay but i didn't know if you wanted to add anything on that uh that idea yeah you know it's funny uh sophie was actually talking mentioning before that we started the webinar that maybe we should have a webinar just on just on permissions oh wow that worked she's she's probably got a good idea yeah i'd say so i was wondering if maybe we could just cover that in just a training video but she's probably right it might be a good idea to do a webinar on it but um emma is right you know if you have your permission set up accurately um then people will not be able to see that information and and typically you'd have to go in and you'd have to really choose to give them access to it for them to see it i mean usually by default a user has no permissions and then you need to set up their permissions and choose which set they're in so if you didn't select someone to be admin full access then they're not going to have access to the to those to most of those rates anyways you know you might give them access to billing rates which is actually something i typically recommend that you allow your your staff to see but that's a whole other conversation but in almost all cases they will not have access to cost rates and therefore cannot determine any kind of salary information or anything like that so we jump back to that job here i just want to point out really quickly that we have invoice 2900 so we can see our invoice of 2900 and looking at our financials this value at the bottom right is zero because we have invoiced all of our time and expenses so let's take a look at invoicing the fixed price job and that's really really simple if we take a look at it so our fixed price example job we can see that this job will be billed fifty percent up front and fifty percent upon completion credence invoice is very very simple all we need to do is choose to from the jobs details page add new invoice the default setup in your system is for it to default to estimated values as far as how to calculate the invoice from you can either change that as i did a minute ago for the other invoice you can also change the default but most of the time this is going to be the default that's usually what you want and it's really easy all i do is i put in a billing percentage 50 percent select that invoice and i have an invoice then of fifty percent now notice that we're looking at the same page we have fifty percent of the value of the estimate we do not have any actuals we also have fifty percent of the value of the expense and that's something a lot of agencies don't do they'll build fifty percent of the services up front but they build the expenses as they're incurred if that's the case we would just simply delete this value out and choose not to invoice it now if you want to play around with the values here you have a lot of control we can delete this out i can type in anything i want into these different fields furthermore i can also adjust the billing percentage we'll say 25 percent of estimate it fills in 25 of my estimate we'll go back to 50 click estimate puts in 50 percent delete the expense value and save the invoice so you're just putting in the billing percentage you're clicking save and then you know going on with your day very very easy not very time consuming the only thing that you need to kind of keep track of is if you are a project billing agency a fixed price agency a progress billing agency whatever you want to call it and you have your account executives you know selling a lot of different projects and different work to different clients with different billing structures you know one client you build 25 up front another is 100 upon completion another one is a third at different months then you just need to make sure that you're recording this information somewhere the estimates last job description is a good space for it and then you just need to make sure that you're on top of that so that you know you know to look at the jobs and see which one's the invoice and when and and i can actually i'm gonna actually show a little bit of how you can manage that but you just need to if you're kind of getting all over the place with how you deal up uh bill all your different clients then you're adding complexity and i understand that that's sometimes just how the agency world works so you just need to make sure you're on top of it you're putting in the descriptions when you intend a bill so that you are accurately invoicing the client when you should be so the last thing that i want to take a look at here on this particular topic is invoicing the retainer job and i'm going to show you individually i wasn't sure if i was going to but i think i am i'm going to show you the invoicing of it individually but we're also going to cover it in multi-job invoicing as well so let's take a look at the first one so let's look at our retainer job example i mentioned earlier that the most important thing about setting up a retainer whether it's a large project or campaign retainer that includes multiple jobs or if it's just an individual job you know no matter how you're doing it you need to have the estimated value of the job that you intend to use for billing be the value of the retainer whether it's monthly or quarterly this is the amount that you need to be setting up the estimate for the amount that you intend to bill we'll say in this case monthly therefore this is the amount you bill every single month when we look at the financials we're going to see you know social media marketing management and it's 20 hours and it's two thousand dollars i realize you don't have any actuals against this i'm not going to take the time to put those in because we're just looking at billing but the process for building these retainers if you have the estimated value equal the amount you intend to bill each month is very very simple it's the easiest of all all you do is from the jobs details page select add new invoice and then just simply click add invoice because the default value is a hundred percent of the estimate therefore it automatically generates an estimate for two thousand dollars now this client actually it looks as though they have some tax on there so this particular client i selected great atlantic insurance looks as though they have some tax set up set up on their on their account so we we charge tax to this big particular company perhaps based on their location so it's adding a six percent tax but aside from that it's a 2 000 subtotal on the invoice so it just generates an invoice with the value that you intend to build every single month and it's as easy as that you know you just you know add new invoice and then you don't even need to save because it saved automatically you just move on you know print your client facing version and again move on with your day because it just takes you two clicks so the next thing that we're going to take a look at is more multi-job invoicing and the process for uh you know pulling up multiple jobs all the same time based on how you build them maybe at the end of every month and then running through those multi-job invoicing processes and answering any questions that come up from those um probably hasn't been any new ones but ml check in anyways has there been any new questions that have come in that we can answer oh hey mark i think we're doing okay um we had one come in that sophie is going to answer shortly just about different invoice types but uh anyone else feel free to send in your questions but so far so good sounds good all right so the first thing that i want to touch on is time materials billing and you know i know that this isn't as common for a lot of agencies these days uh you know 10 years ago it was it was all the rage you know agencies traditionally were billing um you know based on the time that they spent on things and that's not always the case anymore but i know in a lot of agencies i speak with at least some of their work is and invoicing that can be pretty straightforward all we're doing is we're going to do a job fine and each of these processes is going to start with a job fine so we're going to do a job find for category of time materials and instead of clicking find jobs we're going to choose find active now you can be more specific and choose from your statuses and i have a whole bunch in my system but a really easy way to go about this is just choose the category and select find active here's a list of all of my active timer materials billing jobs and there's 13 of them and you know some some people on this call are probably thinking yeah you know that's probably a third of the jobs we have which is about a third of the jobs i have in my system and that makes sense other agencies you know your other people on this webinar are probably looking at that and thinking you know we have 13 jobs coming every hour so there's a wide spectrum of you know how many active jobs you might have so i understand that this might not be exactly the the length of the list that you would see but the process is the same so looking at these jobs we're looking at a at a default column setup if you have never customized the columns in your system and you do a job find then this is exactly what you're going to see this is showing us the clients the name of the job the type the status the due date and then financial values estimated actual being the value of time and expenses the variance between your estimated and your actual how much you've invoiced the client so far and then a balance outstanding comparing how much you've invoiced the client with the value of the work that you've done so where we see a negative number it's just letting us know that we've invoiced in this case twelve hundred dollars less than the work that we've done but there's also some cases where it's a zero because we've invoiced for everything there's no outstanding unbilled work and then actually you could see a plus here if you've invoiced for more than the value of the work that you've done which is probably not something that you'll see in a time materials example but it might be some it actually will be something that you'll see in the case of a fixed price where you're you know billing up front you will have invoice more than the value of the work that you've done but what we want to do now is we want to we want to generate invoices for all these jobs and we want to do it quickly we want it to take us like you know three four minutes uh so that we can generate those invoices and then and then move on we don't want to have to go through and you know spend hours doing all this invoice we want to be quick and easy so we produce the list and then from the top we choose batch invoice ad now it's going to ask you for a name i'll be honest the name doesn't really come into play all that much so usually you know usually what you're going to want to do is put a date on it so we're just going to call this a time and materials uh july batch keep it simple these are interim invoices and we're going to calculate from actuals again either actuals or remainder from actuals is going to count is going to you know calculate the value of all of your own build time and expenses so we're going to choose to add batch invoice on the next page it's really just an overview you shouldn't really need to do anything here there's some stuff around accounts receivable i'm not really going to get too much into the accounting stuff but you know most of the time you have a single accounts receivable if you have different accounts receivables for different companies then you can use the company accounts receivable accounts so if you have companies in different countries and you have different ar accounts for those then you can select to use the specific er accounts for their locations for the most part most agencies on the most people listing this webinar you don't really need to do anything on this page you just click next at jobs to batch now this then shows us a list of all these jobs and it shows us the amounts we're looking at a second ago but this invoice amount is how much you intend to invoice right now now you can add them one by one but what i usually do is i hit add all and then i look at what the values are so i select that all and i've now invoiced twelve hundred dollars for traffic at new package design forty four ninety seven 97.50 for branson airways and so on and so forth but then i have zero dollars for online survey invitation i don't need a zero dollar invoice let's get rid of that one i also have zero dollars for display for galaxy notes let's get a get rid of that one too and i have zero dollars for this time time material example job because we already invoiced that one on its own so let's just get rid of that and those are now gone and then let's say that for some reason i know that's the winter driving school program brochure we're invoicing 57.70 but i know that some weird stuff happened with that job and i don't i don't trust this number or i know that it's too high and i need to do something with it it's very easy i can choose to edit and i get the full invoicing edit option right from this page without needing to move anywhere and i can just choose okay you know what we spent a bunch of time in research that we can't bill for so let's just go ahead and not bill for that time unselect it and then save and close and this allows you to go through each of these jobs and edit exactly what you intend to invoice all within this page without having to move different areas of the system so you have full editing options full invoicing options from this single location once we're satisfied with what we have here we choose finish adding to batch and our invoices are now created now we now have all of these invoices in a batch and if we look at the batch so notice how we're looking at invoice 146 and i can produce this invoice this is a single invoice so i can produce this invoice this is a single invoice to one client for twelve hundred dollars but i can look at the batch and see all the different invoices for these and i can navigate to them and i can produce a pdf for all of them but you can also choose to notify selected if i select notify selected it's going to send an invoice out to every single client that i've that i've selected here every single every single invoice i've created all of those clients are going to get an email with the with the pdf invoice attached maybe a link to the portal if you're using it with the content that you have here you can also drop in a template if you have a template that you prefer that can pull in first names and last names so there's you know it's really easy in a couple clicks you can send all of those invoices out you save it as a note for having a record that that invoice has gone out and you click send and it goes now i'm like 99.9999999999 sure that every single invoice we have in this demonstration system is completely but i'm still not gonna hit send just in case so i'm gonna hit cancel there but the point is that you can send them all all out instantly if you're not comfortable with that maybe you're new to the system or you just haven't tested that out yet and you're not quite comfortable you can easily go to each of these invoice invoices produce the pdf and then send them over to the client and you can also post all of them right from here too if you are syncing with fba account so this batch invoicing it you know facilitates an invoicing process that gives you full control over the detail the invoice allows you to send it out to all the clients right as soon as you're done and it can i've i've heard stories of agencies saying that you know they were having an invoicing process that literally took them a day or two days of uh you know of a person's time all down to maybe 15 minutes so you know it's saving them you know eight to 12 hours every single month which is you know a huge benefit so really good processes for this and it also applies to the retainer invoicing which i'm going to show in just a second but before i do i must want to check in any questions any of this stuff so far uh hey no we are doing well so far thank you uh oh well we actually we just got one in that we may as well uh ask since we're on the right screen melissa just asking about the post button if you could maybe speak to that briefly yeah for sure so whether we're posting the invoice we're looking at it again we are looking at invoice 146 and we can see the details of that invoice but we can also see the batch that it belongs to we can post this invoice which tells the system that the next time a sync is run with quickbooks that this invoice will go over to quickbooks if we do it from the batch we post all these invoices which we'll go ahead and do actually it's just letting me know i wasn't sure if i'd actually set up the system to integrate with quickbooks and it looks as though i haven't but if i were to choose to post all those invoices then it would post all the invoices with just one click and the next time we run a sync with quickbooks all these invoices would go over automatically so the next thing that we're going to take a look at is the retainer multi-job invoicing and this is actually just as easy as what we just looked at but it's a little bit different so if we were to do a job find and just like before we use the category select retainer and select find active so here we have a list of four retainers and let's say that in these cases we're billing the client the estimated amount monthly so we have you know two thousand dollar seo retainer here a two thousand dollar social media retainer here we have a ten thousand dollar retainer for our client safeway and we have another two thousand dollar retainer here for great atlantic insurance another social media marketing retainer so let's say that in this example we're invoicing these clients these amounts every single month but any any expenses that are incurred are additional on top of the monthly retainer so you're building the client additional for any expenses incurred so the process is similar what we're going to do is up with the top select batch invoice ad in this case we're going to call this you know retainer july 2015 batch and we're going to leave it as estimated because the estimated amount equals the amount we intend to build every month select add batch invoice leave this page as it is select next and then we have our four jobs so we're going to choose to add all because we do intend to invoice them for their amounts so we have two thousand two thousand ten thousand two thousand but what we need to see is do any of these have expenses that need to be billed so first let's look at mac and co seo retainer so choose to edit and i can see that i do not have any external expenses so i say cancel let's look at the nag smm retainer for july edit that and again i do not have any expenses you will i'm not seeing any external expenses here so we'll cancel that let's look at the safeway monthly retainer and i can see that i do have external expenses and do i have any unbilled external expenses and i do have one entered today printing a 5 000 new area flyers or somehow in relation to this retainer now when i look at this i can see that the total value of my expenses is four thousand dollars we've previously invoiced 2500 so but there's a value here that hasn't been invoiced and we can see that there's one expense the date of the expense of the date of the invoice allows this to be a very easy process for you there are expenses against this job that i am not seeing and i'm not seeing because i've already built them in previous months any invo any expense that has not been billed will be shown here and all i need to do is just go through and check click the box do i see the words external expenses if i do select to see if there are any that are unbilled and there's one so i'm going to choose to invoice it and it bumps the invoice from 10 000 to 11 500. save and close and then we can check our last retainer and there are no external expenses so we cancel that so you know it's a bit of a process you need to go through each one and you need to make sure that there are no unbilled external expenses but if there are they will be displayed to you very clearly you just click the box click save and it adds it to the invoice for that retainer click finish adding to batch and we've generated invoices for those four separate retainer jobs we can then again produce our pdf of each one individually or notify each client individually of the of the invoices and have that got sent out to them automatically so again it's just about you know setting up those retainers so that you can build them efficiently every month by having the estimated value equal the amount you intend to bill each month there are very very effective ways of reporting on the monthly rep on the monthly performance of each retainer there are filters you can use on the jobs financials tabs for each job that's going to tell you exactly how the retainer performed every single month as well as overall performance for the lifespan of the retainer and you're going to see that in the videos that i was mentioning that we'll we'll send out uh links to in the follow-up email so just know that having the the value of the estimate equal the amount you tend to bill each month uh it allows you for efficient invoicing but it's also going to help you out in reporting on the monthly performance or or quarterly performance if that's a bill of each retainer that you have so it's effective if you set it up correctly and invoicing them is pretty quick and pretty easy the last thing i want to touch on uh is is why why you traditionally cannot batch invoice project based or you know fixed fee jobs but some some methods and some tools that are at your disposal to still make it a little bit quick and easy before i do that any questions on the retainer batch invoicing or anything we've covered in the last few minutes uh hey mark yeah we've had a few questions about retainers um making me think that it might be worth maybe adding to a future series uh some retainer-based subjects i've offered to one person who's reached out already uh to send some links to documents videos because there are different ways you can do it the question was about you know do i need to do a job each month for the billing uh or do you know can i keep the same job for the billing and uh we know that there are there are lots of options there so no specific question for you to answer your question um but it might be worth considering doing a retainer series and anyone if you want links to any of that retainer type stuff uh just let me know and i will uh make sure we email you that stuff sounds good um yeah you know as i mentioned at the start there are a lot of different ways to um you know to cut this pie of retainers i was going to use it i was going to use an animal related analogy but then i realized emma is a huge animal lover as am i and she would have been upset that's that's good mark i'm glad you know where your vegan bread is buttered that's very good you got it um yeah so you know there's a lot of different ways to manage those retainers and there are effective methods in function point to manage each different type that you might have you know the question was asked do i need to have a job each month the answer is really just it depends on you you know having a job for each month allows you for quicker reporting at a glance you know instant view into how each month is performed but it means that you need to close and open a job every single month and you typically would preload them for the entire year so that opening and closing process is pretty simple but it still needs to be done whereas if you do not open up a job every single month and you just have one that just sits there and you just bill every month you time track to it every month and it's the same job that you use all the time that means no opening and closing but it means that you need to apply date filters when you're wanting to report on the performance of the monthly retainer so there's some different scenarios there and there are some plus and minuses of the different options um and and the video kind of outlines those those different options and you can decide which one works best for you uh so you know in the ten minutes or so that we have left uh i want to i want to touch on the the project based you know i use project based and fixed fee billing interchangeably because i hear those all the time you know why you typically can't batch invoice those but what you can do to help you out anyways so i'm going to do a job find for category of fixed price and i'm going to click find active and i can see that i have 13 fixed price jobs here let's see i'm just kind of looking at the values and i think for most of them it looks as though the value of the work that we've done is less than the value of the invoice which is actually not always the case uh i mean our our one example that we created earlier today is a common thing that you'll see let's put that at the top here here's our fixed price example job notice that we have you know 16 000 estimated we have no actuals we've already invoiced the client 7 500. and 7 500 was half of the 15 000 of internal services and that's 7 500 more than the work that we've done and that's something that you're going to see you're going to see positive values here because you're typically invoicing something up front before you've done any work therefore the amount of the invoice is more than the amount of the actuals but kind of back to the point of why you often can't use the batch invoice here and or why why it's a little bit tougher it's because usually you're not invoicing these based on time you're invoicing them based on deliverables so you might have in one job you're invoicing 50 percent up front you're invoicing 25 upon a milestone and another 25 upon another milestone and then plus any other scope work adjustments will be billed you know uh upon completion so you know there and you might have other jobs that are completely different scenarios so therefore there's no stagnant value whether it be the estimate or the actual that equals the amount you intend to bill at certain time intervals so that means you really need to you know look at each job independently and typically invoice them on their own now what you could do is you could use this list to assist you in that and you can do that by you know managing the so let's choose to manage the columns and let's add and subtract some things that uh that we may need or may not so first of all i'm going to take out the edit button because i don't need that on the list i'm going to add in the job category and i'm going to add in the job description and because i'm zoomed in on the page that actually might cause one of the columns to get cut off we'll see sometimes when you zoom in to make it bigger for the webinar and then you add in a column that can have a large amount of text it might cut off a little bit of it but we'll see about that in just a second what else do i need um let's say office i don't need anything i don't need for now i don't really need type either but i want status i want due dates take a project for now and then i have some financial value some standard financials you know i could also include estimated and actual hours and i could also include a host of other more advanced financial information as well if i want to see specific values around how much will be invoiced for externals versus internal services and a lot of other really cool things here but let's go ahead and let's move the job description i want it over by the due dates and then i want the category by the status so that looks pretty good save that and there we are and actually didn't cut off the last column which is which is nice i wasn't sure if it would so notice now that i have a list of all of my fixed price jobs and i can see this we build 50 percent upfront 50 upon completion that's letting me know how i intend to build for this job now you might have of course a much larger overall description and you know how you intend to build it might be embedded in there some so it might not be as clear-cut as what you're seeing here um but it can still be there and you can actually have there's another description you can put in here as well uh called the date description which i might show in a second but the point i'm trying to make this allows you to quickly skim but this is a list of all of our active fixed price jobs and i can see exactly what the estimated value was you know the fixed price compared to what we've invoiced and then from here i can make the choice of clicking on the job and then going ahead and choosing to add new invoice and doing them one by one once i had that invoice i would then jump back to the job list by clicking on the header and it brings me directly back to that list so i'm invoicing them one by one but i'm using this setup to quickly jump back to a list which tells me what to build generate the invoice back to the list generate the invoice if you really wanted to you could do a batch invoice ad and you would just need to be a little bit on top of things so for example i might produce that job list in another tab so i can come back to it and then in this case i'm going to call this you know fixed price uh july 2015 batch the calculate from doesn't really matter because i'm going to have to you know edit all of them anyways i'm going to choose to add batch invoice click next and then here i have all of them and i would just go through and say okay well um you know i have my fixed price example job they default to be organized by um by creation so that's why it's at the bottom there and let's say i know that i want to build a second fifty percent of this so i would choose to add that in i'd edit it and i'd say fifty percent of estimates maybe a hundred percent of the expense save and close and that's an invoice for this job 8 500 in this case and i would just go through and invoice them all from this page and then when i get to you know the corporate website job well how do i what do i need to build for this i have no idea there's nothing on this page just letting me know so in that case i can review back my jobs list or if i add it in here i believe that you can see it in this description box here as well so that allows you you know to add them in if you've put it in the description view exactly what you should be billing and then you know manipulate the invoice to be the value that you need save and close and then that invoice is created so you know the point i'm trying to make is that there's no kind of quick and easy it's not like okay well everything is 100 of estimate or 100 of actuals uh you know each one is going to be different but you can go through and you can add each one uh you know edit it review the description change the values save and close and then move on to the next so this is still a really effective page for being able to do a lot of individual invoicing quickly and manipulating each one as you go along so i'd recommend you know for something like this give it a try at the end of a month you know produce all the jobs based on category in a list add the batch invoice go through them one by one and see if that if that saves you some time it probably will if if you if you have descriptions that help you and let you know what you need to be invoicing you'll probably save a little bit of time and you'll probably like this interface because i feel like it works really really well any any questions on that fixed price overview at all um not specifically to that mark but um we did have a little bit of a question which i think you've addressed a bit here um with batching based on sort of category you know and that could be used in different ways and there are different ways to you know get a group of jobs um so that they all can be batched together we we had a question coming just about uh terms so you know if you've got a whole bunch of clients that are net 30 versus that 60 you could sort of batch all your net 30s and all your net 60s and it's slightly off topic i know but um hopefully i'm not throwing you off your game there by by bringing that up yeah you know that's a good question actually you know i'm not sure i'd have to kind of experiment and see here so i'm not saying because that's a good point yeah that's might have different terms so right we were to i looked into it sorry not to interrupt you but i'm i offline i went and looked and if you do a batch uh once the batch is created you can go and edit individual invoices within the batch and change the terms um but you know if you had like half and half that you were going to have to go change it may be better to do a batch based on you know which terms they were going to use that's a good point um i'm just taking a look here okay and seeing if the terms i'm seeing them here looking to see if you can establish them beforehand yeah no yeah they're on the invoice specifically the payment terms so um i mean it would be something you could maybe use work type or something to uh establish that because that yeah that's estimate terms yeah that's a really good point if we were if we go to the next page here there's three invoices in this batch let's let's finish it out of that yeah once you've once you're in there then you you can see your you can edit it now you can edit this individual one to change the term so i mean if you're doing that for one out of three it's not a big deal but if you had like 50 invoices in a batch and you needed to change 25 of them you may want to maybe batch based on terms as well yeah that's a really good point can you can you do a job fine based on i mean i like you said you'd have to use you'd have to use work type yeah yeah you would net that may not apply to the to the client that was reaching out but um just thought i'd throw it out there in case anyone else was wondering because when you make the batch you do pick the terms when you're making the match but it doesn't mean that if one in the batch or two in the batch need different terms you still can go change those individual ones so just thought it worth throwing that in there since we had a few minutes left here you've done very well on time today mark by the way we're still under i appreciate it yeah well you know i really thought i was going to go over i didn't say anything because you didn't rant you didn't have a rant i was waiting for one of the mark grants and you didn't rant where i expected you to rant i'm very impressed because i'm about to think about i wonder if it's going to be what i wonder if it's going to be about what i think it's going to be about but i'll i'll let you rant you're you're thinking that i'm going to talk about consistency of client billing yes that's what i thought i'm going to throw that one down really quickly and then i'm going to show something something else that i think is really valuable in fact let me show you the valuable thing first okay and then if people want to leave um so they don't have to listen to my rant and that's cool too one thing i want to mention really quickly is that sometimes when i work with agencies that have been using the system for a while just just based on how it's been used the find active button is not effective for them because they have so many jobs that are done but they haven't been closed and there's a bunch of different reasons why that might be i have 46 active jobs but i'll tell you right now function point is very effective for you if the job statuses are are managed and and providing you with a simple list of everything that's currently open and active so if you do a job fine and you [Music] you know you do find active and you see a whole bunch of stuff there that shouldn't be there and you can see that by sorting by due date or sorting by number um i was working with an agency the other day and i did a sort by number and the due date on some of them was like 2013. um so i asked them you know is this still open they said no that's been closed for years so the way to fix that is select the list to be editable and then just go ahead you know again sorted by numbers so you have all this stuff at the top and then just go ahead and change the statuses and ignore the amount of statuses i have but go ahead and you know put it to completed or closed or invoiced you know whatever status you use to mark completed jobs and just go through and get rid of all the ones that aren't actually active uh you know if you have like a couple hundred it might take you an hour most probably less maybe half an hour but it's very very beneficial to do that so you're going to want to make sure that when you do a job fine and you click find active that you don't get anything in there that's old that shouldn't be there and if you do then use the editable list view and clean it up so that was a useful tidbit one other thing i wanted to mention uh emma's prediction of my rant only going to take like 30 seconds is around around invoicing so when you're when you're you have your account executives selling new clients or when you're in conversations with existing clients there's certain things that can be up for negotiation like what are the what are the payment terms in the invoice how quickly do the clients have to pay um how much do you build up front how much you build upon completion uh are retainer expenses included or are they not are they on a separate invoice or or the same invoice the more consistent you can be the easier your life is going to be if you can you know come up with a standard operating procedure for the agency and then have other things be what you negotiate with you know think you know things other than when the client pays or how they pay or what the invoice looks like and things like that i know that this is always possible it's not always realistic if you have a huge client that is demanding certain things and it's either do what they say or don't work with them i i get that but if at all possible if you can if you can organize your billing and make it consistent and and maybe it might take you a couple of years to do so just as you renegotiate contracts with clients just try to you know corral them all into a similar billing structure your life is going to be so much easier and this is a huge problem i see facing so many different agencies especially agencies that are somewhat new and have only been around for four or five years and have you know so many different and they've allowed clients to kind of dictate how they build it it can get pretty tough so uh just a little bit of a rant there's something i recommend well that was that wasn't as ranty as i was hoping for but it was good i still feel like my you know my rant itch has been scratched so that's nice thank you the last thing i want to do is just run a quick poll uh you know this is the third webinar of our fp expert webinar series which is running in cycles so the next one is the fb accountants and then the entire series is going to run again immediately so every two weeks is a web there's a webinar on wednesday and it's going to continue to run the topics might change in you know after the next cycle based on requests we're getting from people uh we might do something additional to that but uh you know we're learning as we go here i want to make sure that these webinars valuable for you i want to make sure that you're you know getting good information out of them so uh just a quick poll uh and then you'll feel free to respond to the follow-up email and just and just let us know if you have any requests um for anything else that you'd like to see so or changes or adjustments or uh you know other rant requests if you have them