Create Your Time and Material Invoice Template for Technical Support Effortlessly

Time and material invoice template for Technical Support

so um awesome so had a cooworker look over at me and I wanted to make sure that I wasn't doing something wrong um okay so uh first thing I want to mention really quickly is up at the top right of your system uh in what I call the super navigation bar you're go you're going to see a couple different areas and one I want to show really quickly is just the training area there's also access to our old webinars um and and I'm actually would I'd like that to link to let's see here we go so so if you select that it'll bring you to our old webinars where you can watch all the recordings and also the upcoming webinar schedule where you can register for new webinars so check that out and then there's some other items as well like you know feature requests and contact support and things like that okay so let's jump in so the first thing we're going to be looking at is setting up jobs uh in a way that will allow you to invoice effectively and there's just a couple items here that I want to mention that are are really important when you're when you're setting up new jobs as anyone that's used the system for a while knows you know the first step in adding a job whether you select that job or whether you select that estimate it's going to bring you to the estimate ad page it's really you know the same estimates and jobs are essentially the same thing for most companies um it's the information is interchangeable the estimate name becomes a job name the estimate type becomes the job type the contact becomes the job contact and so on and so forth so you don't have to rekey any of that information but there is a very important field here and I feel this category Now by default these will be the values that you'll find in your system retainer time materials and fixed price if you don't see those three options in your system it's either be it's because someone customized it it could have been um you know if you've been using system for many years it could have been you know a long time ago that that that was done or um you know could have been during your deployment recently if you're newer to the system uh but this is what you should see by default this field is meant to represent how you intend to build a job uh and that label as important in facilitating the workflow I see this left blank a lot um unfortunately there isn't an option to make this field Mand mandatory although I um I I am going to put that as and as a request because it's something I'd really like to see um but it is something that that's really important you know in the same way that the description is important and the due dat is important you really want to be making sure that you select your category if you have other ways of build or if these terms don't fit with you you can of course adjust this within the list maintenance area of the system if you want to make adjustments there but it's it's really really crucial that that you select this another thing that's that's really important that I do see from time to time is not necessarily entering in dollar values against your jobs uh even if you intend to build something on a fixed price uh sorry even if you intend to build something on time and materials or even if you you know have a fixed price but maybe you don't know it yet or there's certain factors are going to adjust it later it's it's really really good habit to put in some sort of value here even if you're just entering in one dollar amount in one field you know on one service in the override field just something to give this job a value the first thing that I do when I look at at any system and and I know that they're doing you know managing their financial workflow in the program is I do a job find and I select find active and I look and I see are there estimated values on everything and then I'll often add in the category field which we I'll touch on again in just a second um and when I see estimated values in all the jobs when I see due dates when I see categories and accurate statuses I know that their life of invoicing is going to be much much easier now let's take a look at a bit of a workflow process and and talk a bit about you know who might be creating invoices and and what's you know what's the bet best fit for for your agency um with regards to to your workflow so something that I that I encourage and I see more agencies moving to especially as when they get a bit larger is actually having your account Executives create the invoices themselves it will allow you to become a bit more efficient um and then your bookkeeper or your uh you know coo or whoever it is CFO accountant whoever it may be that used to be creating the invoices can simply be the person who is then approving them and and syncing them with accounting as opposed to having to go in and create them now that may not always be possible um and and you know different circumstances may not allow for it but a really good first step and something that I recommend you doing is the following if I'm an account executive then what I might want to do is pull up a list of all of my jobs where I am the AE and I'm going to pull up a list of all my jobs that have a specific category let's say time of materials and this is again why this field is so important so I can do this I'm then going to pull up a list of those jobs so you know I happen to have seven you could have significantly more per AE you might even have less but I have seven time of materials jobs where I am I am the AE and since I'm the AE I know what can be invoice invoiced for these jobs and why so I can go through and you know I know what's going on with each of them you know I might even drill down further and see more detail and I can also see you know what is our estimated value how much work have we put in how much have we invoiced so far and then what's outstanding what is left to invoice if we were to invoice this right now for for the full uh unbuild value of the time and materials what I can then do as an AE is is set this up to allow the bookkeeper or someone else if someone else is doing the invoicing to have a a solv report of what should be build and why and the way that I can do that is up at the top left there's a button that says editable list View and if I select that I can then go in and put in status updates and descriptions on these jobs and something that I can do if it helps with you know with the workflow process if it makes sense is actually even have a status called ready to invoice and I could go through this list of jobs and say okay well this is ready to invoice this is ready to invoice this is not so we're going to leave it but this is ready to invoice and I might want to enter some some instructions uh you know please only invoice time sheets up until March 31 since we're past the 31st and then my bookkeeper when they pull up this list or the whoever it is that's creating the invoices when they pull up the ready to invoice list can see that status update and they'll know the only invoice the jobs that are up to or only invoice the time sheets that are up to that date so that is a really good way to facilitate a workflow if you have a process where information needs to be shared from from say an account executive to a bookkeeper and it's something I see all the time where there's know disconnect between those groups and there's usually emails that are being shared or um you know the account Executives running over to the you to the to the the bookkeeper um you know a couple days later and saying hey you know you I I didn't want you to invoice you know four of those time sheets or or something like that uh so that uh can can help you to alleviate some of that disconnect now this status of ready to invoice creating this if you think it would help you uh is done in of course the list maintenance area of the system and actually I mean if you haven't been using the system for a while that may not be as as obvious to you but um when you're looking at that at that list maintenance area and you're creating that status of ready invoice or something like it it's important to make the status of ready to invoice or whatever you happen to call it an alias of open so that the system considers that an open active job um unless you don't want people tracking time to it anymore then of course you can consider it an alias of closed but typically you'd want it to be an alias of open that would then allow the bookkeeper to do a job find and say I want to see all the jobs that are ready to invoice pull up that list and I have a list of all the jobs that are set to ready to invoice of course a very small list in my example but um there it is I can also choose to add in the field uh called Date description which was that comment update maybe I'll put it over beside the status and I now have the instructions right here telling me exactly what to do so that can really help I do recommend investigating that if if it makes sense for you um but you know the the process of of having the AES creating the invoices and then it going through an approval process is usually what I recommend agencies trying to get to you know striving for as as a better way of doing things uh and and we're going to take a look at how you can manage that approval process uh and and how it relates to your your integration with accounting as well uh and and in doing so we're actually going to create an invoice uh in order to to take a look at that so if you did see some questions pop up and then come down as you're answering them anything that you think that we should address hey Mark yeah thanks for checking in um no really good questions coming in so far it was actually funny I was answering one of them via typing and then you showed it uh so um just to sort of reiterate uh when you have a bookkeeper that maybe wants to pull that list of the ready to invoice um just doing a job find and and allowing them to pull that easy list so that that just kind of made me chuckle but um no I think everything's good on this side uh thanks for checking in no problem um yeah you know one one thing that I just want to come back and and mention is is the importance of of maintaining your lists um it's really really crucial that when you do fines for certain data points like say a job status that the list you get is accurate and even just doing a job find for everything that's active in the system needs to be accurate you can't have those lists getting getting out of control jobs need to be closed statuses need to be changed uh things need to be updated so it's really really crucial that those lists remain uh you know remain uh here now something I actually want to do is I'm going to pull up so there's actually a different job that I'm thinking of working with here so I'm I'm going to pull up my time materials jobs where I am the AE and uh let's use a date field let's use actually I'll just I'll just select fine that should be fine um and then I have a job here maybe I didn't select myself as the AE where is it here time materials oh my apologies so probably when you're copying estimates of course you want to make sure you update the information accurately um yeah let's pull up that list and I want to work with this job here called time of materials example so I'm going to make this list editable I'm going to change this to ready to invoice now let's say that I am the bookkeeper in in this example and I'm going to come back to that list of all the jobs that are status of ready to invoice and pull that up and I'm going to work with this time materials example now all the invoices we do today are going to be single invoices um and that's usually how I recommend doing your invoicing when you're new to the system bulk invoicing and batch invoicing works really well um and that's what we're going to be taking a look at in the second part of of this webinar invoice Series so in two weeks from now um but today we're going to be looking at just single invoices now in this case I'm going to I'm going to go ahead and invoice this we're going to talk about time materials invoicing and then I'm going to stress the importance of managing that status and and how to how to update that and we'll also talk about the approval process as well so I'm going to select this this job here and that brings me to the job Details page and usually what I recommend doing is just taking a look at it and and getting an understanding of what's going on so we have some creative Services here research design and copy uh you know we have some hours and some values estimated and I can see that you know we've gone over in some cases and and we were were under budget in others um so you we haven't had any of our expenses come in yet but it looks like we actually have gone over our creative Services by about $400 so I might want to take a look at the time sheets and maybe investigate that uh but in this case it's a time of materials job and I'm going to say that we're going to invoice for all the outstanding time sheets so what I'm going to do is up at the top I'm going to select to add a new invoice that brings me to my invoice Details page now I just want to stress again that we are invoicing this time and materials example uh so I'm going to choose it as an interim invoice the we're not putting the the J we're not doing a final invoice yet because we haven't received our our our expense invoices from our vendor so we're going to be billing those later I'm going to choose calculate from actuals what this is going to do is it's automatically going to generate an invoice for all the unu time and expenses so when I select out invoice it brings me to the invoice Details page and it automatically bills all of my time sheets that are on this job and expenses if I had any so I can see that my invoice column matches my actual column and in this case I just happen have one time sheet need service but I can see that I've invoiced for this time sheet it was entered by myself for four hours and the total is $400 now how you I I understand that it's not always that clean and you might need to do certain different things at different times so I'm going to show some tips and tricks for working with this page that can make your your lives much much easier uh so first of all clicking on the invoice on the word invoice on the header will clear this value and I can then type in anything I want so I can you know invoice this for $1,000 if I want to to can invoice this for 5,000 or I can invoice this for you know 10 bucks whatever I want to do it's completely open to me and I can open up the field and enter anything that I want I can also select the other headers to populate the values within the fields if I select estimated it fills in the value of my estimated amount and I can then adjust it as I see fit if I select actual it fills in the value of my time sheets and notice the field becomes no longer editable because I'm invoicing an amount that is equal to the time sheets however if I decide I want to Bill a value that is less or more than the value of the time sheets I can always adjust the value of any individual time sheet so I could say for example you know this time sheet we're only going to invoice for $2,000 and it's an extreme example I put 22 hours in one time sheet but um so we're only going to invoice for $2,000 now it's very very important to note that if you adjust the value of time sheets on invoices then the the value of your actuals and the value of your invoice will not be equal to each other at the end of the job soon as you start manually manipulating the value that you're billing on time sheets there's no longer you know possibility of that time sheet value being equal to what you build it for because of course we're we're we're customizing it we're doing something different this is really really important to note because I'm I'm seeing a bit of a trend right now and I think it has to do with workflow process where we have one party creating the invoices maybe it's the AE or maybe it's the bookkeeper and they are are manually overriding the values of time sheets or or you know adjusting the value of expenses or whatever it may be and that job that then gets invoiced three or four or more times uh for the actual value of the time sheets incurred at at those stages and then when all is said and done somebody else is looking at the job and saying hey why don't these numbers match why does our total invoice value not match our total actual value and you know if you are customizing and editing the value that you're building on time sheets and of course those values won't match uh so it's something to something that's important to to keep in mind um in addition if I enter time sheets in the past prior to the the date of this invoice that will not adjust the value of this invoice it's not going to automatically pull that time sheet into this invoice if I have new time sheets that didn't exist when I created it now but tomorrow somebody's gone in and enter time sheets in the past I need to edit this invoice and include them it's not going to suck them into the invoice automatically um so that's you important to note as well so we are going to jump back and talk about statuses and approvals uh but I I noticed there's a question kind of sitting up there s if anything that you want me to to touch on hey Mark yeah thanks for checking in um there was a question it's more around like the notifying the client directly out of the system is that something that you're going to cover today just out of curiosity yeah absolutely so let's let's talk about the pro yeah for sure let's let's look at the the notify client option uh and then and we're going to talk a bit about approval routines and things like that um and how it relates to to that approval routine so when you're looking at at at invoicing and and the process for doing so of course getting that invoice to the client is is a key component because going to pay it if you don't get it to them um now you can either produce the PDF I'm not going to spend too much time on print outs because you we look at that for estimates and and it's really the same thing of course you want more info on printouts there's a lot in the in the health aspect of the of the system um but the option for for getting this to the client of course you can also select notify client now you can control who can and cannot do that through their permissions you might also want that decision to be made based on an approval process so for example you do have the option of having an invoice with your invoicing processes have an approval process built within it now this is optional most likely if you look at an invoice in your system you're not going to find this I'm going to show you how to turn it on you only really want to turn this on if you're going to manage it so if you have you know person a creating invoices and person B approving them and that sounds like a good idea to you which for a lot of agencies it's you know really important then you can turn this on I'm actually going to deselect that it's approved but the area that you can turn this on if you do want to looking start looking at at at approval routines on invoices is in the admin section under system setup and system preferences there's an area called invoice so there's a tab called invoice and system preferences and there is a uh invoice approval routine and whether or not you want this to be you know turned on and whether or not you want it to be uh you know to exist essentially um there's also a default setting of do you want it to automatically exist as approved and then pretty uncommon I had it like that for now but most likely you're going to want it to not be approved uh upon creation but what that allows you to do is on a regular basis you might have a bookkeeper could be every day it could be every week but somebody is coming in here and doing an invoice find and saying show me all of my not approved invoices approved invoice no click find and I get a list that invoice I can then select it review it make sure that I I like what I'm seeing here and if everything is okay then and notice as well the the notify client button is grayed out so I it's not going to let me send this to the client unless I approve it so if I I like what I'm seeing here I can choose to approve the invoice maybe look at it one last time and then select notify client uh you can include additional contacts on this invoice which is really nice if you have other people that need to be included uh you can load up a template uh there's the content of the email that will go to the client you can send a test version to yourself and then if once you're happy with it uh click Send now the invo the email address attached to this contact doesn't actually exist so we're not going to send that um but uh yeah so so that's the the process for for notifying the client and it will send them uh a PDF uh with the you know all the invoice information and it'll send whatever PDF you want it to send as well so you know you can choose which version they're getting uh of which version of the invoice they're going to get on their side so that that approval process again you know if you it it is an extra step but if you can get to a place where you have AES or project managers being the people that are actually generating the invoices which I find is in the end is a huge time save then that approval routine is probably something that you're going to want to take a look at so if was that uh do you think that answered that question and is there any others that you think we should touch on uh yeah I think that definitely covered um that question thank you Mark uh there is one more question that's just come in from Dana uh just asking for clarification on um the like definitions between the pre-approval and and the approval that's living in that back end of the system um so of course correct me if I'm wrong mark But the pre-approval is just uh you trust that whoever is creating the invoices um they are correct and a bookkeeper doesn't necessarily need to check them where the approval uh just means that um the bookkeeper has now gone they've checked those invoices and they have checked that Bo box uh signifying that they have approved it um anything you want to add there mark no I mean that you're you're totally right I'm trying to think about a like a like a scenario in which you'd want to select this option I mean and this might it might be better to call this not approved but but basically this is asking you when an invoice is created what's the what what how do what's the approval state that you want it to default to uh which is basically what you're just explaining um normally you'd have it saying okay I wanted I want it to default to not approved if you're going to manage an approval process if you're turning this routine on you probably want to have it pre-approved because you want the invoices approved by someone but if let's say that you have it selected to approved an example of that might be well I don't want all of my invoices to go through an approval routine I only want some of them to go to through an approval routine so if I'm creating an invoice that I know someone else needs to take a look at I might choose to deselect the fact that it's approved so that when a person pulls up that list they find it there and they can then review it you can also have the system email people um as well related to this stuff so you know alerts um can be sent out for invoices being being created and approved and things like that if you want the system emailing you about that but I can then you know select to approve it and when I do that invoice find for not approved invoices it'll no longer show up in my list so I you know did the find again and there are no unapproved invoices now another thing that that relates to this as well is the is the status uh around QuickBooks and I'm not I'm not going to get too much into this um but you know anyone who's using integration knows about the the post or export um you know option depending on if you're using QuickBooks online or the installed version um and that also can be a bit of an approval routine as well where somebody might be doing an invoice find on let's say a weekly basis uh or you know bi-weekly maybe monthly but I think that's a bit long where we're going to pull up all of the invoices that are unposted in other words it's not posted to QuickBooks it hasn't been synced yet pull up that list and you know I have all of my invoices from March that have not been synced over yet so all these invoices and you know they need to be synced um if you don't want them synced immediately upon creation so it you know that again this is really going to be a preference thing but I find a lot of people just sync the invoice immediately upon creating it if you don't want to do that then you can have them all be in a list and then I can choose to export them and then go through and post post post post uh it won't allow you to do it in bulk um and if there's a reason for that it's just generally not a good idea um so you can either sync them immediately upon creation or sync them later on but this also can be a good way of facilitating a workflow if it's if it's required of you um to be you know reviewing these before they go into QuickBooks uh and that's also another another point that comes back to the how important it is to maintain the accuracy of these lists uh so that when you pull up a list of invoices or jobs uh you based on the status that the the resulting list you get there is accurate so if anything around that uh any other items that we related to what we've been discussing that that you think we should address um you know what there was one question that did just come in uh we've got Jen here um who once once you've done that sync uh so through that sort of um that page that you were just on she was asking if that would remove them as open in your job list um which uh it it it won't uh it will uh leave it as open in your Jo list uh you would either need to go through and um change that status yourself or when you're creating invoices uh changing it into a status of invoice um Mark you might have a better explanation than myself on that one I feel like I was brain farting slightly there no problem no I mean essentially what you said is is true but let let's take a look at that um because it is an important part of the the invoice workflow so let's let's look at final invoicing and what and what that does um so in order to make this a good example um oh actually there's a really important Stu that I that I wanted to touch on really quickly uh as as the the person you know creating the invoices um if if I've you know set up a process where I am pulling up a list of jobs based on a status of ready to invoice and I'm doing some sort of interim billing so I'm not doing a final invoice on this the job's going to go back to open then it's really important that I once I create my invoice I come back to my list and I change the status of that job back to open it's not going to change back to open for you automatically unfortunately so you do need to change that status um so if you're not doing a final invoice you know you're you're basically invoicing coming back to the list to create the next one changing the status of the prior uh if you're not doing them in bulk and again we're going to look at bulk uh in two weeks time but this does then relate to the next point that I want to look at here and that is doing the final invoice in order to make this a bit more real let's say that I I received this this printing expense from the vendor so I'm just going to add that in really quickly here uh you know I received invoice number you know six or uh 793 um from our vendor um it was starboard custom printing uh and you know they we got a th copies at a dollar a piece just to make the math simple and we're marking It Up by 20% so I'll go ahead and save that so I have my expense entered and then let's invoice that job so again we're looking at the job we're looking at the financials and I can see that I've invoiced for my my creative Services work now again I did edit the value of one of those time sheets so notice that my invoice value is different than my actual value because I did customize one of those but I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to select to add a new invoice to build my expense and in this case is going to be a final invoice now selecting final is going to automatically change the job status to a status of invoiced invoiced and closed are the same thing it's done it's over it's gone you can't do anything with it anymore unless you open it back up it's not going to show up on any active lists uh so this is this will allow you to automatically put that job into that state and I'm going to select to calculate from actuals now there's two options here with that have the word actuals in it I'm going to give you an explanation of exactly what each one means because it's very important selecting actuals is going to invoice all of the unbilled time and expenses now in this case I have one unbilled expense and I have no unbuild time sheets so if I select out invoice I'm going to get an invoice in this case for for $11,200 because that was the value of the expense after the markup so let's actually just go ahead and do that so I'm going to select that invoice and notice that I have an invoice here for for 1,200 for my expense so that's what actuals will do it'll invoice the unbuilt time and expenses that is different than remainder from actuals I'm deleting that invoice because I want to show it I want to show you what I'm talking about here so I'm going to select I'm going to create this invoice again but I'm going to select remainder from actuals remainder from actuals calculates the total dollar value of all of your time and expenses Compares it to what has previously been invoiced and invoices the difference in the in the previous invoice we edited a time sheet and we invoiced it for $200 less than its value even though there are no on invoice time sheets selecting remainder from actual should give us a $200 amount on that service line as well as the $1,200 for the expense this is basically saying I don't care about the time sheets themselves I want the total value of my work to be equal the total invoice amount I want to invoice for everything even if I've adjusted something in the past uh now when I select invoice I add invoice I believe we should see $200 in this line so notice that here notice that there are no uninvoiced time sheets there's no drop down here but it's billing for the the total dollar value that is the difference between what we've invoiced and what we've actually incurred this is this is really important to to note and and be aware of and understand if you're doing a lot of invoicing where you're tweaking things and adjust adjusting them and and and manipulating values which I understand is the real world that we live in um you know it's the agency world where you you know you gotta adjust things things happen you know unforeseen circumstances whatever it may be um you know so if you're if you're tweaking and adjusting values knowing the difference between invoicing from actuals and remainder from actuals is really really important if you want your dollar values to line up at the end of the day or if you want the the time sheets to be invoiced for different amounts so just just understanding the differences between those two so do you feel like I've done a decent job in explaining that I know that sometimes it's a bit of a diff like sometimes people have a bit of a hard time understanding the difference between those and then also are there any questions that have come in related to this or or anything else uh yeah no Mark I think you did a good job explaining that I'm not gonna lie it's one of those things that sometimes it takes me a minute to wrap my head around it as well so um anyone out there that's having trouble with it I completely understand and I feel for you uh the only other question that just came in um I just want to clarify that when you are creating those invoices um when you choose from estimated or from actuals it's still going to create the same type of invoice it's just whether or not it's pulling those original estimated amounts or the actual amounts that you currently have um we just had a question there where they were just asking the difference between uh pulling it from estimated so just wanted to throw that in there gotcha and we're actually going to take a look at estimated in the next two examples over the next 20 minutes um that are are really common examples so fixed price uh some people call it Project based invoicing or or Milestone invoicing uh and then we're going to look at containers as well uh but so Sophie's right it it doesn't there's no difference in the type of invoice that's created it's just think of it as like giving you a head start it it just autop populates values and a lot of the time you you then don't need don't need to do anything you just click save um but if you do need to adjust something then of course you can uh and again using the values up here or or or you know blanking out the amount is is uh is helpful with that um but uh it's essentially the same the same invoice it just gives you a head start on calculating its amount so let's now take a look at a job here that I have called called fixed price example and you know again being able to do something like this where you know I'm the AE or or maybe I'm the bookkeeper whoever I am I want to pull up a list of all the jobs um that have a certain category really really important and in two weeks when we do the bulk invoicing webinar um which is you know a huge timesaver for people once they you know uh get a bit more comfortable with the system um this this field here is is crucial in in that bulk invoicing process I'm going to say show me all of my fixed price jobs where I'm the AE uh select find active and I get a list of all the jobs that are fixed pric around the AE uh so I can then see that I have this job here called fixed price example and I'm going to go ahead and invoice this so let's take a quick look at it so I can see that you know this job also has some creative Services we have two expenses this time so print in photography and let's say that for this job I have a value of 7500 I intend to Bill 7500 doesn't matter if I go over if I go under doesn't matter I'm billing 7500 now in this case I know that my photographer is working on this tomorrow and I'm G to build my client for 50% of my creative services and maybe all of the photography but I'm not going to build them for any of the printing that's going to come at the end of the job but I know I'm getting an invoice for my photographer next week or sorry maybe tomorrow whatever it is uh so I'm going to build for 50% of my creative services and 100% of one of my expenses so I'm going to go ahead and select add new invoice up at the top and I'm going to enter a billing percentage of 50% notice I'm keeping keeping it as interim I'm entering a billing percentage of 50% and I'm calculating from estimate doing so is going to to generate an invoice with a value that is automatically half of our estimated 7500 but in this case I don't want to build any of the printing so I'm GNA just going to get rid of that and I actually want to build for all of the photography so I'm going to edit that and build for all the photography so again it's like the first page is basically giving you a head start what's the billing percentage you want to do and how do you want to calculate it you'll get to this page it'll all be pre-populated and you can tweak and adjust from there you can also do some other things here as well I mean you have full control I could say well I actually want to Bill 25% enter my billing percentage click on the word estimate and it fills in 25% of my estimate it would do the same for actuals if there were any values there let's stick with our example so 50% of estimate except we're going to do none of the printing and all of the photography save that and then our invoice should not include our printing expense now that is a setting uh if you ever see a line item on your invoice with a value of zero and you don't want it there it's it's an admin setting it's a printout setting you can you can turn that off if you don't want to see those zero zero value line items uh so that is then our our fixed price example so you I mean it's pretty straightforward you're really just just billing a value that is a a percentage or a portion of the estimated amount uh and then when we take a look at our job here so if we jump back to our job we might also maybe approve this invoice just for the sake of doing so but if we jump back to this job then we're going to see that we have an invoice here it's an interm invoice and we look at our financials we can see you know really clearly that we've invoiced for half of our total creative service value and we've invoiced 600 for expenses now was 600 on photography and zero for printing so that's the the basics of the fixed price is pretty straightforward I mean at that point it's usually um from there it's usually Milestone related the where you're building the rest of it so if if you're maybe building 50% up front 25% upon a milestone and 25% upon completion that's another really good example of why you might have a a staff person change the status to ready to invoice you know update the comments saying you know bill for the next 25% because we you know finish the the first client approval uh and you know the bookkeeper or whoever it is can pull up that list of TR an invoice and go ahead and do that Sophie any questions on um that's on this I mean I think that this is pretty straightforward if you you got to go through the time materials I think is the more complicated example that fixed price ends up usually being being pretty easy any any questions on this at all um no not on this topic specifically I am still answering a couple questions but um I'm thinking it might be good to connect with with a couple people outside of the webinar um just to really kind of like dig into some of the stuff that they're they're encountering with their invoicing and and just making sure that it it works specifically for them absolutely um okay so we're going to take a look at retainers really quickly here um and the with retainers you know under you know managing retainers is is the invoicing process for it is is pretty easy uh you the actual Act of creating the invoice is very simple um usually with retainers the the complexity if any exists because sometimes we see really simple retainers and then sometimes we see the really really Wild Ones um there's one client I'm working with right now uh you know their biggest account uh their their retainer uh you know they have I something like you know two 200 jobs included on it and it's the spreadsheet you can roll the thing out like a Bugs Bunny cartoon and you know go across the room um and that's just the reality you know when you work sometimes you work with really large organizations you have a really large retainer um there's you know a lot of uh different circumstances that you need to need to accommodate and you know restrictions that you need to adhere to based on you know who the client is so you know those those are the realities that that I do understand but the process of actually creating the retainer for the most part or sorry creating the invoice for the retainer is really simple so we're going to take a look at that really quick and then the last 10 minutes we're going to touch on deposit invoices and and I'm going to explain exactly why you should or should not be using deposit invoices so let's pull up a list of the jobs here so I'm going to do a job find and I'm going to do a job find for the category of retainer and I'm going to select find active now what should happen here is you should have a list of all of the jobs that you intend to build for there's any jobs that are you know working jobs that are included in a retainer but you know are are in addition or something like that they shouldn't show up in this list that they should have a different category or perhaps no category at all um this should just be the list of jobs you intend to bill so I have three retainer examples here um one that I bill every month for the same amount one that I have that's specific to this month and I open up a new one every other month every month that that comes up and then a larger retainer encapsulates other aspects of our work for this for this company uh that's a large one it's for $10,000 so let's just say that I'm G I'm going to invoice this Mac and Co SEO retainer here it's really easy I just select it select add new and invoice and then all I'm doing is I'm invoicing 100% of the value of the estimate if I leave the billing percentage blank it'll default to be 100% of the value of the estimate so it automatically creates an invoice for $2,000 I happen to have some taxes on this one so it comes up to 2140 but that's you know that's really it it's it's as long as you set up your retainers correctly no matter how complex they are it it should be like a couple click process so um it's more about how you set them up and of course we do have a webinar coming up in the not to distant future about retainers and uh you know that'll be a really good one to attend if this is something that you need to uh need to manage but lastly we're going to take a look at deposits and then we'll check in with Sophie before we we close it out here we got about 10 minutes I think we're going to I think we're going to finish up uh right right around uh you know the the prescheduled time so maybe maybe go one or two minutes over at the most but I I don't think so so we should be on for about 10 more minutes so let's take a look at um the the concept of of the deposit and what it actually means and what it does and and how to actually use it and and I'm going to use this job that I already have set up here I'm going to use this job called fixed price example that we're looking at a minute ago I'm actually just going to delete this invoice and just and just start with it fresh so I have this job fixed price example and again it's estimated for 7500 now let's say that I wanted to to do exactly what I did earlier but I want to do it with a deposit invoice so I'm going to decide to invoice um you know 50% of of my creative services and let's say all of the photography um now you might even want to use a calculator for this and if you know if you're not just building for the whole thing up front um or if you're if if you need to calculate what you want to invoice I'll show you why um but I'm going to say 5700 divided by two and I'm going to then add my $600 for photography so I'm coming up to$ 3450 so that 3450 is the value I'm going to enter in my deposit invoice and when I select up at the top select add new and invoice I'm going to choose the option of deposit deposit exists solely for the purpose of managing an acrel accounting process if you don't manage an acral accounting process then this isn't necessary for you sometimes people get confused because they'll invoice things up front they'll say okay well you know we're going to invoice a 50% deposit for this job so the select deposit even though that may not be what they need they might just need interim it in the in function point is is meant uh to manage an AC cruel accounting process where the value the the revenue that you collect for the invoice is considered unearned Revenue when you sync it with QuickBooks it's going to go into a liability account and and be considered unearned Revenue until uh you know such time that you choose to then recognize the revenue is earned so I if you are a cash-based agency I think most of our clients are um then this is not not NE uh uh necessary for you and usually like if you if if what I'm talking about isn't really making sense to you or if you're not really sure what I'm talking about when in doubt don't do it because it's only necessary if you're again if you're managing an a cruel accounting process but notice that the deposit subtotal it isn't pulling from any aspect of the job and that's why I needed to calculate the value that I wanted prior to getting this page which in this case is 3450 so enter my invoice value of 3450 now the tax group is really really important um you know if if you have taxes that you're managing that you need to include on your invoices to clients then of course you'll want to to select the Tax Group there you you you need to have the taxes selected here if you do charge taxes to your client on your invoice I'm going to leave it off just so I can keep the numbers uh really simple for us but I'll select out invoice and that brings us to to this page uh this information should fill in automatically actually but for the most part you shouldn't need to do anything here you have your your deposit of total invoice value of 3450 and you just click submit there is no relation to the structure of the job you send the invoice to your client you know tweak it customize it you can adjust the print out and things like that when we look at the job this is where this is all going to start to lay out you're going to notice that in our financials tab we have no invoice amount we have an invoice for anything in the financials tab because this is is is meant to re is meant to represent recognized and earned Revenue unearned revenue is not going to show in this report notice that the invoices tab is blanked out but there is a deposit and that deposit is for 3450 now let's say in this case that we then receive an invoice from our photographer so just like before I'm going to pop that in here really quickly um what am I missing here oh there we go uh so save that so I have that uh I have that um that expense that invoice from the vendor I'm also going to drop in a time sheet in here um a couple time sheets really quickly just to make this a real example so 30360 and I'm putting let's say to service I'm going to put or to research I'm going to put five hours to design I'm going to put uh 10 and to copyrighting I'm going to put uh 12 okay so when we look at this job now notice that we have in total $3300 worth of actuals and in fact I think I want I want that value to be a little bit higher put in one more time sheet say against design for another eight hours so we have in total $4,100 worth of actuals we have a whole bunch of time sheets in here and we have an an expense that's been entered we've already done a deposit invoice for 3450 we now have total actuals equal 4,100 The Next Step will allow you to recognize the revenue that you've already collected from your client has earned and Bill them the additional in this case like 600 bucks um that we've that we've incurred in addition to the original deposit the way that I do that is up at the top by selecting add new and invoice I'm going to choose an interm invoice I'm gonna have an interim invoice for my actuals my time sheets and my expense select add and it generates an invoice for the value of my time sheets and expenses notice that the value is 4,100 so I can see what I'm billing here's my expense and notice this line here less deposit so this is showing me that I have a deposit already of 3450 and I now want to recognize all 3450 as earn revenue and the difference between that 3450 and the total 4,100 is now 650 and that's the new value of my invoice that I then sent to my client so I'm recognizing the 3450 and I'm then billing an additional 650 so when I produce my client facing version it'll say 650 and when I look at my job I can then see that my deposit has a total value of 3450 and we've applied 3450 so we've used it all up I have 3450 as earned revenue and that will then show in my financials tab so the total value invoice value is now 4,100 the original 3450 from the deposit has been recognized in addition to the 650 that we invoiced on top of it and I can see my interm invoice right here for 4,100 with a balance of 650 because the 3450 came from the deposit so this is something that you really only want to kind of tackle if uh you know you're again you're managing an AC cruel accounting uh base you know agency and um and and you know man um having Revenue going to into an unearned liability account uh is something that you're currently doing if it's not something that you're currently doing um you know there are certain circumstances in which you maybe want to look at doing so but they should only be um you know special circumstances things like if you gain a new client and you know that you're you know they're gonna you're going to invoice them for you know $50,000 up front for a really large job that's going to go on over the course of six months if you're doing that type of thing you should be managing an acrel accounting uh practice and you should be looking at that 50,000 as unearned Revenue until what until which time you do the work and then recognize it as earned um you know if you Bill your client at the start of the month for the work done in that month not necessary uh or you know if you Bild your client a couple thousand dollars up front for something that's happening you know maybe a month later or two months even two months later probably not a big deal um but it's when you start to get to very large amounts or large time spans that you want to start look looking at potentially um managing an AC cruel accounting practice and starting to use the deposits but otherwise shouldn't really be something that you should be taking a look at so we have one minute left I just want to talk about the webinar happening in two weeks and then we're going to tackle any questions we'll probably be on for a couple minutes extra um but uh in two weeks from now we are doing invoicing part two so you know today we looked at time materials invoicing fixed price invoicing retainer invoicing uh we did we touched on the closets as well and we looked at everything individually in two weeks we're going to be looking at doing things in bulk how can you set yourselves up to successfully bulk invoice potentially everything not just predetermined amounts or or retainer amounts but how can you do all of your invoicing in bulk so you're not having to do it one by one um and if you're you know if once you get comfortable with the system that is possible and it can save you a tremendous amount of time uh as long as you kind of know what you're doing and and you and you you know set yourself up for Success initially uh you can you know be very very effective in doing so um so we're going to be taking a look at bulk invoicing in two weeks howly recommend you join in um but on that note uh we're we're at time but let's let's let's tackle some questions we can stay on a bit longer if we if we have any that'll that'll require so Sophia how's it going you know what I think I've oh sorry someone just sent in a question so I'm just going to quickly read it um okay so this is from Brandy uh she says that they do not use acral accounting or deposit invoices but have projects that cannot exceed $15,000 the client would want to be will the client wants to be build 15 50% I'm so sorry Brandy I'm butchering this right now 50% of the fee upfront and the rest hourly up to 15K would this be a good example of using a deposit invoice Mark any any insight yeah you know that that's a really good question um and thank you Brandy for that question because it is a good one um my recommendation to you is to not um is to not do a deposit invoice for that example but it it could potentially be a really good example of when you might use one but it really when you say when you you preface the question with you know we do not use acrel accounting or deposit invoices so like if your QuickBook system is not set up to M to to be a cruel and you're you're cash based and you're recognizing all the everything as as earned Revenue right away um then I mean it's I guess you you know might be a question as to whether or not you feel like you need to switch the way that you manage your books um but I probably recommend in your case to not do the deposit invoice in that case really what you'd be doing and I'm going to try to give you this example really quickly here um uh I'm going to call this job uh bry's example hope you don't mind me doing that Brandy I hope that's that's okay um well let let's let's give that example here in order to make it really simple I'm going to take out some of the expenses and I'm just going to do exactly what you're describing so um you know I'm going to get this to 15 grand uh let's see here notice how I'm just kind of manipulating the the values to um to get to my 15 so I have my 15 gr uh save that um so what we would do is right away we're going to add an invoice and it's going to be an interim invoice for 50% of my estimated value so that's G to be an invoice for 7500 so I have my invoice for 7500 now from there I'm then going to start tracking time against that against that job um so this is you kind of need to kind of you know monitor monitor it and and just to see um you when you get to a value that you believe needs to be you know where another invoice is Justified um so you know if I put some time in [Music] here let's just get some time in there really quickly time sheet totals for today are going to be comical um so that should be about three grand of invoice 7500 so let's just actually go full out here okay so the invoice value um is you know 7500 and I now have an actual value of 9,000 uh so the the difference is 1500 um now in this case I'm trying to think here about actually now that I think about it I think I'm kind of stumping myself because the deposit really would be a better way to manage this it's just that you know it's going to go to QuickBooks is UN earn revenue and I'm not really sure if you're using the integration if you really want to do that so I guess what I'd probably do um is I would I would I would do the following and and this what I'm about to show you is going to have some uh some ramifications with regards to the Val to to build value of time sheets but I'm going to go ahead and select to add a new invoice for this job and I'm going to choose to calculate it from estimated and I'm going to invoice in this case $2,000 I'm going to go 500 500 and a th000 invoice total equals $2,000 my actual total um sorry I guess I wanted 1,500 my actual total is is 9,000 my um uh the my previous invoice is 7500 um so actually now that I think about it there's actually a better way to do this sorry I was thinking that this was actually going to be a much quicker answer but I think I just came up with a better idea um if I if you select to add an invoice for that job and you choose to calculate by remainder from actuals I believe that end up with your 3500 that's not the difference that we want so no my apologies i' probably not do that so our actual equals 9,000 our previous is 7500 you're not wanting to build a full 9,000 because that would of course bring you above the 15 grand so you're really just wanting to build the remainder which is that um that 1500 but you don't want to Discount this particular service so selecting this you don't really want these values so instead what I'd probably do is something like this know 250 250 and um a th and I have an invoice or 1500 so I'm just manually entering the amounts that I want to build when I look at the job really what you want to have happen is you want your actual value to equal your invoice value upon your second invoice now every subsequent invoice is really easy every subsequent invoice from here you just bill based on actuals and once it gets up above 15 grand then you just build you know a custom amount to equal that to equal 15 grand so you you probably do remainder from estimate um but it's a good example where it's kind of like you're doing like a combination of like a fixed price and then time materials in which case it's really just about staying on top of I guess and and you know manipulating the values to accommodate your circumstance um so uh I appreciate your uh I appreciate your thanks Brandy um I Brandy just I just saw you kind of pop in there and and uh and just mention that that you know that provided some benefit for you so I do appreciate that um and thanks everyone that stayed on a little bit longer I think we're going to cut it off we'll probably stay on to answer any questions via text that do come in after this point um but otherwise I think we're probably good to go we only went 8 minutes over which is actually not that bad for an invoicing webinar so if anything that you want to mention before we uh kind of turn off the audio here and just convert to text for any remaining questions no I think you've covered everything today Mark um again if there's any followup questions you know middle of the night tonight uh you have an an aha moment you need some help uh feel free to reach out to success function point.com we won't respond at midnight but we will respond probably within the next 12 to 24 hours after that so so uh looking forward to talking to you there you go well you know Sophie always uh very generous with your time and you know we appreciate uh you know you and your and your team and the work you're doing of course you know how how happy I am to jump in and uh and work with with agencies and assist when when applicable so um yeah you know again thanks everyone uh for your time today really appreciate it uh next week open open hours open Office Q&A um so join Sophie for that one should be good and then in two weeks time invoicing part two um same bat Time same bat Channel looking forward to tacking tackling that bulk invoicing batch invoicing process uh always a good time can make a tremendous difference um in the time it takes you to do your billing we have one client right now told me the other day takes her think should have takes her eight to 12 hours to do her billing they're just getting deployed um and I'm hoping to to take that down from 8 to 12 hours to do their billing to maybe half an hour um you know at at the most could even be more like 10 minutes minutes so you know those are the types of benefits you can get from doing invoicing in bulk in in in in batches uh and looking forward to tackling that next week uh so again thanks everyone for your time today and have yourselves a great rest of your Wednesday cheers bye now