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Virtual invoice for Management

good morning everyone welcome back to another session of our live virtual training my name is Jay I'm one of the education Specialists here at LM and your host for today in this session I'm going to be taking you through the entire process of creating invoices in LMN for your design build jobs so this is going to include how to send out invoices to your customers how to get paid for those invoices and using the customer portal online and some really cool features of invoicing to make the life of US contractors much easier and efficient so in today's training I'll be walking you through everything money related we'll learn about invoicing payments and how you'll sleep at night knowing that your customers with a click of a button will be paying you for the hard work your team has accomplished at their job set so let's talk about the main game plan for this train as always within any of the tools within the software we want to First EXP for the key settings so we're going to talk about some of the invoicing settings to build out that foundation for invoices going forward from there we're going to learn at how to generate progress invoices within your account so this will be through Milestone payments for your designable projects and at the same time I'm going to take you through the entire life cycle of an invoice how to review it how to make any changes how to approve that and then actually send out that invoice to the customer portal for review or for your clients to actually pay directly from their email throughout the way we'll also take you through the Journey in terms of how to review and manage all of those incoming payments within Ln from there we're going to go ahead in a second uh demonstration for generating invoices but this time for building them based on your time and material type of design build projects and I'll show you how LMN can track time sheets to generate invoices based on the actual worked hours now in addition to generating invoices and approving them in our training I'm going to be showing you how to generate edit and approve invoices but this time in bulk so if you're a company that you have tens of invoices or hundreds of invoices to generate each and every single day I'll show you how to manage that in bulk when it comes to managing your edits and if you want to send multiple invoices out to your customers all at once SP email I'll show you how to do that through leveraging our customer portal now as we're going through today's session if you do have any questions definitely let us know over the chat or Q&A we more than have you to work through those questions with you in addition to that for any of you who are currently with on booring joining me on today's session as you follow along in your own account during today's session if you come across any company specific or confidential questions make sure to save those for your next onboarding meeting all right so let's get started on what invoicing within LMN will entail for your design build projects so to begin with if you're estimating it's highly important to set up your contract or payment schedule in this case through the Milestone uh payments for Progress invoicing so that way when a job gets created off of that estimate invoicing is immediately active and the schedule will be populated ing once you have that set up in an estimate your invoice will go through different status where you have the ability in this case especially uh the review approve and Export uh features in addition to that for any time and material invoice uh work I'm going to also show you how to do that accurately as well and then once actually all of the generation of the invoices completed I'm going to show you how to send out invoices to your customers in a variety of different ways including especially the most efficient manner through publishing it to the customer portal and how your customers can and pay online this just gives you a quick little uh foundation of the invoicing feature within LM so let's go ahead and start with building out our invoicing settings before we go ahead and actually generate our invoices okay so to get started we're going to navigate into our settings and we'll go to our invoicing tool and go to invoicing settings so on this page you basically have a variety of different uh criteria that you want to program in advance just like any other tool you've seen within the software so that way anytime no matter which team member has invoicing access within your company builds Zed invoice that format is going to be maintained across the board so we'll start with our prefix do you want it to look like that or do you want to actually spell out any text data that needs to be there so let's just say it's going to be invoice number or in whichever you prefer you want to go ahead and narrow that down ing also the next invoicing number so if you're coming from a different software before Ln or you're doing manual invoicing through book and paper and you want to continue where you left off you can plug in that number and men will follow that next sequence further to that we have the default contract start and end days so it's not going to be required for design build work this will be more of a maintenance side so we can go and move on to the default invoice terms next and this is basically the due date for which your business operates so in this case after 15 days the invoice will be due then we have three note Fields where if you want to put a little bit of customization on each invoice that you're sending it out to make it as unique as possible to your business you can add in those descriptions for example angp business all invoices to be paid within 15 calendar days I also have an option for AC and one for et transfer if you have like a GST number that you want to plug in you can also plug that in as well and that will show up at the bottom of each and every invoice so once everything is good to go you lock that in every invoice you build out in Ln will maintain that exact format all right so that's basically the settings so as a reminder these are some best practices as we're getting started to invoicing our installed jobs number one we want to make sure that all jobs there are to be invoiced need to actually have invoicing turned on now the benefit is if you're already building out that contract from your estimate once the job is created all of that is ready to go and in voicing is activated immediately there's no additional work that is on your plate when it comes to doing it in evance so just a gentle reminder for those of you work with estimators within your company always make sure you have that contract enabled in events all right so now that we have a better understanding nowen I'm going to show you how to invoice a job after an agreement was made and ready to be paid via Milestone payments so navigate back into ourn and to get started we're going to go ahead and if you recall from last week we made an estimate for our star of the show customer Mr Mark John's and we decided that there's going to be three Milestone payments uh that are going to be invoiced ing so what I can do here is I can actually reference the job specifically and we're going to kind of review both the job and the estimates so then you can see all of that key information so let's go ahead here okay so within the job before I even analyzed the job we're going to actually open up our estimate here just want to give you a quick little refresher and reminder of all the criteria that we have going on here so here we can see the design build project that we were working on last week this is already marked as sold so we know the customer has approved it by going to work AAS in pricing I can see again the project I'm offering is going to be garden beds and planting in addition to a lighting enhancement okay so overall these are the work areas we have unique price built for each of them the objective here as I quoted my customer to two different work areas each one of them will have a unique price in addition to all of that I went ahead and built out the contract and that's where we have the deposit the project start and the project completion so those are those three Milestone payments for billing purposes you go to crew notes we can also see that we have those instructions also built out in advance so once we had that estimate created we also went ahead and built a job off of that and within the job we could see here that we have our work areas converted to our task in addition to that we have our materials and equipment and those are also set up to be tracked if I go to invoicing invoicing is automatically turned off so this is the best case scenario or the the recommended way where you already have that contract enabled in advance so if we were to go to the schedule immediately everything has been carried over from there now another scenario is if you're a contractor where basically you did not create an estimate or maybe you had a job that was created on the flight what you can go ahead and do is under the job list we have a really handy filter here called invoicing status what we can do is we can sort through any jobs that have invoicing turned on or any that do not have it turned on so let's say jobs with no invoicing I can also filter based on my customer record so that gives me another way way to go ahead and organize this list of jobs here and then we can go ahead and look for that job so let's say I'm just going to go through my list here let's say we look at this job here as you can see there's no reference to an estimate we only have a job ID I go to time sheet tracking we're working with sidewalk interlock I go to materials and equipment we have some information under invoicing invoicing is not ternal so to begin this process we would then go ahead to invoice activation set up the job for uh invoicing based on the jobs okay and then that's where we can go ahead and program our contract so let's just say it's going to be amount and add in those Milestone payments say two let's say we're going to it by percentage and there is our invoice schedule already programmed so those are a couple of different scenarios I wanted to take you through one where invoicing is automatically activated or turned on within the job where the contract was built from an estimate or if a job was created on the Fly and there was no contract already enabled or invoicing wasn't turned on how you can begin that process from the beginning so so far are we clear on uh those two scenarios we have any questions on uh setting up those jobs for invoicing no we're good to go okay perfect so now let's go ahead and actually learn how to generate the invoice and to do that we're going to go back to our main uh uh job that we are referencing for Mr John's so I'm going to go back into my list make sure you reset our filter so by date created and we'll find that the job right over here so let's just say we're ready to go ahead and actually H generate this job which just say we called up Mark John's we're like uh the invoices due as of today was the first dat for your crws and he understands uh when we're speaking to him on the phone that he's aware of the payment schedule when we setopt the proposal and what he approved in the main so with that we can always go ahead into invoicing and then go to our invoice schedule and let's just say the first invoice we want to generate is going to be the milestone for the deposit or in this case very important to keep in mind especially for design build invoicing when it comes to the deposit invoice it can be generated individually from here or if you go to the contract on this side you can actually generate it from the estimate right right via the contract Milestone payments so if that was the case there's two different options once it's actually paid you'll be able to convert that estimate to an operational job or you can create the job and then generate the actual uh invoice for the deposit before you actually scheduled that work to to be completed so just a couple of different options in this case Okay so let's say we're ready to generate it from this screen select the invoice and this is the first interface that you're going to see of what the invoice will look like to you as a contractor using elev So currently it's in pending status we can see here we have the billing details the job address the invoice date and the due date so pay attention here because again the invoicing settings based on that 15-day terms we have that due date adjusted we can see it's generated by and we can also program who's the account manager salesperson and Division and also if you want to track with staff revenue and efficiency you have the ability to actually add in a crew lead on this or basically you can split it amongst multiple crew leads if you need so that will also help with the staff Revenue track okay so now that that is broken down because it's in pending you can see I can make any changes so let's just say that we needed to maybe go ahead and actually uh adjust this maybe I wanted to go ahead and charge a customer for an extra item while it's in pending you can make any changes but then for those of you who have managers in the office who need to be able to review before it's sent out to the customer you can go to actions and flag it for review so then it will be in Orange status and now it's marked as review won't be sent till it's actually reviewed and approved now as a best practice as a manager to be most efficient as possible instead of going through each job one at a time and finding all of those in review invoices we highly recommend you go into your invoices and navigate to the invoice list so this will take you through a master list where you can verify based on any status that is going to be under in review and now in One dashboard you can go through all of that information that is broken down right so we could see all of that based on what we have and we can also sort based on the invoice State and there's the one that we had earlier for today so once I actually go in this and I see here well hey we're actually charging the customer for an extra item I feel we do not need to do that I can go and reset it to pending remove that item and now I can go to actions and approve it once it's an approve approved and save that and immediately it's removed from the list but I can always flip that to approved and immediately I'll see the invoice that was uh approved right over here okay correspondingly to that if I go back into the job I know I have one invoice here and that status is also up to date as well okay so just to give you kind of a quick little breakdown of that but that basically is going to be uh one different way to generate your uh Milestone payments when it comes to invoicing purposes uh within the actual job itself okay so now that we have the invoice actually generated I want to discuss how you as a contractor can use lend to email out the invoices to your end clients so to do that there's a iety of different options first is you can actually print a manual version of the invoice so let just say those of you have some customers who are much older and they prefer to have an invoice uh sent through the mail in an envelope you can actually print out a digital copy of that invoice and element and then attach it uh with that uh delivery that you're sending VIA mail the second option is through those of you who are using QuickBooks for accounting purposes you can use the export to QuickBooks feature and then finally through the email and customer portal for maximize efficiency and Automation and that way easily your your uh end clients don't need to actually create a portal account immediately you can just send it out just like you have been uh seeing through the estimate proposal delivery you can do the same thing with the invoices so a variety of different options just wanted to give you a quick Ty so let's go each of these three together so we'll bring you back back into LMN and we're going to reference the same exact invoice so let's just say that in this case you wanted to generate that printable version can go into the invoice H actions and then print in we have two different options we have a standard and a letter Ed mode so let start with the standard as you can see this is what the invoice will look like so you have the company details at the top the invoice information in addition to all of those messages that you had programmed in your settings now again because this is a printable version you would need to download or print this off and then either attach it in a separate email or go ahead and print it off and bring it into an envelope to then deliver it to your customers the second option if I go here is the printable uh version as letter head so it's pretty much exactly the same thing there's only one main difference you don't have company details at the top okay so if you want to go through this route you have two different options for the uh printable method that you can use to uh get those invoices delivered to your clients we also have the export to QuickBooks features so if that is the method you all still want to follow you can go to actions export to QB and what that will do is basically change it to QED status and that means that it's going to have a copy of the invoice created in LM sync tool or this repository where you'll go to in order to actually sync over or carry that invoice into your QuickBooks income account okay now if you're not using QuickBooks maybe a different accounting platform you can always go ahead reset it back to pending and then leave the status marked as approved okay so that is uh the second method that I wanted to show you when it comes to sending out hearing voices to your clients the final one is going to be through the feature of automation when it comes to leveraging the customer portal online so if you're so if we areall I go into actions and I click on send publish invoice here call from our CRM training uh earlier uh from the last week training we went ahead and showed you how you have the ability to designate contacts within a CRM customer as billing contacts so in other words as you are going ahead and using the send and publish feature what you have the ability to do is notify billing contacts via email in addition to that you can also streamline this and customize what that email message is going to look like and if uh you prefer okay email is ready to go you can always choose who you're sending it to and you have the ability to not just assign it or notify uh the multiple billing contacts but you can also CC and BCC additional recipients as well so this is a great way for you uh anytime that you have multiple different uh contacts that need to be notified uh maybe an accounts payable or receivable whatever the case might be within that Master customer record so in this case let's just say that we want to actually use the customized feature for the one we're going to be sending out to uh Mark John's it will just open up new screen here and this is where now you have additional customization available so we can send it to Mark John's we can also check out multiple contacts if we need to here's the way that it's going to look like so let's just say that we need to maybe customize this and let's say I sent you a brand new invoice I can address directly hey so I can go ahead and basically uh program that ingly if I need to CCC or BCC anyone I can do that as well I can also attach a PDF so they don't need to actually go and click on the link they can basically access a pdf version which is that printable version we saw earlier I can also even send a pre so once you're ready to go with that simply click on email and publish and that will then be sent immediately to your end client granted that their email is valed based on what you have set up in the CRM and then you have the ability to immediately see that that invoice has been sent out there's a confirmation and you can also see the portal status has been added okay so that just gives you some additional capability when it comes to sending it out through the customer portal directly okay so anytime you need to send to multiple billing contacts that is going to be the way that you have to go about doing that okay so those are basically the three different methods as a reminder these are some of the best practices you want to keep in mind make sure as always your customers have a valid email address Associated to their uh LMN uh LMN account um in addition to that make sure that the invoice is accurate and in the correct status so if it's in pending or in review you can't actually send that out you need to make sure it's either approved or aced also your portal default settings uh which we're going to talk a little about later when we get into the payments portion and uh highlight some of the efficiency there for your contract your defaults okay so just want to give you kind of a quick little reminder when it comes to that uh key information as well all right so now that the invoice was generated it was sent out to our end clients we need to talk now about payments right so how are you going to be able to get paid for those invoices and for hard work your team has accomplished at Job set well in this case there's a variety of different options right so you have uh maybe even more than what you kind of see on here based on the payment methods your company offers to your end clients so you can get paid via e transfer again there's a little bit of manual work involved there's also going to be credit card on site so let's just say your customers come to your main uh location and they process the payment on site in addition to that if you're using QuickBooks for payment processing and finally through email and customer portals so specifically through the integration with Ln pay and I'm going to show you how to kind of understand the next steps if this is a solution that you're looking for down the road to streamline everything into one specific software and being able to manage the payment processing uh in the most seamless way possible so with that like to introduce you to Ln pay so basically you partner with cover connect and we have an in-house solution with LMN pay to make it a very quick and easy sign up process simple and affordable pricing and a very lusted inhouse customer service uh now tons and tons of benefits to kind of keep in mind these are just a few but the ability to have better cash flow and more improved cash flow reduced admin time so you're going to be ahead of your invoicing not forget what was actually sent out and an overall improved customer experience so not just by setting up a merchant account for a company but in addition to that your customers will be out there on the go they receive an email on their phone with an invoice click on a link and pay off that invoice very very streamlined and as a result you'll be getting paid faster for your invoices so this is something that your team is looking into and exploring uh down the road just a quick little reminder so uh to begin with when you go into your main settings and you navigate to the portal and payments there is a form that you would want to fill out with COBRA Connect just to get the discussion started to learn a little bit more about the payment processing solution once you go through next steps and everything gets approved uh and you've connected with the team you'll receive your Merchant Account Details plug that into your settings in LMN to activate online payments and if you want to do that in bulk for all your customers you can also enable it in bulk as well so that way make sure everyone is set up and all your clients have easy access to streamlining the payments uh for the invoices so I'm going to be bringing that uh to you just to give you kind of a quick little insight on how to get that going so for that let me just bring you back into elen and let just say uh you're opting to go with that route with setting up a merchant account and streamlining the payment process we can go ahead into our settings and you may recall this from our estimate training previously but under our settings we can navigate to our portal and payments okay so once I'm on my portal and payments we'll be able to see exactly under online payments if I go to connect merchant account this is where I have the ability to plug in my details but even before I get to that I'm going to share this link with you through Zoom just so you have uh that link handy and that would be the link to basically the form to get discussion started just to learn a little bit more and very straightforward form once everything is good to go you'll plug in your details to activate online payments and this is where you can activate it in b as well now in addition to that if your company is on the professional or Enterprise subscription level with Ln you have access to offering both credit card and a payment options but if you're on the starter plan you have access to only providing credit card only now in that case this is where you can also designate online payment methods at the settings level and you can always override that at the contact level or even at the invoice level if you need to as well but this is where you can program either credit card debit card and e or one only you can simply toggle between each of these and program it from there as well okay so just to give you a quick little reminder on that now before we go ahead and see what that email would have looked like because as you can see my account is activated for online payments and to see how Mark Johns can pay off that invoice online for any of you who have the manual payment process where maybe you accept through cash or check whatever the case might be what you first want to do is verify in your settings that if you go to your invoice payment settings that you have all of those listed right within here and then if I were to go back into that invoice that we have for Mark John's and let's just say that that was paid through a different method what you have the ability to do to manage that and keep an accurate record is go into invoicing within that invoice we can then go ahead and add in a payment and that's where we can choose from our payment methods maybe it's s be check can enter the check details and then add that invoice payment and even export it to QuickBooks always just make sure that you first sync over the uh invoice into QuickBooks before you actually go ahead and Export the payment so that it aligns ing if that is the route that you choose to follow okay so that basically just gives you kind of a quick little uh breakdown on how that comes into effect now I'm sure you're all very excited to see exactly what that email notification will look like so there's a couple of different ways I'm going to go about this first is we're going to go to the email as Mark John's and I will see there is that customized email that we provided in so hi Mark we have a new invoice ready for your review payment please us know if you have any additional questions at this time there is the invoice number the due date and the amount we can see a link to review and pay that invoice and also if they have not actually configured a portal account this is where they can create a new account or even sign in to their uh portal so in this case let's say I'm ready to go ahead and review and pay it so the first scenario where I click on the link from the email it will take me uh into the portal while that's loading AER reminder there is that PDF attachment that we had from that toggle so now you can actually attach a copy of it before they actually go into the link and once they're in the link this is what the invoice will look like very similar a little bit of a better look and feel to it but as you can see company details billing job site address invoice amount they can Download a pdf of this one uh and then there are the different messages at the bottom from our settings now because online payments is our already available here I can go to checkout and this is where they can add in their payment details or through the a option once everything is ready to go the pay now button will write up click on pay now and the invoice has been paid so same exact idea if they go on their phone they receive that email they click on the link it will look exactly the same because the portal is optimized to work very similar on the mobile device as well okay so that's is the first scenario to take you through the second option is if I'm Mark Johns and I'm logging in my customer portal I have a bunch of additional capabilities but again towards the end I'm going to give you a quick Glimpse at all of those features but for now I can go ahead and see that there is that invoice that is actually due I can see the exact same thing once I go to checkout because I already have my information locked in as part of configuring a portal account pay now is already ready to go and simply just pay off that in so a couple of different ways to go about that just wanted to give you quick heads up on how both different options uh work so with that we' basically taken you through the Journey from setting up uh how your invoices will look all the way to generating your Milestone payment for design build projects being able to send it out to your customer and how to collect and receive those payments at this point just want to take a quick pause how are we finding things so far do we have any additional questions at this point anything at all let me know through the chat the Q&A just want to kind of see how we're finding things at this point all right I'll take a thumbs up appreciate that no problem at all okay so let's get back into it and for now I'm going to transition into a different method for generating our invoices um before I get into that as a quick reminder and exciting uh announcement for you all we do have an LMN pay promo that's going on both through our P pricing and packaging update in addition to the cob promotion so here are some more details for you in addition to that I'm going to share a quick link through the zoom chat so you have more detailed information on that promotion also if you're really interested in exploring LMN pay and taking things to Next Level to implement this into your business you for see this as a GameChanger for your company I'm going to share a link here where you can actually book an initial uh call with one of our LMN pay Specialists to be able to understand a little bit more about how this integration comes into effect so I'll just share a quick little uh note here and this is where you have access to that so just make sure there something of interest you want to learn a little bit more to get started you got you got it covered right there and uh you should be receiving that on your okay so let's go ahead now and transition into invoicing your time and material type of work I'm sure quite a few of you on J call deal with this from time and time again so I'm going to show you how to actually review exactly what uh that time and material job will look like in addition to then generating an invoice for that job so this time we're going to pull up a different customer here so I'll go back to my job list and let's just say that we're going to be visiting a customer and there was an urgent sidewalk or intertalk job that we created uh this week so I want to go ahead and specifically find that job again doesn't need to have an invoice schedule but invoicing should be turned on because it's a time and material tracking job so if I go into time sheet tracking we could see we have our sidewalk interlocking we have some detailed notes for that as well I can also go into materials and Equipment make sure we we have all of that locked in and then if I go into invoicing invoicing is immediately turned on for progress and books so to begin this time and material type of example we need to actually build a time sheet where Cru are actually in the field performing that work so while I'm already on the desktop side of element we're going to actually build it directly from here so to do that I'm going to go ahead and open up the time sheets and go to my time sheet list I'm just going to take the name that job so you can make sure we have that locked in and we'll just verify everything for tracking purposes and let's say maybe in this case it's not fillable okay so we're going to go ahead and add in a new time sheet start it for today clock in now let's say I'm going to just adjust this based on the team members uh that are going to be uh working in here so let's just say maybe it's going to be so these team members here we're going to find that job sidewalk interlocking so we can go ahead let's adjust the dates or the time sorry so we'll do that say we finished it by so this time okay and we can indicate use for one day maybe use that pouch finish okay so we reached our goal we have exactly some good crew efficiency broken down and that time sheet has been built up so if I go back into to the job go into my time sheet tracking in history I have all that information locked in okay so all of that is readily available and good to go so the best part here is that regardless which subscription level you're on with elend you have access to detailed automated invoicing feature so in other words we don't need to actually create a manual invoice about the time that was worked based on that information immediately all I need to do is go ahead based on the invoice section go to my generate screen and now based on this information here if I go into today's uh date I now have all the information needed to generate that invoice and there we go all of that is locked in and readily available I can go ahead and add that invoice run and immediately on that job the invoice has been created for okay so there is all the detailed information that has been broken down okay so all of that is verified and confirmed if I go into the job under my invoices immediately everything is rolled up and further to that if I go into my job costing because I've generated that invoice I now have some information um for example that uh it's going to be there in terms of what was actually used but if I were to back just for that previous example that we had with Mark John's I can also see Revenue trigger that is broken down and measure my estimated versus actuals right because the other job was created on fight this one was based off of an estimate so that just gives you a bit of different variety when it comes to generating invoices for Milestone payments through the schedule versus the actual time and material capability abilities through an actual time sh okay so I wanted to give you a variety of both different options okay so let's talk now about some more efficient and accurate invoicing practices one of them we already just highlighted but I'm going to show you again another way to go about doing this so through automated invoicing so instantly generating your invoices from Ln time sheets and contracts there's also bulk in invoice generation so let's just say that we want to generate specific invoices on a monthly or a weekly basis we can do that all based on that time frame and you can also bulk approve and push so you can review Mark invoices in review in one shot you can go ahead and send them out to all your customers in one shot via the customer portal or even through the QuickBooks export as well so a lot of different ways for you to be able to manage all of this in one shot as opposed to doing it individually so with that being said uh I'm going to go ahead and uh bring up that for a quick moment just to highlight so let's go back to our job there for Mark John's and let's just say that we're ready to go ahead and invoice for the next two uh next two ones so I can go ahead I can program what that date is going to be and once I go into the generate screen I can filter it through and then go through my list ingly and now within each of these I can go and generate all of those in one shot and it's a much faster way to do that as opposed to individually generating that so in my job now I will have three total invoices that have been generated okay same idea works if you have any sort of time and material projects that were done for a variety you can change by only billable extras maybe I want to go from specifically today's date till that date and I can go ahead and generate all these timing material work as well if I wanted to okay so just different ways and variety for you to kind of keep in mind based on that information okay so with that said uh another one that I want to highlight which you just saw me going in and out of was the invoicing run so basically this is a collection of invoices all created at the same time now it is highly recommended that you filter it based on the invoice uh date and what was already created and you can also see all the invoices generated within that time frame their status and the amount so let's just say that you find an invoice that you've generated over 50 different invoices and one is inaccurate or doesn't need to be there you can always revert the run if you needed to or delete that invoice it'll go back to the generate screen and then you can go and regenerate it going forward without any error from there so just a quick wi reference point for you as well also the invoice groups so by now you probably earned about Job groups and staff groups invoice groups another way to keep everything organized based on invoices for all of your customer accounts so uh when it comes to some best practices specifically with your design build projects you may want to create one for like time and material work you may want to break it down based on uh any design builds Milestone payments or partial payments those are different options that you can choose from uh or even just your your uh time of the the month that you're going to send out the invoices or when you are going to be receiving a payments based on so there's a variety of different naming conventions I'm going to show you in my account but just want to show you how this will help you to stay as organized as possible as you're using various dashboards within the software so let's go into both of these uh very quickly here just want to give you kind of a quick little reference as well so go back here let's talk about the invoice run so earlier as you saw we had a collection of invoices created at one shot so if I scroll through here I can look at like this one where I had 15 invoices generated at the same time and they're all organized with the date the amount and time frame ingly okay so that just shows you how to kind of stay organized and see all the invoices created within that run now if I needed to go ahead and regenerate them given that obviously they weren't paid or approved by the customer you can then go and click on the revert option as well and then it'll bring it back into the invoice generate screen okay invoice groups on the other hand this is where I have the ability to basically create a bunch of different groups so you can see here I have a variety of them so like time and material work uh we have like um some for let just say partial payments jobs that pay me on this state uh invoices to be sent on a specific date anything that is hourly uh we have some for Milestone payments hourly and contractor design build customers who pay you on that date so there's a variety of different ones you can build out interial so let's say we're going to add in a brand new one and let's just say this is going to be my urgent sidewalk interlock jobs immediately I can go ahead and add in all of those urgent sidewalk projects so let's say I'm going to just go ahead and add in a bunch of them over here let me just make sure we have the relevant ones so once I have that locked in I have my uh group already built out here now okay so my urgent sidewalk interlock jobs now how can you actually utilize those invoice groups well there's a couple of different areas if I go to generate let's say I'm just going to backdate this a little bit so let's say we're going to go ahead from here it's going to be my uh urgent sidewalk inter walk jobs and there we go I can easily organize what I need to generate if I go into my invoice list I also have the ability here to go and narrow it down so let just say all statuses okay just give me a moment here and let's go and say that it's going to be and based on that in the results now you can see all of the invoices that belong to that group or the jobs that belong to that group right so another way to really stay organized uh when it comes to all of those uh keep features right just wanted to give you quick little highlight on that for reference okay now some additional ones that I want to highlight before we go into the final part of today's demonstration so one of them being remember when we are going through earlier and actually sending out the invoice to our end client so Mark John's in this case another feature that you have to manage all the activity within uh specifically the uh customer portal so if I go to CRS and portal activity this is going to give me all the portal activity for every customer but what you have the ability to do is based on the notification types you can actually see any invoice email that was actually viewed or uh if basically the invoice was actually being viewed or if a reminder was there or if an invoice was published so that way you can pinpoint all of that detailed information further to that if I go to reports we have tons of invoicing reports that you can generate as well so a variety of different options just like any other Tool uh within the software you have that available right so all of these ones here and then if I go into my dashboards I can go to invoices and we have some detailed invoice analytics that you can reference but for some more upto-date ones as well you can also go to the analytics dashboard so you may recall this from our estimates and our jobs trip same thing with invoicing you have tons of different reporting and also some additional features to really streamline everything that you're looking at to capture all those Data Insights so we're going to go ahead and just uh kind of pinpoint exactly from an invoicing site and we have the overview the Aging report and invoice listing so let's say I just go through again don't need to go through everything but just give you an idea you have different filters at the top that you can use to narrow down your search to stay organized so just like any other dashboard that you are uh utilizing here are all the data points as you can see little bit of a different look to it looks a little bit more organized and also you can actually save the view based on filters you've applied so that way you always will have that combination anytime that you access this and then even better we can go ahead and actually download this to Excel or CSV format or even go ahead and Export this to Pia so you have a variety of different options to capture all that data in one place okay all right so that's basically uh about it on the desktop side that I wanted to kind of uh share with you here for the final uh part over here wanted to go ahead and uh just give you reminder on some best practices here which I already talked about so jobs to be invoiced make sure invoicing is turned on make sure progress invoicing is set up and filtering by the beill date to generate your invoices and with that time now to give you a quick little demonstration on some of the additional features within the customer portal just to make sure you're all good to go with all of those essential features that are within there so with that I'm going to pull up uh Mark John's portal uh one more time just give me a second while I'm loading that any outstanding questions there from some of those uh tips and tricks there on invoicing or even the reporting or analytics just want to make sure you're all good to go there okay no worries something comes up let me know now let's go ahead and show you some more details on the portal so if I go to the dashboard which you're looking at uh little earlier this is where obviously we able to capture some of the detailed information in terms of invoices that are due uh your client will be able to see exactly any job sites that are visited including any pictures and any notes um in addition to that there will also be any proposals that are approved or uh pending any invoices that were overdue um and a quick little timeline overall of all the activity that is taking place estimates as a refresher for you this is where you can view all your different estimates uh that's you as a contractor have sent to your end client so your end client can see all of this information if I go to job sites this is going to give additional visibility to any of the work that was actually completed um by your team so your customers have that job site visibility now again remember that is going to be a permission that you need to enable within the settings under portal and payments right because if you want to give them access to like seeing time sheet photos or comments or GPS location in that information that's where we also want to keep that in mind so let me just see want to go ahead and give you an example so let's say that I go into this one right over here we can see any of the design build information that was completed all the services and materials any notes and if any photos were uploaded as well I go to visit details that's Again part of the permissions as well so they can see any upcoming uh visits that are going to be taking place in a heat map so they can see different statuses and visit schedule to pre-plan exactly in advance of any of the different uh visits that are yet to come so if not they need to reschedule it this is where they get that maximized visibility into all of that key information that is available to them right now work request is another big one because again to avoid having many different uh uh phone calls and emails and text messages and all of that this is going to help to streamline that communication between you and your end customer so in other words let's just say that maybe they have an upcoming pool installation request coming in they can basically build a new work request for that information and basically whoever is assigned in the CRM to that main contact will get the notification that that this is the request that is coming in we need to act upon that ing in addition to that let's just say maybe a garden bed's request or whatever the case might be maybe there's one that's going to be we need to reschedule this visit to another date that could be another type of request when they add a new request they'll simply enter in the task name the instructions they can mark it urgent choose their job site and upload up to 10 different photos the job site as well okay and as you could see you can manage the statuses as well if that's been completed in the office you'll be able to manage that information as well invoices we already talked about earlier but another additional component to highlight for any payment history if they want to get confirmation or like a receipt of the payment that was made they'll be able to go ahead so let's just say I'm going to backdate this to get a bit more variety so let's just say that this was going to be paid here we can see all detailed information and download or print that off as well so your customers have that additional capability there to go ahead with managing now users if they have multiple users within the portal to interact with that they can basically choose from three different access level permissions from basic accounting or admin okay so there's variety of different capabilities within each of them and last but not least is the profile so this is where they can go ahead change their password add in the card details if you granted them online payments so every time they pay an invoice everything is saved for them well in advance they don't need to manually go ahead and enter it every single time okay but again that's granted if they actually create a portal account so that way everything is going to be locked in for them okay so just wanted to give you kind of a sneak preview of all the different features you probably seen some different ects of the customer portal throughout our live virtual trainings but again wanted to give you a quick reminder on some of the additional capabilities that uh your end clients have and again all based on what you have programmed within your actual portal and payments right because that's where all of that is being determined based on your contractor defaults and if whether or not you overrided that at a contact level within the CRM as well okay so those are pretty much all the key components that I wanted to highlight uh with you here uh for today so with that said uh just going to do a quick little recap and summary for you all on what we have covered off so essentially we started with building out that foundation for our invoicing for design build work uh through our settings and then we learned how to generate customer invoices for accurate billing based on the Milestone payments in addition to that once the invoices were generated I took you through the entire life cycle from pending to in review to approving that invoice or even exporting it to QuickBooks in addition to that uh what you also have the ability to do is uh email out invoices to your customers through the customer portal uh we discussed how to manage uh payments in one chart as well and we reviewed again how to generate invoices based on the time and material type of work now one additional aspect that I'm going to take you through very quickly here when it comes to managing everything in bulk we talked about generating uh invoices in bulk what you also have the capability to do here is if I go ahead back into my invoicing and I go to the invoice list if you want to take any bulk actions either editing or sending out multiple invoices what you can do in one shot here on the invoicing uh with dashboard give moment there we can select all invoices hit update and this is where I can change a status change a date export to QuickBooks set to export it if it's already been sent into QuickBooks I can close off the invoice I can send it in bulk so if I want to send multiple invoices to the same customer all at once via leveraging the portal I can do that and I can also send a reminder as well so let's just say that that voice that we had here um for Mr John so let me just say uh right over here I'm just going to adjust it if I go to the invoice that we had let me just find that so if I wanted to go ahead and remind them because we still have an outstanding balance I can go ahead one at a time or I can check off all hit update and then actually send an invoice reminder and when you do that very similar interface to what we saw earlier when we're sending and Publishing the invoice and it will look like that and you can even customize what that email reminder is going to look like that you're notifying to your end client and you can attach a PDF of the same invoice as well so you do have those capabilities but again those are some additional bulk features that I wanted to also highlight with you here as well okay and then I walk you through sending out multiple invoices to customers all at once via email and leveraging that along the way as well all right so just to make sure we've all gauged our knowledge and insight on everything that has been covered off here in today's training I have a quick little poll uh for you with three questions want to make sure each and every one of you uh go ahead and participate in that just want to make sure you're all well aware of all of that key information that we have been covering so I'm going to leave that poll on for a bit so please do your best to work through that ingly while you're doing that if you have any additional questions for me from today's training please go ahead through the chat or the Q&A more than happy to leave some time here to work through those questions with you okay one question coming in here is it possible to generate multiple invoices for One customer and send them all as one invoice at the end of each month yes absolutely so what we can go ahead and do is if I go back into the invoice list want to generate multiple invoices we've applied our filters ingly we're going to go through these and then that should do the trick and we can merge the selected invoices and then go through through this popup window to go through that okay and then remember you can actually unmerge those pending ones just be very mindful of that as you go through okay but great question appreciate that insight as well okay looks like that question those are all the questions for today uh everyone's completed the poll so great job there appreciate you jumping into that all right just going to give you a reminder on some of the additional items so our VI virtual training such as this one if you want to attend more of these especially if you have a new team member joining your Landscaping crew you want to get them trained uh on Ln by us definitely I want to make sure you're aware of that so I've shared that link through the zoom chat I'm also going to share some more information through the chat as well so our Academy certification 4 day inclass inperson training uh is uh back and we have four different locations coming up for this fall so definitely make sure uh if you're interested and you want to meet myself and the rest of Education team in person to take your element expertise to the next level make sure to check that out as well and also our uh business growth transformational workshops a lot of Industry insights and knowledge again we have h four different locations across the states uh coming up as well um so if you're interested make sure to check out this link too finally tons of educational resources available from The Academy online all the way to the help desk with more detailed steps and tutorial guides in addition to instructional videos on all the content we've been covered definitely make sure to check that out right through your Ln account you can go to the help and resources Tab and easily find detailed information over there and don't forget once today's training uh closes you'll be receiving a survey uh as well indicating uh any detailed feedback you have about my training with you here today in addition to any detailed insights you have about invoicing your designbuilt jobs and any gamechanging features you may have learned about from today's session so would' love to hear through all your comments if you don't mind taking a moment of your time to fill that out it would be highly appreciated and with all of that being said from our LM crew to your crew thanks again for joining me today appreciate all of the detail engagement and questions throughout today's session if you have any further questions afterwards about invoicing your design build jobs definitely reach out to the L to have a great rest of a day everyone and take care bye for now