Advanced Invoicing: Special & Complex Invoicing Scenarios (2525/Level 2)

Advanced Invoicing: Special & Complex Invoicing Scenarios (2525/Level 2)

Diane Gilson: Hello, and welcome to today’s webinar ‘Advanced Invoicing: Special and Complex Invoicing Scenarios.’

One of the most fun things I get to do as I put these things together is to come up with some picture that kind of goes along with the theme of what we’re working on. So today, we have a pallet down there with all sorts of good colors and paintbrushes. So, that takes us into ‘Accounting Artistry with Invoices’. You know, a lot of people think accounting can be a little dull, but in fact, there are so many systems and so many different things we can do; it’s almost like this great systems game that we get to play on an ongoing basis, so I hope that I can infuse people here with that same sense of enthusiasm towards working in this software that’s got so many different features.

So, with our invoices, really, what we’re doing is asking people for money, and we’re just going to try and come up with some creative ways to go ahead and ask for the money.

• We’ll talk about the lay of the land and some background information you need to know before you can be really effective at invoicing.
• Choices, choices, choices! We’re going to move from the simple up to the more complex, and of course, it was kind of fun to say that from the simple to the sublime.
• Maximizing ‘group think.’ Now, this isn’t quite what it might appear to be; we’re going to actually talk about neat ways that you can use groups in your invoices.
• Time, cost, and billables: how can we use that information - that is available to us in the system - to help us get better invoicing and
• Converting the plans, our estimates, our sales orders, etc., into cash - via that one stop along the way of an invoice.

So, let’s go ahead and get into our PDF presentation. Of course, these hand-outs are on the site to accompany this class. So [let's start with] 'Scouting out the Lay of the Land'. Now, what I’m talking about here is what’s happening right inside your company and what type of job is going on. So whatever you can do to learn more about the jobs that are being worked on... Of course, in any given company, we find that there sometimes can be quite a variety - that most companies are not doing the same thing over and over again. Every job has a few unique angles. So first of all, the kinds of things you want to ask are:

• What’s the nature of the job?
• How long is it going to last? Because that can have a big impact as you move through the life of the job if it’s a long-term job. We’re going to, in the future, going to be talking about income recognition issues, but knowing how long it’s intended to last is a good measuring stick or a place to jump off from on the invoicing side.
• Is it a fixed-price job or a time and materials job, or some combination of the two? Lots of times, jobs start out as fixed-price jobs but then allowances come into the picture (we’ve had a session on handling allowances). Sometimes, change orders come into the picture, or it might be a straight time and materials job where everything comes through at us invoiced line by line.
• Is there an estimate that needs to get entered into QuickBooks? If you’ve got an outside estimating package, do we need to get that estimate inside QuickBooks so that we can convert that and go through the process of getting it into an invoice?
• What are the provisions of the contract? If you’re going to be the person involved in getting those invoices out, you need to know what are the key points where the invoicing needs to be done - and what are the payment terms? So, when to invoice? You know, there are a lot of different points in time that we can create invoices in the system. And the first one I’d like to talk about is this. I have run into clients in the past that they’re just so happy that they got the $250,000 contract, so they go out, and they want to put it on the books so that they don’t forget that it’s out there. Of course, I would imagine that if you had contracts of that size, it would be relatively hard to forget that they were there. The problem that happens is that when you’re invoicing right upfront, you’re recognizing income in the system that should not be recognized. Now, if you go through and do some special adjustments, you can always back that out, but typically, we don’t want to see that full contract go in on the front end when that contract is signed. You can get some pretty strange-looking numbers when you start recognizing income with no related expenses.
• Will there be a deposit? And how is the deposit going to be handled? There are three standard ways of handling customer deposits, and of course, I have my favorites. But everyone has their own way of thinking about it and ways that they prefer to do things. So if you're going to have a deposit, how are we going to be handling it?...