Webinar: 12/3/25 - Invoicing with the Fundamentals App

(0:00 - 5:20)Today we’re going to talk a little bit about invoicing using the Fundamentals app. Basically, when Fundamentals was created earlier this year, the idea was to make the entire process as simple as possible. Everything that the Home Watch company needs to do, but primarily to try to keep the invoicing simple, but yet flexible, because, you know, we do need both. So today, as far as covering the different parts of the invoicing, we’re going to look at service codes and what those are, or items as they’re called. We’re going to look at what billable items are. We’re going to look at how to add additional billable items, how they can automatically be created, etc. We’ll then go through the invoice generation process and emailing process. And then we’ll take a look at how invoice payments are going to be shown in the new customer app. So I think that, you know, it’s a pretty full agenda, but I think we can go through it pretty quickly. Really easy to just understand the workflow. So everything starts with service codes or items. So I use both of these terms interchangeably, simply because QuickBooks calls them a service code, Zoho calls them an item, Method called them an item. So I’m calling them an item. So that seems to be the most common. But within QuickBooks, they are called service codes. And I think they also call them items at times, but product or service code is what you’ll look for when you’re in QuickBooks doing the codes. Those codes then turn into billable items. And what you can think of is that you’re putting a bunch of items into the shopping cart. Every time you do a report, for example, it’ll generate and put an item in that shopping cart that will be billed. And then at the end of the month, you basically take that cart up to the counter and turn all of the items in there into your invoices for your customer. So we’ll go through these steps one by one. I’m going to actually go back to the agenda because we’re going to kind of follow the steps that are listed here as we go. So first, let’s take a look at items and what that means. So I’m logged into Fundamentals here in my demo company. You can find items under your lists option here on the menu. So if you look on the left side, you’ll see where it says lists. And then when you click on that, you’ll get your item codes and can go here. So item codes are synced automatically from your accounting system. And for that reason, because they sync from the accounting system, there is no way to add additional item codes within HomeWatch IT. That’s done on purpose because the different accounting systems have certain requirements that they need for the codes. So it’s best to always set up codes within your accounting system, and then they will automatically sync over to HomeWatch IT. So here I have a list of the different codes that I had in my QuickBooks system. So you can see things like starting the car, different charges for batteries. I have my concierge items. I have my HomeWatch items. And these are all, as I said, basically set up right in QuickBooks. Very simple. If I click into one of these just to look at the details, it’s pretty basic. HomeWatch Weekly. You can set a base rate here, and you can also set a type. It’s going to automatically come over from your accounting system, so you don’t need to worry about the type. But the important thing is your base rate. So why do you need a base rate? Well, you can think of that as a default rate that will always come into play whenever you are creating an item. So if you look at the item itself, there is a hierarchy. Your item code, which is here, let’s just call it HomeWatch Weekly. We had a rate in there, 45. Now you also have the ability to go into your property screen. And let’s just pull up Browers and go to our Billing tab. And here you can say which code you want to bill and what the actual rate is for this property. Now you’ll notice that here I have it set to $70 instead of the 45, which was my default. That’s because this is a larger house. 70 is what we’re going to be charging every week when we go out to this particular property. So you have the ability to set that here, as well as different concierge rates by customer. Now if you leave this blank, it’ll default to that base rate that we looked at a go on the item, so the 45. I don’t recommend doing that. I recommend always putting a visit rate here, or even better, putting a rate on the schedules. So that’s the next tier up.(5:20 - 8:51)What would override the property is actually setting up the schedule. So let’s go into the schedule. And I’m going to go here into John Harris. And I have him set up to have a biweekly home visit. And if I go into his schedule, what you’ll see is here I have the home watch code billing item. And I have it set up for a $60 billing rate. My recommendation is when you’re setting up your system, the most flexibility will be if you put the billing rate here on the schedule. Why? Let’s say that you have a schedule, in this case for John Harris, we’re going to go out every other week for $60. But we might also have a schedule to go out and drive his car once a month. So in that case, we’ll set up a schedule here to go out, drive the car once a month. We have a different item code, which is his auto drive, and what we’re going to charge him to drive his car on that monthly visit. So what you’ll see is you can set up different rates for the different services on a different schedule. So this gives you the most flexibility in that every time we go drive the car, we’re going to charge $15. And every time we do the home visit, we’re going to charge $60. By putting this in on the schedule, it will automatically basically throw that item into the shopping cart when you complete the report that’s assigned to that particular schedule item. Let’s take a look at more detail here on John Harris. If I go to my billable items, I can look at the month of November, and I did my weekly home visits here. Every time I completed the report for him, it automatically threw in that $65 charge for each weekly home visit. So that was done, you know, automatically. Now, what happens if you have miscellaneous things to add throughout the month? So let’s say that on our home visit on the 11th of November, we walked into the property and there was a smoke detector that was chirping. So we got out our ladder, we replaced the battery, and we need to charge him accordingly for that. So we can add an additional miscellaneous charge right here from this screen, or you can also very easily do it from your mobile app. In the mobile app, you do it the same way. You go to billable items, you hit the blue plus sign, and then you can tell it what you want to add. So in this case, we’ll add for Harris. This was on November the 11th. You’ll notice it defaults to the current date. So if I had done this from my app right at his house, it would have automatically already set the 11th. It would have been very quick and easy. And now we can pick what it is that we want to charge. Now you’ll notice here are those item codes that we looked at a minute ago. So all of those item codes automatically sync, and you can pick right from here what you want to bill for. Well, in this case, we’re going to bill for that 9-volt battery, and it knows that we’re going to charge him $5 for that.(8:52 - 9:00)If you need to change the quantity or, you know, different rate for some reason, you can do that. Otherwise, this is all we need to do. We can just save this item.(9:01 - 10:08)And now you’ll notice that on the 11th, it’s now got the Duracell battery in there for an additional $5. So throughout the month, it’s very easy to add those additional charges as you incur them. So if you have concierge hours, if you have other parts that you might use, air filters or, you know, vinegar for the AC lines, whatever the case might be, it’s very easy to just add those in right from your app throughout the month and be able to go from there. The idea is then at the end of the month, you now have all these charges that have accumulated, and you’re ready to invoice for them. So what we can do is we’ll go to our invoicing tab. This brings up a list of all of our previous invoices. In this case, we want to generate invoices. So we’ll click over here. This will bring up for me a list of all of the different clients out there and what their totals are that are, you know, to be billed.(10:08 - 10:24)Now, at this point, I only have Harris that still has amounts from November. So, you know, that’s the only one I’m going to worry about and check, at least for our demo. Now, over here to generate invoices, you basically just follow the steps.(10:24 - 12:00)Select the customer or customers that you want to generate here on the list. You can click the button here to highlight all of them and you can generate as many or as few as you want in a batch. I know that I had a client of mine generate 59 invoices in one batch yesterday for the month of November. And just as a point of reference, the system generated all 59 of those invoices in 52 seconds. So it is very fast to do. So there’s no reason to, you know, separate this and do multiple items unless you want to. Number two, pick the cutoff date. The cutoff date means any charges prior to that date are what are going to get invoiced for. So in this case, I want to just invoice for my November charges. So I’m going to pick November 30th. So this means anything dated prior to November 30th or on November 30th will be included in my invoices I generate. Next, pick the date you want the invoices to be dated. I’m just going to leave that as today just to make this simple. And then once we’ve completed those steps, all we have to do is hit the generate invoice. It will confirm with us that this is what we want to do. We’ll say yes. And now the system will do all of that work on the server as indicated here by the message that was on the bottom. So you don’t need to wait around. You can go on and do other work. But as I said, it’s very, very fast. This one invoice I’m sure has long been completed by now.(12:00 - 12:54)You can check the status by clicking this refresh list button. When you do that, the invoices that you have selected should disappear from the open items list. So if I hit that, yes, you’ll notice that Harris is no longer there. So that means it’s fully completed and done. If I were to go back to my invoices tab, here it is. December 3rd, that invoice for John Harris for $200. I can click on it. I can see all of the line details. The invoice number was assigned directly by QuickBooks. So keep in mind that you don’t need to worry about that here. That is kind of proof that it was synced to QuickBooks and QuickBooks responded with the number. Here are those items we looked at in our billable items cart earlier.(12:55 - 15:19)So the three home visits plus the battery for $200 total. Once the invoice is paid and completed by the customer, your balances will go to zero. So you’ll be able to track that right here and see exactly who has paid you and who hasn’t. The last step that you can do is keep in mind now the invoice is generated and the invoice is in QuickBooks. It hasn’t gone to the customer yet. So if you want to come in here and look at those invoices and make sure everything looks very good, maybe spot check a few of them, you can do that and then you can return to your generate invoice step and you have this number five item that emails your invoices. Now this is going to email all the invoices with this date on them. So if you’ve done multiple batches and have them all dated on today the third, this one button push will send out all of those at once. If I hit that now, this is going to remind me exactly that’s what it’s going to do. If I have invoices that I’ve already sent out, it will not send them a second time. So keep that in mind that if you have invoices that you have sent out through here or through QuickBooks, you can click this and it will only send out the ones that have not yet been sent. Also what this step does is it sends the email from your accounting system. So this is very important. By sending it from here, I’m actually going to be telling QuickBooks to send out the email. Why? Because QuickBooks already has your format, the verbiage you want on that email body. It has the Pay Now link already connected to it. So all of that information you want to keep the same for your customers. You want them to see the exact same email that you know they’re used to seeing. So by doing this, all it’s going to do is tell QuickBooks or Zoho, if that’s what you’re running, to go ahead and send out that email directly. So we did that. That’s all handled in the background. The email is already gone. It should show up in my email box. In fact, it already has.(15:19 - 15:43)And now I can see that and pay for the invoice as a customer and so on. The last item that I was going to show on the agenda had to do with the new customer app and how the invoices show up in there. So here I have on the screen my phone, and I’m logged into the new customer app.(15:44 - 16:03)So you’ll see I’m in there as I’m logged in as Greg Armstrong. And we have an invoices button right here on our main menu. If I click that invoices button, this will bring up a list of all of the invoices that have been generated and if there’s a balance.(16:04 - 19:47)And you’ll notice that the newer ones, simply because the app is new, so anything from the point that you turn it on forward, it will save this link that will allow your customer to view and pay the invoice directly from their app. So if I were to click here on this number 2403, this will open up for me in a browser window directly from QuickBooks or Zoho if you’re running Zoho. So this now allows your customer basically to view and pay the invoice. I don’t have payments set up on my test customer company just because, but yours would have the green pay now button here. So the customer would be able to hit that and pay basically right from their app. If they want to actually view the details of the invoice from QuickBooks itself, here it is, available to them. They can zoom in on it and that’s right in the middle of the app. So that’s the nice thing is the app is totally integrated with that. So your invoice process is actually, you know, quite simple but all-encompassing. Just to recap, we talked about service codes and items and how to set them up. We looked at how those turn into billable items from your schedule. We also looked at how to add additional billable items right from the billable items screen in order to come up with everything that you want to use to generate the invoice and include on the invoice. We looked at the process to generate the invoice, including how to email it and double check it. And then we looked at how to do the payments from the customer app. So all-encompassing and, you know, you see this was a pretty quick and simple webinar, but, you know, good process there. I’m going to put the process screen back up and I’m going to open it up for questions. If anybody has any questions, please feel free to unmute and ask and we can go through those. So Gary, this is Steve. Yes, hi Steve. Yeah, so when you press the email invoices button from the Fundamentals app and it’s, it’ll send the invoices out just as if it was being sent manually from QuickBooks. So it’ll look exactly the same. That’s correct. It’s basically just telling QuickBooks to send the email. Okay. That’s all I’m doing here, just telling QuickBooks or Zoho, depending on which system you’re running, to send the email. So it’s the exact same email, exact same format, colors, logo, everything that you have set up in your accounting system goes out to the customer. Okay. Keeps it easy. Any other questions? I will assume then that the process is simple and you’re all good with it. Yes, I’m sorry, Nancy.(19:48 - 20:55)I’m still in the process of reorganizing myself with the system. So once I get everyone on board, I’m sure I will have questions at another webinar, but this is extremely helpful. So thank you. Sure. No problem. As I usually mention, these are always recorded and added to the help system. I know that right now on the Fundamentals side, there’s not a whole lot of the recorded webinars, but that will increase. I’m looking to do these pretty regularly. And I also would like to ask that if any of you have topics that you’d like to see covered, particularly with the Fundamentals, email those over and that really helps me determine what would benefit you all the most. And that’s what I want to do is make sure that my topics benefit you. So please, please do that. Nancy, yeah, I know you’re brand new with Fundamentals, even though you’ve been with Overwatch IT for, gosh, seven years plus.(20:56 - 21:37)I think it’s great that you upgraded to this and I think you’ll find it is a big improvement over what you were doing. It’s excellent. I can’t wait. I’m so excited. Great. Thank you. Appreciate that. Gary, it’s Steve again. Yes. One question, the billable items, that’s not available on the phone app, is it? I don’t see it on there. Actually, yes, it is. If I go back to, oops, hold on here. I’m logged into my system and down here on the bottom, you have your billable items. That would be more convenient then. Add more charges right when you’re on site.(21:37 - 21:39)Right. Quite easy. Yeah.(21:39 - 21:43)Okay. I’ll try it. Thanks. Okay. Let me know if you have any other issues. Okay.(21:45 - 21:57)Unfortunately, there’s too many items on the bottom now, so I did have to make it scroll. Sure. But I tried to put the ones that are least common, like schedules, off to the side.(22:02 - 22:15)All right. Any other questions? Otherwise, I thank you all for attending, and I appreciate you being clients and look forward to working with you more. As well. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you all.