Tim Sines (00:04:04):

I’m going to go ahead and do one thing, Carl, before we get started. A lot of people don’t know this but in their profile, under my profile, you can change where your screen loads on login. A lot of people go to the dashboard, and some people may or may not be using the client band, the to-do list, but you can if you want to. You log in and it’ll go straight to your client list if you want it to. So a lot of people don’t know about this little option over here in your profile. So that’s there. If you want to go to due date management or time sheet entry or your schedule you can control that. I just wanted to point that out. I see a lot of people come to their dashboard and there’s nothing there, and they may want to go right to their client list.

Carl (00:04:55):

And Tim, on the poll here 70% of the audience wanted to hit invoicing.

Tim Sines (00:04:59):

Okay, great. Any specific questions on invoicing while I’m in here?

Dan Raimi (00:05:08):

So Tim, this is Dan Raimi. The one I guess issue I would like to see is detailed invoicing. I do forensic accounting, so every hour, every description, who did it, which is me, and all the expenses detail have to go on every invoice. So if you could just show how we would do an invoice with all detail for hours and expenses.

Tim Sines (00:05:39):

Okay. I’ll just start by selecting a client. It will bring all your time in by engagement, Dan. And at this point in time, you can change the template that you want for your invoice. You can go from narrative, and then we have all these detail style templates down here. We have four of them. So they’re pretty self-explanatory. Detail, no rate; no rate and time, or no rate, time and amount. It’ll just summarize your amounts by engagement. So this is where you determine what style template you want to use.

Tim Sines (00:06:17):

Now, if I just go with this, let’s just say I go with the detail, I’m going to go with straight up time, I’m not going to do any write up or write down. If you wanted to write up or write down, you could change these amounts here and it will show you your write up and write down. I’ll go ahead and save this invoice. Go right to Invoice Review. And from here, I can actually see that template. You actually have another chance to change it here as well. Even though it’s been saved, if you want a different look you can change it here. So in this case, I’ll preview it, and there’s a detail-style invoice with hours and rates displayed. If I wanted to change this and I did not want to display the rate for example. Now it’ll just show your hours and amount.

Dan Raimi (00:07:18):

Can you do the same thing with expenses, Tim?

Tim Sines (00:07:22):

Expenses, you have the option to roll it. Well, you want your expenses displayed on your invoice, correct?

Dan Raimi (00:07:31):

Correct.

Tim Sines (00:07:32):

Yeah, so if I go… Let’s just reverse this. I’m going to reverse this invoice. I’ll put it all the time back in the WIP. Well, I’m going to go into the client for manual invoice, and let me see if he has any expenses in here. So there’s no expenses. I can go up here to the Quick Links and I could do an expense entry right here. And let me just go ahead and add an expense for this client. Say it’s for the 1120S engagement, I’m doing copying. Maybe I’m charging $50 a copy or whatever it may be. And it’ll put your amount in there, you can put a description, and I can save and close. Now if you notice, we did this dialogue from up here, but it updated the manual invoice, it brought that into this invoice automatically, okay?

Dan Raimi (00:08:30):

Okay.

Tim Sines (00:08:31):

Now I can view the time in here as well or expenses. So here I just have expenses to view, there’s no time here. If you want to view your time just click the pencil icon and any time or expenses will be displayed in here. Let me go ahead and add an expense for accounting real quick. The accounting engagement. I’m going to select the client, engagement was accounting. We’ll go with one. Save and close, and now I have $50 listed in this column. If I view that, now you’ll see your open time records and your open expenses.

Dan Raimi (00:09:23):

Gotcha.

Tim Sines (00:09:23):

No, if you do not want to bring that into your invoice, just uncheck it. It won’t bring it into the invoice. You also which is a new feature, you have now the option to write up or write down this expense if you want to. So even though your standard cost might be $50 for a copy, you could change this to 30 and do a write down on that expense. So, Open Time works the same way. You can review all your time. You have inline editing, you can edit your descriptions in here and whatever changes you made make sure you commit them. And then you can uncheck what expenses you don’t want to invoice for. So if you want to carry them over, you could. Okay?

Tim Sines (00:10:11):

You can also, while I’m in here, I’m just showing you different things in here, you can choose various columns that you may or may not want to display. So if you don’t want to see or for example, user initials, you can hide it. If you want to bring the user’s name in, you can bring the user’s name in. And it will save these, so whatever you set up here will save it when you’re in and out of this screen. So this is column chooser, whenever you see this, you can customize these columns that you’re viewing. And then up here, you can also filter by activity. So if you only want to see for your 1099 activity, you can also filter the list up here, and clear the filter by clicking here.

Dan Raimi (00:10:57):

Perfect.

Tim Sines (00:11:00):

So another feature which is fairly new, if by chance you wanted to reassign all this time from 121 Food Service to a different client, you could reassign the time. And we do now allow batch deleting. So if I want to delete all these selected time records by chance I could if you wanted to. So that’s it. So if I go ahead and generate this invoice now, and we go and preview it you will now see, you should see your expenses on the invoice after you get past all the time records and there was a ton of them. Wow, a lot of time. There’s a lot of garbage time in here. Oh, I’m going to down through here. So yeah here’s where-

Dan Raimi (00:11:58):

[crosstalk 00:11:58].

Tim Sines (00:12:00):

Yeah, you’ll see your summary of expenses.

Dan Raimi (00:12:02):

Okay, there you go. Perfect. Thank you.

Carl (00:12:06):

Hey, Tim, let me just… Several people have joined, I’m going to do a little housekeeping. So we’ve turned everyone’s microphone on. We’ve got about 25 participants. So feel free to chime in if you have particular questions. If you’re not comfortable speaking up, feel free to place a note in the Q&A and we will answer it as we go along here. The poll results we had 50%, Tim, wanted to see project management, 56% invoicing. So maybe we’ll stay here for a bit if anybody has questions. 13% interested in time entry, and 31% in general overview. One of the things I love that you do, Tim, is the sort of the secret sauce in there, the hidden gems. There are so many of them, you started the call here today with one in particular and you might even revisit that since some missed it.

Tim Sines (00:13:02):

Sure.

Carl (00:13:03):

But feel free to do that as well.

Tim Sines (00:13:06):

Yeah, I’ll just do it real quick. So under the top where your name is listed, go to My Profile. I’ve noticed a lot of people when I’m doing calls, they go to the dashboard by default, but you actually have the option of where you want to go after you log in. I prefer the client list, you can direct to the dashboard, the schedule, due date project management, or straight to time sheet entry. So I like to go to the client list myself. So if I log out and log in, it’s going to take me directly to the client list. So you can control that, just a little hidden gem.

Tim Sines (00:13:47):

Well, let me jump back into invoicing, and the manual invoicing is where we started. And I would just look at all the sections to get familiar with what you’re actually looking at. I think once you get your eye trained to the different sections, you know exactly where to go. We build the invoice for you by default based on time. So if you notice, we’re already building the invoice for the expenses and the time. We’re showing you the open time, and if there’s any advanced payments or credits on the account for this client, you’ll see it. And we’re showing you the customer’s balance, and we’ll show you the last invoice amount.

Tim Sines (00:14:26):

What’s nice is you can also go right here to Invoice History and you can view the history, and you can filter. So if you’re billing for a tax return and you just want to type in tax or personal property tax, you can filter out your invoices and look at those amounts that you’ve charged previously. So that’s under invoice history. We do have the option now to preview the invoice before you save it. Fairly new. So if you don’t want to commit it, save your changes. You can preview it. And this is just the Clear button if you want to clear it out. And this is nice also, we’re just showing you the current address for the client which comes in handy, and the email. So if you are emailing this invoice to your client, you can at least see you have an email set up and what it is.

Tim Sines (00:15:16):

Changing your templates, we’ve already talked about it. Terms, and this is finalized. So this is what you want to do when you are going to invoice review how you want to deliver your invoice to your client. Do you want to print it, email it or just record it only? So these options are here. Time is here, open time and expenses. Again, you can view it just by clicking the pencil and these are your actual invoice line items for a narrative invoice only. So some people do detail invoices just like Dan, and this description may or may not be important. We default it with something like accounting or payroll or whatever, but this will display whatever you type in here for a narrative invoice.

Tim Sines (00:16:03):

Now keep in mind, even Dan, if you create a detail style invoice and you want to flip the switch and do a narrative, you can do that. So we allow you to even after an invoice is saved, you can change the invoice format and re-email it to your client in a narrative style or detail style. So these are your invoice line items. A lot of people ask what the internal memo is for? It does not appear on any invoices as it mentions on the tooltip. It’s just an overall description of the invoice. But we do use it for if you’re going to print statements or email statements to your clients.

Tim Sines (00:16:45):

So this basically since you could have a very long invoice, you could have a detail style invoice, you could have a narrative, but this mainly is just recapping the invoice. So if you do, do a statement, this description will print on that statement. And you’re allowed 250 characters, and you can see I’m up to 162 right here. So there is a limit for this memo, which is describing your invoice. And then you have a top memo and a bottom memo. And that’s manual invoicing. Daniel, did you have a question?

Daniel (00:17:21):

Yes.

Tim Sines (00:17:22):

Okay.

Daniel (00:17:24):

As you’ve been explaining, I’ve been playing around here with the different invoice formats. Is it possible to further change like for instance, some of the simple narrative? One has the phone number, the other one has the address, can I fine tune that and make one that has both the address and the phone number, or that’s I don’t have access to any of that?

Tim Sines (00:17:53):

Yeah, what I would suggest is to submit that change, Daniel, but we don’t currently have a report designer where you can move things around on the invoice. So hopefully down the road, we’ll have more features with report designers and report builders and things like that. But currently, if it’s something you want to see on an invoice, a template, I would suggest just emailing that to support@imaginetime.net and we can make that customization.

Daniel (00:18:23):

Okay, great. Thanks.

Tim Sines (00:18:26):

Let me jump over into batch billing. A lot of people do use manual. I’ll come to recurring as well, which is a useful tool. But batch invoicing is mainly bringing in all of your WIP. And I don’t know if a lot of you have noticed but we made just here recently a big, big update, a big performance enhancement where large chunks of data load very quickly. So there’s thousands of records that just loaded very quickly. So what we’re doing is we’re compressing the data that’s coming across from the server and delivering it to your workstation. So this was a big performance increase. So we have some firms that have a large amount of data, this loads quickly now.

Tim Sines (00:19:14):

But anyway, batch invoicing. This is where you can set your invoice date. We’re giving you the starting invoice number. And again, this is just a short memo description that you can put on here. If you don’t put anything here, it will use your defaults from your engagements as your memo. So let’s take a look at how you would use this. First of all you have filters up here. If you want to bring in your fixed fee engagements, or if you want to bring in a certain billing group or you want to bring in certain engagements, you have the options to use these filters here. You can also do a cut off date to build through. So for example, if you’re billing for up through June 30, you could change this cut off to June 30, fetch the data. It’s going to go grab that data. And if you notice now my width is $166,000 of WIP.

Tim Sines (00:20:09):

So you can use these filters to filter out what you actually want to invoice for. If I only want to bring in fixed fees, I could fetch just fixed fee engagements. And now my fixed fees are there. Now, if you notice, there’s nothing in here in the invoice amount column because I haven’t selected anything. Once you start selecting your clients that you want to invoice, you’ll see we put a blue background for a fixed fee type of an engagement, and we’re automatically doing the write up and the write down for you. You can change this, you’re not willing to take that much of a write off. You can change the amount and we’re going to reflect the new write up in this case.

Tim Sines (00:20:52):

So the beauty of batch invoicing if you’re invoicing, for example for your payroll service at the end of the month or accounting, you can bring in those engagements and come up here, select it, and now this is just an easy way for you to review your write up and write down by client and the engagements for that client, and quickly see the amount that you’re invoicing, the total write up and the write down, et cetera. So this is a very useful tool for doing a lot of invoices very quickly. Now, another thing I’ll point out is in batch invoicing you still have the full capability to review the time. You can edit the time. What we do when you do the write up and write down, in this case it was $800, we’re doing the write up and write down by an allocation weighted on the standard amount, the most billable hours rate standard amount.

Tim Sines (00:21:54):

If you want to change this, you have the capability to come in here and indicate what staff you want to write up or write down for. So if you want to just use the allocation, you can go with the allocation. But you can change it at the time record level to get down to just I guess a little bit more detail as to who’s going to get the write up or the write down. So we have the same batch options in here, you can reassign time, delete time, et cetera. Those options are here. And another feature is you can just show your basic customer information which is the customer balance. By default, we’re showing the last 20 records, you can change this all last 50. And you can view the invoice history and your payment history all in this screen. So no matter what client you’re on, AB Salon, you click it and now you’re going to get all the historical information for AB Salon.

Tim Sines (00:22:54):

So that’s useful. And we do have a preview, it is client by client. So if you just wanted to preview this invoice without committing or saving it you can. Now just keep in mind, if you do save it, you can always reverse it. It’ll put the time back into WIP. But you can preview the invoice. And let me see here, there was a couple other options. Oh, let me point out something. Well, here, let me indicate this too. This is defaults are coming from the client. So if 2731 Greenmount I always email, if you want to print it you can change it here as well. We’re bringing these defaults then from the client record, but if you want to override it and change it, you can.

Tim Sines (00:23:41):

Same thing with the style invoice if you want to change the invoice template here you can. So a lot of people see this and don’t know you can really edit that and change it, you can edit it right here, okay? So this is a batch invoice, and when you’re done, you’ve reviewed everything, you just process and everything goes to invoice review. So that’s batch billing, any questions with batch billing?

Rakeesha (00:24:10):

Hey, Tim. This is Rakeesha. This is not on batch billing, but when you talk about emailing invoices it reminded me, is there a way if I’m just doing just one invoice, to do new invoicing, I could have it emailed directly right out of there instead of having to save it and then go to the client and the multiple steps of going to a client and emailing it out of there?

Tim Sines (00:24:30):

Yeah, you will have to actually save the invoice and create the invoice before you can email it, and that’s by design, because you wouldn’t want to email an invoice that might not be finalized. So we actually force you to finalize the invoice, and when you finalize here or you process everything that’s going to go to invoice review. So for example if I want to process this one, it is going to ask you and this was a Daniel suggestion, we carried it over here to, Daniel. So when you process, we give you the option to stay here and continue to invoice or go directly to invoice review. So from here, you would just finalize and that invoice will get emailed, but it has to be finalized before you can email.

Rakeesha (00:25:19):

Okay, so I have-

Tim Sines (00:25:20):

[crosstalk 00:25:20]. Go ahead.

Rakeesha (00:25:22):

Basically I have to have that set up for that particular client to email the invoice?

Tim Sines (00:25:29):

You don’t have to have it set up to be emailed at the client level because you can change it here as well. So say print was the default, you could always change-

Rakeesha (00:25:38):

Oh, okay.

Tim Sines (00:25:39):

Yeah, you could always change how you want to deliver this, deliver or not deliver. You may want to just record this invoice only. And but whatever method-

Rakeesha (00:25:50):

Yeah, I had…

Tim Sines (00:25:50):

Uh-huh (affirmative).

Rakeesha (00:25:50):

Yeah, I never tried clicking on that column that I’m asking now that only after you click on it does the drop down box show up.

Tim Sines (00:25:57):

Yeah. And same here for the invoice template. We still give you even yet another chance to change your invoice template.

Rakeesha (00:26:05):

Okay.

Tim Sines (00:26:08):

So couple things while I’m in invoice review, so-

Carl (00:26:13):

Hang on Tim. Sorry, bud. Nicole’s got a question.

Tim Sines (00:26:17):

Okay.

Nicole (00:26:18):

Hi, this was for batch, the batch invoicing. I have a few CPAs that like to review all of our time slips. We’ve got a lot of clients, about 1,800, a couple thousand. And they like to review the time slips every month before I build them. Is there a way that I can either print the open time slips to distribute to each CPA or can I send them an electronic way to see all their clients with the open time slips?

Tim Sines (00:26:49):

Yeah, good question. So there’s a couple ways you can do it, you can do it with a billing worksheet. You can do it with time records by client open. And you can filter it for that billing partner for however you want to filter that list out. You can select the billing partner for example, engagements or certain engagements, but you can do that. So for example, a billing worksheet is more detailed and some firms like them, some firms don’t. I’ll just go ahead and give you a look at one billing worksheet. But that’s the billing worksheet, and as you can see there’s quite a bit of information where you can see who the originating partner is, the staff assigned, et cetera. You can see their A/R aging, you can see the WIP aging, and we’re giving you the last five invoices so that billing partner can see what was invoiced previously.

Tim Sines (00:27:47):

And then we’re going to list everything out by engagement. And even if there’s any notes on the engagement, they’ll be listed. And if it’s hourly, it’ll show hourly or fixed and they can make whatever adjustments they want. So this is a billing worksheet where they can review all their time.

Nicole (00:28:04):

And I’m sorry, and how did you get there? That was on the Reports tab?

Tim Sines (00:28:08):

Yeah, let me… So I’m in full screen mode here also. Here’s another little trick and everybody, it’s personal preference. If I go full screen mode, I have more screen real estate but you lose the tabs up here. So what I went to was Reports and then Time & Expense tab. So this is Time & Expense, Billing Worksheet.

Nicole (00:28:31):

Okay, perfect. Thank you.

Tim Sines (00:28:33):

You’re welcome. Now, if they want to see it in a different way it’s just how you want to view your data, there’s an open time aging detail, which this will age the timeout which is useful because if you see a lot of time that sit in in WIP that’s over 60 or 90 days, the billing partner might get a little upset that the time has not been invoiced out. You don’t want to let your time sit too long. So the open time aging will present that in that format where it’s aged out. You can do an open time aging summary. And then we have various reports down here as well. So a lot of different ways to get your time and look at them, okay?

Nicole (00:29:16):

Okay, thank you.

Tim Sines (00:29:19):

Back in invoice review, I was going to point something out. I would always until you’re totally familiar with the platform, you can hover over these icons wherever you see the icons and a lot of people don’t even know that you can review a time report here.

Speaker 7 (00:29:38):

Salad, so you have to go to the refrigerator.

Tim Sines (00:29:42):

Hey, [inaudible 00:29:43].

Speaker 7 (00:29:47):

[crosstalk 00:29:47].

Tim Sines (00:29:47):

All right, so you can go to a time report and you can view the time report right behind this invoice. So there’s my $800 invoice amount, and I can see my write up and write down right here. So another hidden gem, you can view the time before it goes out, and you finalize, or you can reverse it or you can edit it. So if I’m doing a narrative and I don’t like my descriptions, if I have the wrong invoice date, I can change the invoice date here, I can change my descriptions, et cetera. So you can edit an invoice before it’s delivered to your client. Okay, any other questions? If not, I’m going to go right into recurring invoicing.

Nicole (00:30:33):

One quick question. How do you get the lift of the all the options on the bar right there on top? Mine shows up on the left hand side?

Tim Sines (00:30:43):

Oh, the menu here?

Nicole (00:30:45):

Yeah. How did you get it up there?

Tim Sines (00:30:47):

We call this a hamburger. This is a hamburger icon, and you click the hamburger icon it will-

Nicole (00:30:56):

Oh, yeah.

Tim Sines (00:30:58):

Yeah, now, me personally, I do like it at the top because I can see my menu items front and center. It’s personal preference, we do hide it. If you hover over it, we bring it out. You can also lock it. So you can lock it like that as well. Now, when you do that, hopefully you have a big screen because you are going to lose screen real estate.

Nicole (00:31:20):

Oh, yeah, I’ve got 21 and a half inch monitors. Three of them.

Tim Sines (00:31:25):

Okay. So it’s the hamburger up top will move it. And when you log out and log in, it will remember that last setting for you.

Nicole (00:31:36):

Cool.

Tim Sines (00:31:39):

So let’s jump into recurring invoice which is fairly new, and we revamped it, added a lot more power to it functionality. So before, for any of those that used recurring invoice we had a replace wildcard, only one and it replaced whatever text you put in an input box into your description. Well, now we have wildcards and the wildcards are self-explanatory, it’s current year for CY, CM for current month, PY: prior year, CY: current year, CM: current month. So it’s just CY, PY, CM, PM: prior month, current month. So you can put these wildcards into your descriptions, and then pick and choose what is going to be my current year. Do I want my current year to be 2020 to substitute for my current year. So by picking these values here, will be substituted into the wild card. So July, if you have CM it would go July, but if you had PM it would put June in for the prior month of June or July, I’m sorry.

Tim Sines (00:32:59):

So this is how it works. Again, hover over these icons, most of them are self-explanatory, but this is the header or the main part of your recurrent invoice, the template that you’re setting up. And this is the amount that you want to invoice and you want to do it annually, and you can set a scheduled date. Now if you want to actually edit the invoice, you can have more than one engagement now, which we couldn’t previously. So if you want to add a service or an engagement you would come in here, select the staff, select the engagement, put in your description. We do support the wildcards. I mean, the shortcuts I should say. So you would put in your description.

Tim Sines (00:33:52):

If you want to release time, it’ll release your time up through this date. Put in your amount. Save it. So now every month I would be invoicing for two engagements. If I want to add an expense, you can now add an expense. And if you notice it’s showing you a write up and write down because it’s bringing the time in through this release through date. Now if you want to review this time, click the icon, your time records. And now you can edit this time, you can change things as well, you can filter. We have the column chooser, and we have the batch update operations, but you can view this time. You can select or unselect time that you want to associate with this recurring invoice.

Tim Sines (00:34:43):

You can also when I go back… Well yeah, this would filter for up to a certain date. So to get back, you can either click the X or click… Our slide outs, anywhere you click outside the box it’s going to close the slide out. So for example, if I click the slide out, I don’t have to move my mouse all the way to the top right, I can just click out of it and it will close it, okay? So this is a recurring invoice. So if I went through, and I said I want to generate these two invoices $420 worth of invoicing, I could date it for whatever date I want on the invoice. I would say process these invoices. It’s going to come up and I’m going to go right to invoice review. And here they are, if I hover over it took the CY and put the current year in. Preparation of 2021 Maryland Personal Property Tax Return.

Tim Sines (00:35:40):

So this is a quick way to generate invoicing that’s pretty standard. It could be monthly, quarterly, even annual. So you could actually set up some of your invoices in there for annual. Now, the other nice thing about recurring is you can filter. So if you are only going to do invoicing for this invoice group accounting, it will only bring in all those clients that are set up for this type of billing that you want to do. Now, where do you set this up at? This is in the gear icon under Settings, and there’s a list called Recurring Invoice Groups. You can set these up ahead of time. And as you’re setting up your recurring invoices, you can assign them to a group.

Tim Sines (00:36:26):

To clear the filter. So if you get to the end of the year, in this case all these Maryland personal property returns are set up. If I want to just do the billing for this I would come here, select the top and I’m going to generate $15,000 worth of invoices with a click of a button. So this is a very efficient way to do your invoice. And what it’s going to do is if I went in and looked at this invoice, if I had any time, it would automatically do the write up and the write down for me and bring all that time in. So very useful. Any questions on recurring invoicing?

Carl (00:37:08):

Tim, and I’ll ask, is there an option for last month date, LM date? I know you use prior month, PM.

Tim Sines (00:37:15):

PM would be the previous month.

Carl (00:37:17):

Yep.

Tim Sines (00:37:20):

Yep.

Rakeesha (00:37:21):

Go over quick setting of the recurring invoice?

Tim Sines (00:37:25):

I’m sorry, Rakeesha. Can you say that again?

Rakeesha (00:37:27):

Could you go over setting up a recurring invoice?

Tim Sines (00:37:31):

Oh, sure, sure. So to set up an invoice, I’m in here right now. Now a lot of people this is a little bit different because it’s more complex, they try to unselect up top here. They can’t unselect, you have to use the button Unselect All, because we’re saving things that you’ve checked or unchecked. So it’s if you want to unselect use this up here. All right, now to create a new one. Add Recurring Invoices, what we’re going to do when you click that button is we’re going to take you right to the bottom, we’re going to bring in the previous rows’ data. So if you’re setting up a bunch of them all you have to do is select your client, save it, and we’re actually going to take you right to the screen by default where you can add your services, your engagements that you want to bill for.

Rakeesha (00:38:21):

Oh, okay.

Tim Sines (00:38:25):

And if you want to release the time, you can release the time. Let me point out one more thing. Now, this creates your invoice amount on this page. This once I save it carries back to the front. So I could have five engagements on one invoice. Those five engagements would total back here. Now another important thing, let me point this out, is this retainer column. So retainer invoices do not have any time associated with them. So it’s merely a request for payment. I want to get an invoice out to Rakeesha and I’m requesting $500 before I do any of my work, my time. I want to get the invoice out, get the money in. So there’s no time associated with the retainer invoice.

Tim Sines (00:39:15):

So if you want to send out monthly retainer invoices before you track your time and you want to get paid from your client, you can use this option and it will generate these invoices with no time associated with them. And in the system, it will treat it as a retainer so that when you receive the payment in against the retainer invoice, the net result is you now have an advance payment or a retainer sitting on the client’s account to be applied to an invoice when you go to relieve the time. This is two parts here. You can do normal invoices, and you can do recurring retainer invoices. So I just want to point that out. This is all new with the new recurring invoice functionality.

Rakeesha (00:40:04):

Okay, but still how do I set the invoice group?

Tim Sines (00:40:09):

Invoice group, let me bounce over there. Just go to your gear icon, General Settings, Lists. And I would get familiar with all the different lists, payment methods is new, you can now customize your own payment method. Some people take Zelle now, they take Venmo, different forms of payment. You can go set up your own customized payment methods. The ones that are checked off over here are required. Anyway, recurrent invoice groups, here’s where you set up your recurrent invoice groups. So whatever you put here will be available when you’re creating that recurrent invoice.

Rakeesha (00:40:50):

Okay. Thank you.

Tim Sines (00:40:52):

You’re welcome. I was going to say something else about the recurring invoice. Oh, well, I’m going to go ahead and give you a little tidbit. What’s coming out next since we have the Mango Payments in the platform now, we’re going to be setting up, there’ll be another action icon where you can actually set up a payment method, whether it be a credit card or an ACH, some bank information. And you’ll have the option, it’s optional only, if you want to generate the invoice and get paid at the same time, it’ll do both.

Tim Sines (00:41:26):

So what it will do if you turn that payment method on or the option when you got to process your invoice, it will first go out and process that electronic payment. If it’s successful then it will create the invoice, it’ll create the payment, and everything is done. You don’t have to record the payment, the payment will settle to your bank account, your invoice is done. So once we release the optional payment methods, it’s really going to streamline not only the billing, but also the payment side of it. That’s going to be version two.

Tim Sines (00:42:03):

And version three, for those that want it and some do, is you’re going to be able to put this on autopilot. So now the schedule date right now it’s informational. Okay, have we ran these invoices? Because these will advance forward based on this frequency here, okay? So if this were monthly, and I go generate these invoices, it’s going to roll this forward to 7/21. Now if you notice these rolled forward to the next year, these were annual. So but this date is now going to be used for version three if you want to turn on automatic billing and automatic payments, it will come in here in the middle of the night and generate all your invoices and generate all your payments, release all your time, do your write up and your write down for you. And you don’t have to come in here and manually select this and do we’re just going to do it for you. So yeah, any questions?

Rakeesha (00:43:09):

Nope.

Tim Sines (00:43:09):

Okay. So anyways, there’s some more features coming with recurring invoice which are going to be helpful to many that want them. And you can use it however you want. No payments. Use it without payments, with it, or you can turn autopilot on and start generating these things automatically.

Tim Sines (00:43:34):

Okay, so we’ve touched on manual invoicing, recurring invoice, batch invoicing. Retainer invoicing is pretty much what I talked about here. It’s a way to generate an invoice that from an accounting perspective doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just a memo-style invoice to give to your client to say, “Give me some money.” Once you collect the money, then you have an accounting entry to cash, and deferred revenue, whatever. But we do support the retainer invoice here, and we support it in recurring invoicing.

Tim Sines (00:44:11):

So while I’m here, a lot of you guys know about it, some don’t, but this Apply Time to Invoice is useful. I did Carl’s tax return. Carl doesn’t understand passive losses, he doesn’t understand his basis calculation on a Schedule D. And he calls me up and I’ve already generated the invoice to Carl. So I spent 30 minutes explaining to Carl about passive losses and I want to record that time because I record all my time. Now you have a couple options, I can keep the time in WIP or I could not record the time. That’s option number one, just don’t even track the time. If you want to track your time you put it in. You can keep it in WIP for next year or whenever you want to bill them. You can apply it to an invoice which will affect your realization, or you can write the time off, and show the write off and the realization on Carl’s account.

Tim Sines (00:45:08):

So what this does here if I were just to go here, you select a client, we’re going to pop up this client’s invoices for you automatically. You select an invoice that you want to apply the time, I’d say the guy called about his 1120S. We’re going to show you the time records that have already been associated with this invoice. And if you notice, these are all open. And look at my realization here, I had a good write up on Carl, $575. But now, it’s not looking so good for Carl because I just spent a lot of time. So as you start associating this time, you’re write up and your write down, it’s going to get worse as you can see, your realization.

Tim Sines (00:45:49):

So you save it, and basically, it’s going to relieve this time from WIP, and it’s now going to be associated with this invoice. Okay, so you can apply time after the fact. Invoice review is the queue. So no matter where you’re invoicing from, it goes to invoice review. This is where you deliver your invoices to your clients. You either print them, email, change your format, but whatever you have here, when you finalize, that’ll be printed. These two will be emailed automatically.

Tim Sines (00:46:24):

And now, a lot of people don’t know about it, let me jump over to reports. And I’m going off of what I hear in meetings with people. So some people don’t even know about the email log. So as you are batch emailing out your invoices, you can come straight to the email log and you can see everything that was delivered to your clients, and if they opened it. In this case, every time they open it, you’ll see every time that your client opened that email, the date and the time.

Tim Sines (00:46:56):

So you can scroll if you want another week. We only bring in one week at a time just to expedite loading records. So we don’t want to bring in thousands of records. But if you want to go to any week, just select that week and it will go fetch those invoices, and you’ll even see if your client clicked the invoice to make a payment. So this is the email log. You have the same log available at the client level. If I go to any client, the email log, and it will bring up the ones that are delivered, opened, delivered, opened. So any other questions?

Carl (00:47:40):

Not currently, Tim. Thanks for the kudos, Nicole. She says, “We’re going to use this all the time.” She loves that feature.

Tim Sines (00:47:47):

Great.

Carl (00:47:49):

Going back to our poll. We’ve got 15 minutes left, Tim. The next highest rank was project management. We hit that pretty good last time, but if anybody has any particular questions, we’d love to hear them and certainly we can dig into it.

Tim Sines (00:48:10):

Okay. Project Management, I like to start in settings. This is where your template library is for your workflows within your firm. You would create these, what is your standard workflow for preparing a 1040, an 1120S? Any static type of assignments, if Tim is always doing the billing, you can set those assignments at your template level. They can always be modified at the client level. So these are your templates if you want to modify a template. Anytime you see the blue link, just click it and now I am in the template where I can edit. While I’m here, you have a few options. The turnaround days is used for setting an internal due date or an out date of when you would like to get this tax return out of your firm.

Tim Sines (00:49:04):

So for example, if the due date is 4/15, we’re in the month of February, I’ve just logged in Carl’s tax return, and I want to get it out 10 days from February 10th. So I would like to get this out by February 20th. It’ll do this for you automatically. You can advance these days forward if you’re having a problem with the project for your client and I’ll show you at the client level how you do that. This is a repeat, how do you want to repeat yearly, quarterly, monthly, et cetera? And do you want to complete your tasks in order? You can set it here at the template. You can add rows, delete rows, you can reorder rows around. You can move them and it’ll renumber everything for you. And you can use this button to add rows to it as well. It’ll just take you right to the bottom. So this is your templates. And whenever you leave it’ll ask you since I was making changes do I want to save it? I’ll say no, just leave.

Carl (00:50:03):

And Tim, we’ve got a question on project management. It might make sense here is Fernando is wondering under project management, would it be possible to add client number in the project tasks view?

Tim Sines (00:50:16):

Client number? Sure. Yeah, go ahead and send us an email on that and we can add that. So are you referring to… In this project view, these are displaying all your projects, we do have a column chooser so we can certainly bring in the client number. And if you want to see that as a column you could. Did that answer your question?

Carl (00:50:43):

Let me make sure I’ve got him turned on so that we can hear him. One second. Sorry I’m interrupting the whole flow here, Tim.

Tim Sines (00:50:53):

No, you’re fine. While I’m here, while you’re looking-

Carl (00:50:57):

I just turned him on.

Tim Sines (00:50:58):

Okay.

Carl (00:51:00):

Go ahead.

Tim Sines (00:51:00):

Did that answer your question, Fernando, about the client number?

Carl (00:51:08):

Oh, well.

Tim Sines (00:51:09):

[inaudible 00:51:09] Okay.

Carl (00:51:10):

You might still be muted, Fernando, but we can hear you if you try. Either way go ahead, Tim.

Fernando (00:51:15):

Hello.

Carl (00:51:15):

There he is.

Fernando (00:51:15):

Can you hear me.

Carl (00:51:16):

There he is. Hey, Fernando.

Fernando (00:51:17):

Oh, okay. Hello. Yes, I was particularly under… So if you were to click a specific project for example, the 1040. Yes, in that screen area. Because sometimes we have clients, their names particularly like a personal return. Just to make it easier on the staff to have a client ID in the top area.

Tim Sines (00:51:43):

Definitely. Yeah, we can do that easily, just submit that. We’ll have that out in a few days, a day or two.

Fernando (00:51:51):

Okay. And also time entry. Also, I also noticed in the time entry there’s no client ID. Also make it easier on the staff to make sure they don’t accidentally choose the wrong client name, because we have a lot of clients with families, particularly they have the same last name and they may accidentally choose the wrong name. So if there’s a client ID I think it’d be-

Tim Sines (00:52:16):

Yeah, definitely.

Fernando (00:52:16):

A little bit better.

Tim Sines (00:52:17):

Yeah, no, appreciate that suggestion. Go ahead and email that to us if you want.

Fernando (00:52:22):

Okay.

Tim Sines (00:52:23):

You know what I’ll do, Fernando, let me just take a note real quick.

Carl (00:52:26):

Yeah. And for anyone, if you have requests like that, please send them to support@imaginetime.net or put them in the in-app chat. And we track those very closely. We want that feedback.

Fernando (00:52:38):

Okay, great. Thank you.

Tim Sines (00:52:41):

You don’t need to email it Fernando, I made a note of it.

Fernando (00:52:45):

Okay, great. Thank you very much.

Carl (00:52:47):

And Tim, we have two other quick ones while we’re here. Can you reorder the columns?

Tim Sines (00:52:53):

Currently, no. But we are bringing that out where you can reorder those columns. So I think what you’re referring to is you want to move this column over here or this one right.

Carl (00:53:02):

Right, absolutely.

Tim Sines (00:53:03):

We have the functionality, we haven’t implemented it. We can do it, we just haven’t done it yet. But we have it on the map to do it. And when we do it, we’re actually going to be doing it on all columns throughout the program. So even on the client list, for example, if you don’t want the work phone here, you can move it where you want. So I think the tags are self-explanatory other than the two that are reserved. When I get into a project, I’ll show you how they work. And then email notifications are again, they’re self-explanatory. You can turn them on or off. How you would like to use them.

Tim Sines (00:53:44):

To duplicate out, we get the question quite a bit. “How do I duplicate these projects out to my clients?” So just select one project right here, duplicate or just click Duplicate. Your clients will appear. If you want to filter the list by your individuals, if you’re doing a 1040 it will filter by your client type. You can filter by group, you can filter by manager or billing partner, you can hide. If I don’t want to see these, you can hide them. And anyway, once you filter it, click on the top checkbox. We’ll sign out 552 1040 projects to all these clients with these templates. So that’s how you clone it out.

Tim Sines (00:54:33):

Another thing that you can do, this has come up before. Once I’m in a project, you’ve created a workflow and you can clone this, create a new template from this template. So I’m in a template. If I clone it, it’s going to ask me what is the name? Maybe I want to make this 1120 now. So you can clone a template from a template, a company template to another company template, so you don’t have to enter all the workflows again. So that’s come up before, I just wanted to hit on that.

Tim Sines (00:55:09):

Another useful thing is when you’re in your project. You can jump right to your client history from here. So you can get to it from here and from here. I’m in this client 121 Food, I can see all active projects for this client, I can also see all completed for this client. I can see the date we received it in when we completed it. If I want to dive into this project, there might be notes on this project, I can see whatever notes are out here. So that’s useful.

Tim Sines (00:55:46):

Let me dive into a project now. Actually let me create a new one from start. You can create a new blank project. You can create it from a template or you can create a new template, and I’ll just take you to create a new template. But I’m going to create a project from a template. It’s going to pop up and say, “Okay, what template?” 1040. Create. All you have to do is select your client, and I’ve created a new project. And I can change my assignments down here. I can add customized tasks to this project for this client. I can say to complete them in order and I can save it. So I’ve completed a project.

Tim Sines (00:56:30):

Now, how would you work this project? There’s a couple things. The first thing is you’re probably going to meet with your client, and right now it’s pending, we haven’t done anything on this project. So all projects are pending until they’re in progress, which is started. So I’m going to meet with the client, and we flip the switch, and if you notice an email was sent. And I’ll show you when I complete the next task, the next person will get notified, because I have that option turned on to do an email notification as tasks are completed.

Tim Sines (00:57:03):

So right now this is in progress, and if I met with the client I probably want to record it in. So if you notice, we automatically tag it available for work. I now have an end date, and with that turnaround days of 10 I now have an internal due date. Now, I know we’re past 4/15, but imagine we’re in February and I want to get this out before the due date. Now why do we do that? Well, it helps your pipeline of getting your work out the door by prescribed timelines. But also with this internal outdate, it will show up on your dashboard now.

Tim Sines (00:57:45):

So anything out a month or two is not going to show up on your dashboard as nice as one that’s due this week or next week. So if I go to my dashboard now, anything that’s due today, this week, next week will now show up. And all of these are clickable, nothing’s showing up right here. But if I click here for example, it would go filter and bring up anything that’s past due. You can also do the same thing here. You could filter what’s due today, tomorrow, this week, next week, this month, next month. So you can use all these filters, you can filter by tag as well.

Carl (00:58:25):

Hey, Tim.

Tim Sines (00:58:26):

Yes?

Carl (00:58:28):

Yvette asks… Hey, Yvette, by the way. She asks, “Is it possible to see all the work assigned for a client for a particular year?”

Tim Sines (00:58:37):

Sure. So you could go up and let’s say you could filter up here and it would go find anything that is due this year for that client that is open. That is open. Now if you want to get even closed, you can even get what’s completed from here. So you can get it here or you can go right to the client, go right into the client, and here’s everything that’s open for the client as well. So now I’m just at the client level in project management, and I can get to anything easily here. Did that help you, Yvette?

Carl (00:59:24):

Hopefully, she got that. And then Fernando asks, “Under project management is it possible to reassign multiple projects from one staff member to another staff member instead of changing each project manually one by one?

Tim Sines (00:59:37):

Good question. Good question. So right now I’m in the project tab, you could go to Tasks. And let’s say the person that does your billing is no longer with the firm. So what I did was I filtered out all the tasks for billing, and I would select them. If you notice, once you select, if you look to the right of column chooser we’re now going to bring in batch operations. So I could select that and I could go to Batch Update Tasks and I could magically pick my new person and go update all these tasks for the new assigned user.

Tim Sines (01:00:18):

So whatever is checked here, if you check this and you leave this blank, it’s going to go put blank in all your tasks. So just keep in mind, whatever is checked is what’s going to get updated. So in this case, you do have a way to do that. And you have the same functionality on projects if you want to change a manager or partner. This came in handy this year when you had a due date of 4/15. All of a sudden the due date was 5/17. So you can come in here, and batch update all your projects with a new due date. You can clear out received dates, you can put extension dates.

Tim Sines (01:01:02):

Now we tag the project with the extension tag when you go run this operation. So well, we’ve had this come up. This is a great way to filter out your list for all your pending tax returns. And if they’re pending, that means they haven’t come in the door yet, you don’t have the work yet. Okay, let me go filter all my pendings, fetch them. Let’s just say I have one, he’s already extended with the purple tag. But you could go get all those pending tax returns, come out here, batch update, put in your extension date, and you could extend all those in batch.

Tim Sines (01:01:47):

So the batch is good for maybe you want to start using the complete task in order, and you didn’t do that when you set your template up, and it wasn’t cloned out to your clients when you cloned everything out. You can come back in hindsight after the fact and say, “I want to update all selected.” So just keep in mind, you have to clear these filters. And whenever you’re not seeing your data, just come out here, do a reset, fetch, and all your data will come back. So if you’re not seeing the data you need to see, either clear the filter here. Come to filters, reset and refetch your data. Now, so with that in mind, again, if I wanted to extend these, anything that’s selected will get updated with the batch operation, okay?

Carl (01:02:40):

Hey, Tim, we’re at three o’clock. I’m sure we can stay a couple minutes more if anybody would like. Now, we have one open question that we didn’t get to earlier and I would ask, can I email a statement to a client that has many companies showing all his open invoices for all of his/her companies?

Tim Sines (01:03:06):

Yeah, the way you would do it is in our report center, and it’s under the accounting tab. You scroll down to the bottom, and here’s where you can email statements out in batch. So I think I heard you there’s multiple companies. You will have to select each company. Now, you can filter if you have all those companies in a group. Let’s just say for example, I want to find a Mark’s group. I don’t know if I… I don’t have that group. I’m filtering by software group. So say your clients were in a certain group, they would appear, you could check that, they would all be sent the email, and you could process and email out all those statements to your clients. So-

Carl (01:03:54):

Great.

Tim Sines (01:03:55):

Hopefully that answers your question. One, let me point out one thing before we close Carl.

Carl (01:04:00):

Yeah, go ahead.

Tim Sines (01:04:00):

And it’s a hidden gem. There’s a lot of new people on the workshop today. But in Settings, under Invoices, we have Statement Reminders, since we’re talking about statements. So this will automatically email out your statements to your clients and basically puts it on autopilot. The condition is based on your terms that you have set up for your clients. For example, due upon receipt, grace days are 15 days. Once an invoice goes beyond the 15 days, it’s considered to be late because you’re giving them a 15 day grace. That invoice would qualify that client to receive an email.

Tim Sines (01:04:45):

So for example, let’s say you had five invoices that were not past the grace period, they’re not past due, you had one invoice that was, they would get emailed a statement. Now, once they get emailed the statement, this interval will say, “All right, I emailed Carl a statement today. I don’t want to email Carl another statement for another 15 days.” So every 15 days, Carl would get emailed a statement. And hopefully, Carl is going to go make a payment, an electronic payment in the portal, or a call on the phone and make a payment on his open items. So this is how you would enable statement reminders. They go out every night automatically, they’re auto-generated, they’re auto-emailed to your clients. They will show up in your company email log, and they will show up at the client level of the last time you sent that email out to your client.

Tim Sines (01:05:41):

Now, you enable it at the company level, and you assign it out to all your clients under the gear icon, General Settings. I went to the Assignments tab, dropped the list down and I’m working with statement reminders. And I can enable it, and I could clone this option out to all my clients. If I don’t want first choice safety to be emailed a statement, I could turn it off here or you can turn it off at the client level. So I just wanted to touch on it since we were talking about statements that we do have this feature available. So-

Carl (01:06:20):

That’s great, Tim. That’s great. Let’s close there. I just want to remind everyone, we’re doing these every Tuesday and Thursday. We record everyone and then I’ll email them out to all the attendees today. And then we put it in the in-app chat within mango. So you’ll have a couple of ways to get it. And then we’re posting them on the website and we’ll have them by date. One thing we’re trying to do is break them apart by subject area and category so that you can search them. But stay tuned on that, we’re trying to do that to make it even easier.

Carl (01:07:00):

Thank you everyone for joining. There’s a lot to this program and there’s a lot more being developed every single day. I’ve never seen a human being work harder than Tim Sines does. He doesn’t sleep.

Tim Sines (01:07:15):

Thanks, Carl.

Carl (01:07:17):

Many of you may know he also has his own accounting practice. So he’s got that going as well. So he can’t sleep, he doesn’t have time. But thanks everyone for your trust in us. And it’s a great program that’s getting better and better every day, and we’re here to support you. So look forward to the next call and feel free to reach out if you need anything.

Daniel (01:07:38):

One question-

Carl (01:07:39):

Bye, now. Oh, is there a question?

Tim Sines (01:07:42):

Daniel had a question.

Daniel (01:07:44):

On the statement reminders if the statements are due upon receipt, how do the reminders work?

Tim Sines (01:07:54):

Well, then it would kind of work like this, Daniel. If they’re due upon receipt, hopefully you had emailed out your invoice to your client. If they don’t pay it that night, they’re going to get an emailed statement. Now, if the interval is set for 15 days or 10 days, they won’t get another statement, email statement for another 10 days. But if it’s due upon receipt with zero grace days, you’re going to email out your invoice. That same night, they’re going to get an emailed statement, but they won’t get another one until it’s based off of your interval, how often you want to get a reminder.

Daniel (01:08:38):

Well, suggestion maybe see if it’s possible to if it’s due upon receipt, not send the first one until the first interval.

Tim Sines (01:08:52):

We’ll take a look at that.

Daniel (01:08:53):

Okay.

Tim Sines (01:08:54):

Yeah, we’ll take a look at that. So if it’s the same, if it’s less than… Okay, we could do that. So if the invoice date is not greater than 15 days from today’s date, they won’t get a statement. We’ll compare it to today’s date and the invoice date. We can do a comparison on the invoice date and the date on the calendar, so to speak. Okay, it’s doable. I’ll make a note of that, Daniel. Another good suggestion by Daniel.

Carl (01:09:26):

Yeah, Daniel is our best developer. He’s our R&D guy. So great. Well, thanks again, everyone. More to come. Talk soon.