In this episode of Clear Estimates in Practice, we explain how the invoicing process works in Clear Estimates. We also discuss payments & receipts, payment schedules and cost status reports, and fielded some questions live!
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Okay. About two minutes after here. So I think we're going to go ahead and get started. Thank you so much for joining us for Clear Estimates in practice. My name is Michael. I'm with the customer success team here at Clear Estimates.
And today we're going to talk all about invoicing and payments. So obviously one of the biggest reasons you're out there every day is to get paid and staying on top of invoices can be a challenge for any contractor. But Clear Estimates is here to help. So today we're going to go over some common pain points for contractors when it comes to invoicing and getting paid, and then we're going to show you how Clear Estimates makes this process so much simpler for you.
So like I said today, we're just going to go over some common pain points, for contractors when it comes to invoicing. We're going to show you how Clear Estimates can help. Before we get into that, just a little bit of housekeeping first. We're going to be covering a lot in a short time today, but we're going to have time for q and a toward the end of the presentation.
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So we're going to start off today just talking about some common challenges with invoicing. From there, we're going to discuss what the invoicing process actually looks like in Clear Estimates.
Along with that, we're going to show you how to set up payment schedules. We're going to talk about creating and managing your invoices, receipts, cost status reports, and more. And then lastly, we're going to talk about some options available for streamlining this entire process with digital payments. So let's go ahead and jump in.
So we talked about this a little bit at our digital payments webinar, a few months back. So this might be a little bit of recap for you. But one of the things we talked about was statistics on late paid invoices.
And in twenty twenty two, chaser HQ published this late payments report, which is just what it sounds like. Study on late payments. They did share one point that really stuck out. Almost nine in every ten businesses are paid late on a regular basis.
So that's across the board, not just contractors. They found that overdue invoices are a problem for small and mid sized businesses really of any kind. And you may have experienced a little bit of this yourself with clients. Now, of course, there's a lot of different reasons why payments might be late, but frequently a lot of it just comes down to communication. So contractor and homeowner just aren't on the same page. So let's look at some common problems that can lead to past due invoices.
So first of all, project cost, payment terms, due dates might not be correct or maybe just not properly communicated to your client on the contract. So this could be the estimated cost of the project itself wasn't accurate.
Payment terms are missing or incorrect. A lot of times with change orders there can be misunderstandings or sometimes things just kinda get lost in the shuffle. Right? So some common ways around this.
Of course, an accounting tool is going to help you stay organized with your invoices and a good quality estimating tool helps you avoid inaccurate estimates. So this is really where Clear Estimates shines for contractors because you can handle both the estimating and the invoicing all in one platform. So this way we're staying organized, everything is accurate, everything's documented, and you're going to be able to build up your estimate with up to date material and labor costs sourced from your area. You can plug in your markup once, and then we have tools available for adding contract language and payment terms right on your proposal.
Then we can email that proposal right to our client from the software. And then within that Clear Estimates project, you're also going to be able to create and track invoices and payments specific to that job, and we even offer digital payment integrations with clearent which ends up taking a lot of the legwork out of this process.
So before we get into Clear Estimates and look at what this process actually looks like, first I just kinda want to share some concepts I'd like you to keep in mind.
So number one, in Clear Estimates, an invoice and a proposal are two different things. So what is that difference? Well, a proposal and Clear Estimates is a combination estimate and contract. It's an agreement you can send to your client with the project scope and cost along with any legal language and your payment terms. And in Clear Estimates, those are just called payment schedules.
Payment schedule, just what it sounds like. Communicates payment amounts and due dates to your client. This is going to be included with the proposal you're going to send out. This way the homeowner knows what to expect. They're agreeing to your payment terms at the time that they agree to the project.
And you could set up payment schedules once, reuse them over and over. So we're going to show you this in a bit.
But let's say our homeowner then agrees to that proposal. So they've signed off on the project cost. They've agreed to our payment terms and now the project begins. So now we can start invoicing on our estimate.
So in Clear Estimates and invoice just requests payment on the payment terms. So this could be based on a payment schedule item. You can also invoice on the full project cost. And once again, you're going to be able to email that invoice to your customer right from the platform, record invoices as paid, and we'll be able to manage this all in one tool. So it's just going to keep us organized. The estimate and the invoicing is all handled in one place.
Just a tremendous time saver over paper invoices, excel, and what have you.
Really quickly, I also just wanted to touch on digital payments. So not only do digital payments see a lower rate of failure, a lot of homeowners just prefer the convenience of electronic payments. They make it easy for the client to pay you on time. And then we're spending a lot less time worrying about chasing down checks, noting payments, creating receipts, and really just spend more time focusing on the task at hand.
So this is possible through our partnership with Clearance by explore. You're going to be able to send an invoice to a client with a payment terminal already built into it. They can pay you via credit card. It's going to automatically record that payment in Clear Estimates, marks their invoices paid, and even creates a receipt for them.
So huge time saver, extremely convenient for both contractors and homeowners.
So all that being said, let's go ahead and jump into Clear Estimates and take a look at how all of this actually works.
So I logged into Clear Estimates right here on the homepage.
Just make sure everybody can see that.
Great. And just a heads up, if you've never logged in and you haven't used the system at all just yet, I do recommend taking a look at this quick tutorial here on the home page. This is going to tell you how to start a project, create your estimate, kinda set up your markup, all of those essentials.
Recommend taking a look at this or one of our other getting started guides just because we're not going to be getting into the estimating too much today. Today we're solely focused on what happens when the project is underway and it's time to get paid.
So to that end, I've already set up a completed estimate here for a drywall and flooring estimate. And actually let me go ahead and stop my camera. This way you can see everything that's going on here.
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up this drywall and flooring estimate I've already put together here for Dave Sample. I'm going to go ahead and click that.
Now when I click that project title, it's going to take me right into my projects page. And this is where all of the estimating takes place in Clear Estimates. So if you're estimating a job, you want to be right here. You'll see it's a little briefcase button for projects page and I've already assembled this estimate. So this estimate is all set to be sent out. I've already added in all of the line items I needed to price out. Like I said, we're not going to get into this too deep, but what I did was just kinda go through the library of costs provided to me by Clear Estimates.
Chose the items that I needed and added them into my estimate with quantities for each. So we didn't type any of this out. Didn't look up any of these prices. We just have this data available to us. We add it to our project.
Beyond that I've set up some markup on this project already.
Below that we have alternates and components. In my alternate, I've set up a change order so we're going to talk about this in a little bit.
And then down at the bottom, I've also included some sales tax. So this is all set to go. And at this point in time, what I'd like to do is first take a look at the proposal that we're going to be sending out. So remember all of the project details and cost and my payment schedule is going to be included in this proposal we're sending out. So to print this I'm going to find this eyeball button and I'm going to go ahead and select print to PDF right here. And this is going to pull up that proposal that we're going to be sharing with our homeowner.
So here is my proposal. Up at the top, you can see it's personalized with my logo. I have my company contact info and my clients.
I've also included some legal language up here at the top. This is just an example, contract I've included in this particular project.
Now, this isn't a real contract, but just kind of give you an idea of what this could look like. And I did just add in kind of some sample language related to payments. Basically telling my client that all the details of the payments, dates and amounts are included at the bottom of the agreement. So in a little bit we'll show you how you can add in that.
And then beyond that we have the scope of the project. So we didn't type any of this out. Clear Estimates just automatically prints professional sentences of text that really outline the scope of work to my client. And then we have a total project cost.
Now below this, I have a payment schedule included here. So this is all of my payment expectations. Pretty simple for this project. It's just three payment terms.
I have an initial deposit of a thousand dollars. I have a two week check-in payment of fifty percent of the project cost and then I have a remaining balance here. So this is great because when I send this over to my client to get a signature, they're going to be agreeing to both this project cost, the terms of payments, as well as any legal language I've included. So this is what I'm going to be sending over to my client.
I can do that just by clicking send to customer, send report to customer.
So let's say we, send over this proposal and the client agrees to the job. So at this point we can go ahead and invoice on that initial deposit. So there's a few ways we can do this. There's actually a shortcut right here on the projects page, so we don't have to go too far. We can just click more.
And then fourth option down here is going to be for create an invoice.
When I do that, it's going to pull up this add invoice window and there's a lot going on here. So let's kind of take a look at this. First of all, you're going to have a project summary. Summary of all your costs over here on the right side. So we have our base cost, total of tax and the final number for the client here, total project cost. It's also going to give me a little run down of what's been paid. So so far nothing's been paid on this estimate.
And the balance due here is the total project cost. We also have just kind of a breakdown of our payment terms we've added into this project.
And then over on the left, we can choose how we want to create our invoice. Now we can do it from a payment schedule, from an alternate. We're going to talk about this in a little bit. We can also just enter in a manual amount.
So if I did want to invoice on this full project cost, I could easily just sort of click this manual tab, plug in my project cost and call it a day. But in this case, I've already set up a payment schedule on this estimate and it's already all set to go. So we see we have a payment schedule dropdown with all of my different payment schedule items and it's all set to invoice on this initial deposit. So really all I need to do is just double check my date.
If I need to make any adjustments to the due date, I can do that here.
Let's say I want this due November first. We have a description of my invoice and then we can go ahead and create invoice. Let's go ahead and do that.
Now when I create my invoice, it's going to show us this little link. And what this link is is it's for your electronic invoice. This is what's so great about the Clear Estimates invoices is that they're electronic and you can just easily share this link. Some clients will text this over to a homeowner.
You can also print a PDF right here. But I just want to preview this right now. So over on the right side you'll see how there's kind of a little box with an arrow sticking out of it. I'm going to click that, and that's going to open up my invoice for my initial deposit.
So here you can kind of get an idea of what the invoice is. It's just requesting payment on that initial deposit that I requested upfront.
In my invoice, my logo's included, details about my company as well as my client's contact info. I have a description of what the invoice is for and then we have status unpaid. So this lets my client know that this invoice still needs to be paid.
If my client wants, they can download a PDF copy of the invoice right here.
Also, there's this invoice note. This is just a little blurb of language that you might want to include. Now in my case, I'm going to probably adjust this so it doesn't say thirty days. I'd rather have invoices due immediately. So in a little while, we'll show you where you can customize that note.
But this is my, initial deposit invoice.
So let's head back into Clear Estimates here.
And let's say that, my my home owner, my client has given me a check for that initial deposit. So now I'd like to mark this invoice as paid. So to do that, what I can do is find that same more button right here and right below create an invoice, there's going to be another option below it for view invoices. So let me go ahead and click that and what that's going to do is it's going to take me into a separate place in the software. It's going to take me into the reports tool and into the cost status tab here. And this is where all of the invoicing is managed in Clear Estimates.
So here we can see in the cost status tool, it's going to give me a rundown of every invoice I've created as well as every payment. So far we've just created invoice one thirty four for my initial deposit of a thousand dollars.
Keep in mind if we wanted to edit this invoice we can do that here, clicking that edit button.
If we want a PDF, we can click this printer.
To email this to our client from the software, you're going to see there's a little mail to customer option. This will actually create an email that'll sorry about that. That will include that invoice link and it'll populate my client's email address as well.
So if I wanted to send that out, I could do that pretty easily.
And then if I ever need that invoice link again, I can just click the chain link. So let's say we get a check for this initial deposit. Let's go ahead and record this as paid. So I'm going to go ahead and down in the bottom left, we'll see that there's this add payment option.
When I click that, there's a few different ways I can create a payment on this project. I could do it from a payment schedule. Once again, I could plug in a manual payment amount.
But what I recommend is choose this middle option here from invoice. This is my favorite way to do this because it just keeps everything very organized. You can see that here we have this unpaid thousand dollar invoice.
We can kind of set up a date that we're getting paid, any kind of comments and then go ahead and create that payment. So now we have a payment logged against this thousand dollar invoice. So what does that mean on the on the homeowner side? Well, let's go ahead and take a look.
So here's that unpaid invoice. If I refresh it now, now we see a different status here. So now my payment is received. It lets my client know the payment's received.
My status is now paid. And if my client wanted to download a receipt, once again, PDF right here, they can have a receipt right from this e invoice and save that to the records. And of course, you could do the same thing, back here.
If you wanted to, kind of create a PDF of that invoice for your own records, you can do that right here.
So the way we made this work so simply for us was by setting up a payment schedule on this project. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to start over from the beginning and we're going to create a payment schedule and add it to this estimate, and then we're going to invoice on it.
So if I want to, create a payment schedule, I have a couple of different options. Number one, Clear Estimates has some pre built payment schedules already included out of the box. So if you don't feel like building your own payment schedule, you can use one of our template schedules.
To accomplish that, just find your reports tool very top left here. Looks like a clipboard.
And then we can click any of our proposal tabs. I'm just going to click formal right here. So we're in reports and formal.
And then in this payment schedule dropdown right here, we're going to see that there's a number of template payment schedules already included for us. So if you just want to use one of these, feel free to take a look at those. But what I'm going to do now is build a brand new payment schedule.
Now when we want to build a brand new payment schedule, we actually need to go to a separate spot. We need to find our options tool, very top right corner.
We're going to go into the options tool and then you'll see how there's kind of a menu here on the left. What I'm going to do is I'm going to find this payment schedule editor, fourth option down, and this is where we can build payment schedules and reuse them on any estimate.
So again, you know, there's a number of template payment schedules included out of the box. We can take a look at those or even edit them. In this case, what I'm going to do is create a new payment schedule by clicking new schedule up here in the top right. So this is going to give us a just kind of a blank slate to work with.
Very first thing we want to do when we're setting up a payment schedule is change the title.
So instead of new schedule we can type in anything we want. I'm going to call this November flooring and drywall payment schedule. And you can really call this anything you'd like. Just a example here.
Keep in mind if you want to just use the same payment schedule on all of your estimates, in some click in some cases I've seen clients do this, you can go ahead and select default for projects and then Clear Estimates will know to include this payment schedule on all future estimates.
Now you might be tempted to click into this description box here and type something, but this actually does not, appear on your reports. So rather than do this, I recommend go all the way down to the very bottom and you're going to see how there's an option to add item right here. So this is what we want to do. For each payment term we want to add to the schedule, we're going to need to add in a separate item. So let's go ahead and first build our first item here. I'm going to go ahead and click add item.
And this is going to pull up the add edit payment schedule, item box. And let me kind of walk you through this here. So the first thing we want to do is find a description to add in to the very top box here. And so like I said, this is going to be for an initial deposit of.
So I'm going to type that in here. Initial deposit of, and then we need to somehow add in our value. And the way we're going to do that is by selecting this type drop down right down here at the bottom. So you see selected type.
It's going to give us this little drop down and there's three different types of payment schedules we can create.
Schedule items I should say.
Fixed amount, percentage of and balance due. So fixed amount, just a fixed dollar amount. Percentage of is actually going to calculate the schedule item based on a percentage of my project cost. And then I have an option for remaining balance due.
So for an initial deposit, I'm going to go ahead and select fixed amount, and then just to the right of that we're going to see where there's this value box. I'm going to go ahead and plug in one thousand dollar initial deposit here. So now we've selected fixed amount. We've typed in one thousand as the value of our payment schedule item.
And now I just need to insert the value into this description. The way I do that is using this orange v button right here.
And what that's going to do is it's going to insert what is called a variable. It's just going to say bracket V A L in bracket, but on the reports it's going to know to insert that value.
So now that we've added in our description, now we just need to fill in the report text that appears on different reports for the same schedule item. So your payment schedules can have different descriptions on these different reports. Now in my case, I like to keep it really simple and just make everything the same.
So to accomplish that, all I need to do is click this d button that's going to copy from my description and it's going to fill in the schedule items with my value. And this is just exactly how each of your payment schedule items should look. They should have a description and a bracket, v a l bracket for each of these boxes. And then we'll go ahead and save that.
Let's do this again. I'm going to add in a second item. Click add item again.
And this one is going to be for a two week check-in payment of So that's what I've added into my description.
Once again, we're going to select my type drop down and this time I'm going to set it up based on a percentage of my project cost. So I'm going to say percentage of. And And over here in the value it just wants to know what percentage of the project cost. So I'm going to say I want fifty percent of the project cost paid two weeks in. So I'm going to go ahead and add that in. Again, this is just for example. You can really set these up however you choose.
But now that I've defined my value, once again I'm going to click this orange v at the very top of the description to insert that value into my description.
Same idea. I'm just going to copy from my description for these report text boxes by clicking the D button.
And we filled in everything else. It looks good. Let's go ahead and save it.
And then let's go ahead and add in one more item here.
And I'm going to call this one remaining balance.
If I could learn to, type the word remaining.
Remaining balance due on completion of And so this one I'm going to use this third, payment schedule type balance due.
Sorry about that. Everyone minor technical difficulty there.
Okay. Can everyone still see the screen and hear me okay?
Just hit a minor glitch there for a second in our presentation tool here.
Okay. Assuming everything is still good.
So what we were doing right right right at this point, right before, the interruption is we were setting up a balance due payment schedule item. So this one's going to be for remaining balance due on completion.
And then what I did was I selected this third type balance due right here. Now with balance due, we don't need to do anything with the value. We're just going to click back up into that description and hit v so that way it's going to show the remaining balance on the proposal.
And then we're going to go ahead and just fill in the rest of this report text by copying the description using this d, d button here. That's going to fill in all of that report text for us and then let's go ahead and save it.
Great. So I'm going to keep this really simple. Just a three item payment schedule here.
And then what I'm going to do is go ahead and click save in the bottom right. Very important step. After you've set up each of your payment schedule items, do not forget to come down here and click save. This is going to help Clear Estimates know to save the schedule overall and then we don't have to worry about losing anything. So we went ahead and click save and now this payment schedule is available for us to use.
Hi, Brad. So sorry for the issue. We were having, just kind of a minor technical difficulty. We lost audio or video. Can everyone hear me at this point?
Okay.
Just double checking everyone can hear us. We just got a comment from one of our viewers that, still unable to hear the audio.
Okay. Great. Perfect.
Excellent. So we went ahead and we saved this payment schedule and now we're all set to add this into our estimate. So here's how we're going to do that. We're going to go ahead and find that reports tool very top left, and then we're going to click one of our proposal, proposal tabs here. So I'm going to go ahead and click formal. So I'm in reports and formal, and earlier I had had a different payment schedule included. So what I'm going to do right now is go ahead and switch that to that new schedule I just created and that's right down here November flooring and drywall payment schedule.
And then we'll go ahead and click continue.
Perfect. And so now we've added in this payment schedule into our estimate. Now you may have noticed when I was first setting that payment schedule up, that I that I didn't include any due dates on it. And the reason for that is because I may want to use this payment schedule again. So we can kind of set these up as templates and then reuse them on different estimates. So because the due dates might be different, I want to apply those more at the project level than on the default schedule settings.
And what's great about Clear Estimates is we can do that. So now that we've selected this payment schedule, we can now make one off edits to this payment schedule using this schedule editor right here.
So I'm going to go ahead and click this schedule editor and what this will do is it'll just allow me to change anything I'd like about this payment schedule just for this estimate.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add in some due dates for these payment terms so that way my client knows when I want my, my my payments paid. So I'm going to open up each of these schedule items here in the project schedule editor using the blue button, and then I'm just going to add in some due dates for my formal text. That way it shows up on the, formal proposal. So for my formal text, I'm going to go ahead and say I want my initial deposit due eleven one.
We'll go ahead and save that.
Let's do item number two here. This is my two week check-in payment. Let's say this is due eleven fifteen.
And again, I'm adding that to my formal tax. This way it shows up on my formal proposal.
And remaining balance due. I'll just leave as is and then we'll go ahead and save that.
So let's go ahead and take a look at the proposal one more time. Now we could do it right here from the formal tab with print preview.
There is kind of a shortcut button on our projects page view report. So this is the same exact proposal. So let's go view report and print a PDF. And let's just double check our proposal. Make sure the payment terms look good.
Give that a second. Perfect.
So here's my formal proposal one more time. I'm going to scroll down below my project cost and now we see I have my due dates and my, my dollar amounts for each of my payment terms. So this is now added into the estimate and my client can see this very easily.
Scrolling back up to the top here, I do have this paragraph of legal language.
Like I said, this is just an example, but if you want to add in your own kind of contract verbiage to appear at the top of the proposal, you can do that here in the system just by clicking reports. So we'll go right back to reports. That's going to take us to boiler plate, and this is what is it's just kind of another term for legalese or contract language, any kind of agreement you want on the, on the proposal.
When when we're in this boilerplate tool, we're going to scroll down to the very bottom left and find this boilerplate information box. And what you can see is that you can have a couple of different contracts set up, in your account and you can kind of pick and choose when you use them. So each of these different titles corresponds to a different contract and these are all just examples. These aren't real, real contracts here.
But just to kind of show you how you could have a number of these set up. And the one I'm looking at here on the formal proposal, general conditions, I know that's going to be this same general conditions. And the reason I know that is because this f checkbox is checked. And what these are, these checkboxes, these are your proposal settings.
Preliminary, formal, and subcontractor, and they each correspond to different reports that you can print. Now most commonly we use the formal proposal. So when we're looking at this document, this is our formal proposal, and that's why we're seeing this legal language up at the top. So what this means is if we want to add in our own contract agreement, what we need to do is we need to just click add heading down here.
This is going to create a new heading.
It's just a blank workspace for us and then we can go ahead and give this a title.
And then we can either type or paste our contract language into this box that you're seeing here. So this is where we can either paste or type that language in. There's some formatting options available for you. And then if we want that included on the formal proposal, we just click that F checkbox.
So it can be a little confusing when you're first looking at it, but it's really simple. It's just going to give you a text box to include your language and then you use these, toggles to turn that on or off.
Keep in mind if you wanted, some legal language at the bottom, you can do that in this outro tab. And this is where you can also customize things like that signature box if you choose.
Alright.
So that kind of covers setting up a contract. We've already kind of set up a, payment schedule, so you see how that works. So let's get back into invoicing here.
I'm going to go back into my project, to my projects page.
And then I'm going to go ahead and go more and view invoices. This is going to take us into our cost status page. And now that we've added in that payment schedule to our estimate and we've sent off our proposal, now we can once again begin invoicing on this estimate. So let's go ahead and click add invoice.
Once again, we're going to have this add invoice tool where we'll have all of the summary info and I'm just going to go ahead and do this from my payment schedule and invoice on my initial deposit. So I'm going to go ahead and make this due eleven one and let's create my invoice.
I want to take a quick look at that. It should be very similar to what we were seeing before.
Just want to make sure everything looks good. One thing I do want to do is adjust this invoice note, saying that it's due in thirty days. I actually want this due immediately. So why don't we go ahead and make that change.
Something like that is going to be a report setting. That's part of your account settings which all live up here in the options tool. So we're going to go into options.
From the menu here on the left side, we're going to see there's a report setting section and down at the very bottom we'll see invoice.
And in report settings invoice, this is where that invoice note is going to live. So I'm just going to make a quick adjustment here.
Invoices are due immediately.
Once I do that, I just want to make sure I click save bottom right so that way that updates.
And then let's just head back right into reports. We're going to go over to cost status all the way over on the right.
And this is where we manage our invoices. Here is that invoice. Let's just double check that note. Make sure that looks good at this point.
Perfect. So now my invoices are due immediately and my client can go ahead and pay this thousand dollar invoice.
So once again it'll record it as, as paid on the invoice once we add a payment here in the system. So I'm going to go ahead and add payment.
Always recommend do this from invoice. Here's that unpaid thousand dollar invoice. I received the payment today and we'll go ahead and create it.
So now we've, created an invoice, we've marked it as paid. What else can we do here? Well, now that the project underway, they've started, paying their invoices. What I can do is I can click this print report button here in the cost status tool. And what this is going to do is it's going to pull up what's called the cost status report.
And this is a great document. It's generated automatically from this cost status tool. And what it is is it's going to be a breakdown of everything that we've invoiced and everything that's been paid. So here we see we have invoice one thirty five for our initial deposit.
We see the date of our first payment was today and it corresponds to invoice one thirty five. And then above here we have a balance remaining. So original project cost a little over thirteen thousand. Now we see that they still only need twelve.
Quick question here from Jacob. Jacob asks, is there a way to include a digital signature, to the proposal submitted by? Great question. So that is probably our most requested feature. We do not have a built in esignature flow at the moment, but that is, like I said, our most requested feature, and we're hoping to offer that, at some point soon.
What you can do is on these proposals, let's see if I have that. If you wanted to you can save this proposal to your drive and you could then import it into an external e signature tool. So you could, kind of save that PDF to your drive, import that into Adobe sign or a DocuSign and send it, to your client that way. So at the moment that's what I see most clients do.
But like I said, in the future we're hoping to have a true built in e signature tool, maybe an integration with a separate e signature tool so that we can give you that capability. At the moment, it's just the kind of raw pdf here, but you can always download this and, insert that into some kind of a pdf editor, e signature tool, or what have you.
Alright. So getting back to our cost status report. Like I said, this is just a breakdown of everything we've invoiced and everything that's still due on this particular estimate or this particular project I should say. So we have remaining balance due and this document's great. You can always save this to your drive. It's good for accounting work.
It's great for just your records if you want to print that out. And you can also share this with your client for you know, if you do for some reason want to send this over to your your customer, you can do that using send to customer right here.
Just very quickly double check, see if there are any other questions that are coming in before we move on.
Not seeing too much come in right now.
So another thing we talked about in the beginning was, change orders and how oftentimes there can be miscommunications about change orders just due to them not being properly documented, or just not paid on time. So what we can do here, Clear Estimate solves this by making it very easy to set up a change order and document it and send it out. And the way we do that is using the alternates feature right here. So alternates are set up to be used for change orders or showing options on the proposal.
And what you can do is you can create these alternates. They're just a subsection of the estimate that's separate from the project cost. So it's a place you can sort of create a change order in the project or just kind of set up some options to show on the proposal. Now if you want to create an alternate, you can click this plus here.
I've already set one up here for just some additional flooring and carpet work. I'm going to open this with the pencil and that's going to open up the alternate so we can see we're in the alternate. This is where we build the change order. You can see I've just kind of given it a title in the description.
Beyond that, it looks just like the main projects page. You have all the same tools for adding line items into your change order and then they're just going to live right here in this change order. Now what's great is this has its own document we can send out. So within the alternate, you're going to see a separate view report right here.
So if we click this and we go print to PDF, we can get an idea of what this change order report is going to look like.
And so this is called alternate work order. Keep in mind you can customize that in your report settings if you do want that to say something different. But then down below I've just kinda outlined what the change order entails and the cost for the change order and it even has its own separate signature box if they want to sign that.
So let's say we send this change work order over to our customer and they agree to it. So back in, and by the way you can email this just by send to customer, send alternate to customer. But let's say they said, you know, let's go ahead and do that change. We can mark this as accepted here and then we can immediately invoice on this. So I'm going to go back to main project.
Let's go more and create an invoice and this is where this from alternate tab comes in handy. So now we can automatically invoice on this entire change order and even if we had a couple of different ones we could select from the drop down which one to invoice on.
From there we just kind of adjust our due date, double check our description, everything looks good.
And then here we now have an invoice on our change order.
So let's go ahead back into our, invoice manager and the cost status tool, and let's also, just kind of take a look at what we've done so far. We've set up one invoice for the initial deposit that was paid and then we have an outstanding invoice for some change work order.
So what can we do at this point? Now we could just kind of continue on adding payments manually, but there's other options as well.
And this is where I'd like to start talking about digital payment options and kind of show you how this streamlines everything a little more. So you may notice down here at the bottom, it's got this option. You want to make your pay, your invoices payable. And if you do, you can go ahead and get started by clicking here.
And what this is is a landing page just kind of giving you an overview of how clearent by Explorer which is our payment processor works with Clear Estimates and there's just information on how it works with the system. If you're interested in getting started with digital payments, what you could do is scroll down here. You're going to see that there's a link here where you can connect with a clearent rep. If you click this, it's just going to take you over to the clearent landing page where you can submit your information.
So you just want to submit your first, last name, company, email, and phone and what will happen is a rep is going to reach out to you about setting up a payment terminal. So clearent by Explor, it's a separate company that we partner with to provide digital payments through Clear Estimates. So let me show you how this works. If you do go ahead and submit your info and get in touch with Clearance, they set up a payment terminal for you.
Then the next step is going to be back here in our email.
And Brad, I did just did just see your question come in about the difference between alternates and components. I will I will most certainly address that here in a minute. I'm just going to show you this, clearent integration process, and then we can jump right into that.
So after you get set up with Clearent, let's say you reach out to their team, talk with a rep, get your terminal activated. The next step is going to be on the clear estimate side, and it's going to start in the form of two emails from my colleague, Jack.
The first email is going to be called accessing terminals information for order. This contains a password that's going to open up the pdf in the second email, order terminals information for terminal and that's going to include an API key we can use to sync clearent with Clear Estimates. So the first step would just be open up this email here. You're going to have kind of a paragraph of text down here with a password. We're just going to go ahead and copy this password to our clipboard and then we're going to open up this second email with this PDF. So this is what's going to get sent to you by Clear Estimates after you get started with Clearing.
We're going to go ahead and download that.
This is a password protected document so we'll just paste in that password and then it'll show us all of our information about our clearent terminal. And down here we see that we have a API key and this is what we want is this API key. So we would just go ahead and highlight and copy this entire API key. We're going to copy this to our clipboard and then what we're going to do is we're going to head right back into Clear Estimates here. We're going to come up to our options tool top right, Then we're going to scroll down to integrations here on the menu on the left.
And then in our integrations tool, we can scroll down to the bottom. We'll see there's a specific section for our clearent integration. We'll just go ahead and paste in that API key here.
We'll click save.
We're going to get confirmation. Our integration data was updated.
So now let's see what this is going to do for us. So I'm going to go ahead and head back to reports and cost status. And remember a little bit ago we set up this, invoice for our change order. So let's go ahead and take a look at this invoice. I'm going to go ahead and grab my link.
Let's open this up and now you're seeing something a little bit different. So now not only is it the same Clear Estimates invoice, it also includes this payment terminal. So this is just going to make it super easy for your client to pay you on this invoice.
So they're going to be able to open this electronic invoice and just very quickly kinda enter in some payment information, credit or debit. They also, have options for ACH check payments. And then your client can pay you right here from the invoice. So it just makes it really easy for them to pay you on time.
And then what's even better than that is back in Clear Estimates, it would automatically record this payment at or this invoice as paid for us. So we wouldn't have to come back in here and click add payment. Now I'm not able to plug an actual payment method in here and run a payment through this right now so you can see this. But without us having to kind of click add payment from invoice, it would just kind of all happen for us.
So all we'd really need to do set up the estimate, start creating invoices. It would include our payment terminal, and then we can just at any time come back here to reports, cost status, double check what's been paid, and then we can even print our report and this will kind of update for us automatically through the power of digital payments. So major time saver for contractor and the homeowner. We've seen a lot of clients have success with this.
And of course if you don't want to do that, you can always just kind of, track your invoices and payments manually in the system as well.
Now a short while ago, Brad asked a question. Thanks so much for your question, Brad. Can you explain the difference between alternates and components? Absolutely.
So the difference with alternates and components, components are included in the project cost and what they're for is creating subsections of the estimate.
So if I wanted to create a component, let's say for a bedroom, this is just going to allow us to have the proposal organized by room or phase. So let's go ahead and just for the sake of time here, I'll use one of our bathroom templates just very quickly so you can see what this looks like.
It's not going to be a thousand square foot bathroom. Do a hundred square feet. Add template.
And basically what this means is that, this bathroom cost is now included in the project cost. Alternates are not. So alternates are separate from the project cost. So our project cost isn't going to change if we set up an alternate.
And this allows you to keep a change order separate or some options separate. But other than that it works exactly the same way. Versus components which are really just used to create sections of the estimate. So we just added in a bedroom component into our project.
I'll show you what this looks like on the proposal just so you can get an idea.
Give that one second to pull up for us. Okay. Great. And so what you can see here now is on the proposal, I now have a section for my bedroom.
I've got all the wine items for my bedroom included below and then what you'll see is there's a subtotal for that bedroom. So that's what a component will do for you. It allows you to create rooms or phases or sections of the estimate and you can have a subtotal for each of these rooms separate from the rest of the project. So if you can imagine maybe you have a couple of these set up for a bedroom, for a kitchen, maybe a living area and have subtotals for each of these rooms.
What you won't see on this proposal is my alternate. Now, there is an option if I wanted to list the alternate as an option, but it still wouldn't include it in the project cost unless I were to go into my alternate, open it up and then convert it to a component here at the top. So you can always do that, if you just wanted to include your alternate with the project cost itself, you just click component. It's going to become a component of the estimate and now it's totaled in. So now we see that our total project cost has changed.
So that's the main difference. Components are just a section of the estimate. They're included in the cost of the project and alternate is not. It's separate and it's used for change orders or it's used for options.
When you're working in the tool also, I do want to point out, hover over these little questions. It'll give you kind of a summary of what this tool does and then if you'd like to see a quick tutorial, just click this and it'll take you into a whole guide on how that works. Same thing with alternates. Very set up to just kind of very quickly pull information like that up if you'd like.
Alright.
So I think we've covered just about everything. One thing I do want to say in regards to invoicing, some clients do prefer to invoice from QuickBooks. We do offer an integration with QuickBooks on all plan options. It's strictly used for invoicing, so what it's going to do is it's going to send over just the summary totals of your estimate. Total material, total labor, any sub cost in the project would get sent over to QuickBooks. So just those three values.
But this is available on any plan option. You'll need to set the integration up first in your options tool. Very easy to do that. Just Just come back down here to your integrations tool, and then you can log right into QuickBooks online.
QuickBooks desktop is a little trickier to set up. It kind of utilizes the QuickBooks web connector, which is a little little antiquated but we can always help out if you do use QuickBooks Desktop and you have any trouble with that setup, please feel free to reach out. But just wanted to point that out. You can also save your estimate details to excel.
If you do want to do any kind of accounting work in excel, you can always do that as well.
Alright. And so that about wraps up the invoicing process. It's really not that involved. It just kind of it's just a process of sort of building an estimate once, setting up any payment schedules, dropping them into a project and then quickly creating invoices and marking them as paid. So So it just becomes a very simple process. Again we did this all within one estimate so we're not, kind of leafing through files here. Everything's all saved in the same project and it just saves me a lot of time and it's a lot and it's just very convenient and organized.
So that being said, let's just see if there's any other questions here from the audience right now.
Not seeing too much else coming in. So what I did want to do today before we wrap it up is to share some additional resources with you.
First of all, this resource, this is a QR code. This'll will take you right to our webinar we did a few months back on digital payments. Now a lot of what we talked about today is covered in this webinar.
But, it does include a little presentation from Clearent team themselves kind of talking about what to expect with your payment terminal and how that works.
So if you're interested in taking a look at that, you can scan this QR code with your phone. I'm also going to drop a direct link to this in the chat here.
So great resource on that.
I also wanted to share this. This is calculating your markup with Michael Stone. Michael Stone is an author. He wrote the book, Markup and Profit, A Contractors Guide.
And, just a really good resource on company financials, calculating your markup. And in the beginning of this presentation, we talked a little bit about managing change orders, and how you can get into trouble with those. So he talks a lot about that as well. Great resource.
I've seen a lot of contractors get a lot out of this webinar. So always recommend take a look at this. Once again, this is a QR code you can scan with your phone. It'll take you right to that webinar, and I'm also going to drop a link to this webinar in the chat if you'd like to take a look. Great resource there.
And then lastly, if you're interested in getting started with digital payments, this is a QR code that'll take you right to the clearent landing page where you can connect with one of the representatives. And similarly, I'll also drop a link in the chat for that. Now if you're, watching on YouTube, you can't see the chat here, and if you're maybe having some trouble with, this QR code, just feel free to reach out to me at support at Clear Estimates. I'd be happy to provide you any of these resources. If you have questions about the presentation today or, just want to chat, feel free to reach out.
Also if you're working in Clear Estimates, there's always going to be this blue chat button bottom right. If you do have questions, we're available nine to five eastern for live support Monday through Friday. So just feel free to send us a message. We'd be more than happy to, help out with any questions you have.
Do you want to thank everyone so much for joining in on the presentation today? Hopefully, this was helpful for you. And hopefully you got a little bit out of this, and understand the invoicing process in the system just a little bit better than before.
So thanks so much everyone for joining in and we look forward to catching up with you at the next one!