Halo Implementation Series – Billing Process- Recurring Invoices

hey everyone and welcome to another installment in the Halo implementation series with me today again you all know what I'm going to say I've got my favorite person from Halo with me Mr Halo himself the legendary Legend of all legends Mr Morgan aspinel and today we're going to talk about billing and specifically around recurring invoices and how to use them when to use them all that kind of stuff so hey Morgan how you doing and thanks for joining me again yeah hey Chris thanks for having me um I think I might have to get plaque up soon uh yeah Mr Halo I'm scratching his head from here we're actually in different locations and uh yeah uh close by the day yeah yeah pleasure to be back um it's a big sort of part of the implementation that we're going to be talking about over the next few weeks I presume um that's billing in Halo it's uh it's not quite as complicated as it may seem but it is very important to make sure that everyone has a thorough understanding of all the mechanisms behind it so yeah and over the next few videos we're going to be looking at all of the different uh mechanisms behind billing so recurring invoices agreements we're going to have a look at Labor billing and prepay and billing plan combinations and how it all ties together um but yeah as Chris mentions we'll start off with uh our recurring invoices so an issue I think this is a good one because um you know especially people that are coming in from from different PSA tools right there's always a lot of confusion as to you know what's the difference between a contract and a recurring invoice and or on agreement and a recurring invoice so I think what we'll do is we'll cover off recurring invoices and then yeah as you said over the next few sessions we'll talk about how they all tie together and you know whether you can use one without the other and stuff like that but we'll focus predominantly on what is a recurring invoice how does it work why do we need it all that kind of stuff in this session exactly yeah so we'll start off with the most basic form of invoice generation in Halo and that is manually creating an invoice right so pretty straightforward that all we need to do is go to our invoices module where down here on the left-hand side we've got all of our different lists we will be covering all of these shortly but for now we're just going to be in our invoices list and all I need to do is click new in the top right that's going to open up the new invoice screen where we can break this screen down into two sections on the right hand side we have our sort of miscellaneous invoice information uh some of that high level info who's the customer site being invoiced in this case uh what's our invoice date what's our due dates any uh internal or external notes that we want to add as well and then on the left hand side the main bulk of the screen here is where we're actually adding our invoice lines which follows a similar procedure to adding our quote lines to our quotes and proposals which is something that we did in a recent session um so again we have our ad products section or our ad products button where we're searching through our existing inventory to add our products in we can of course add generic products which it does not equate to anything in our inventory nor will it ever equate to anything in our inventory it's a one-time line that uh you know you don't want to put into your product list but you just want to add in this case again we also have those options to add a group of items from our existing group templates something that we had a look at in one of the recent sessions uh specifically around CRM and then we can also add bespoke groups to our uh invoice as well go in and edit these lines that's it simple as that creation of invoice pretty straightforward um so of course the next step in complexity here is to think about creating a recurring events so now I'll just go over to my recurring invoice list again I'll click noon now I just want to highlight what exactly is a recurring invoice in Halo PSA uh and I like to refer to recurring invoices in Halo as templates for invoice creation right so we've seen in a previous session the concept of email templates where we create our email template once we add our variables in and then each instance of an invoice that is sent out so each instance of an email that is sent out of Halo will make use of that template replace those variables recurring invoices work in a very similar fashion where the recurring invoice is the template where you know in here we're setting our schedule we're adding some variables for dates perhaps the duration over which a service is covered and and then based on our schedule each month each quarter each year when that schedule is met instances of invoices will be generated so um you know with that in mind again we're looking at a very similar screen to what we saw a moment ago we have our high level information on the right hand side there are some additional options now again of course we've got our customer but now with our recurring invoice we have this schedule section it cannot be overstated how important it is to set a schedule for your recurring invoices because of course without the schedule for your recurring invoices the invoices themselves never get generated and you never get paid so very important to make sure that you're setting a schedule up here okay the schedule itself um you'd be pretty flexible I mean from my experience there are sort of two primary schedules that we're looking to to utilize and that is creating invoices at the start of the month or creating invoices at the end of the month for anything in between of course you simply just pick the date in in the calendar here so we set our start date and I'll repeat period and our end date if applicable and then based on that we can see our calendar up top with uh the date in the calendar that corresponds to when the invoices themselves will be generated so of course we set our schedule to be the 17th of August and repeat monthly so that means that on the 17th of each month an invoice will be created can I just make an appointment on this um quickly by the way which something I've noticed a lot of customers have brought up with me that calendar that we're looking at now is not clickable so friends it would be nice to actually have the option to be able to click in there rather than having to go to the start date um and then have that updated yeah I I agree I'll I've actually I have logged that with my development team previously to have it sort of work two ways but yeah at the minute it's more a way to visualize the output but I do agree that this should be interactive as well yeah okay yeah yeah so we've got uh yeah we've got our start date obviously if it's the start of the monthly monthly that's fine um if you want your invoice is generated on the last day of the month what you can do is simply pick a number of days ahead of the existing schedule to create our invoices namely one day ahead which now means that invoices will be generated on the last day of each month of course I've set down to three days before have them generated a couple of days before the end of the month and so on another option in our uh sort of recurring invoice header section what we see on the right hand side is our additional lines so we'll come back to how these work when we have a better understanding of billing in general it's just worth bearing in mind for now that there is the ability to bundle together all of the different types of charges that would have accrued throughout the month so all of your billable labor can be added on to the recurring invoice all of your Hardware that you've issued on tickets all of your project charges and so on can all be wrapped up onto one document uh each month each quarter cool and then beyond that again similar information similar miscellaneous information to what we saw on the previous one now there's one other option in uh recurring invoices that we didn't have in the standard invoice generation and that is our ad recurring item so again we've got our ad product our generic product ad group create group but now we've got this ad recurring item or added occurring products um so recurring products in Halo are simply products that are marked as recurring so against each product we have a checkbox and by checking this we are suggesting or you know we are stating that this product is going to become a requirement as simple as that so we can add our recurring products in foreign recurring products as well just bear in mind that they'll only be added to a single instance of the invoices so you can add a product in and then it will get added to the first invoice that's generated and then not added to any subsequent invoices so that would be a good a good example of yeah like if you were selling Hardware as part of um as part of this you might want to add that to the to the first invoice up front or you know you were charging some kind of setup fee or something like that where you might want to charge the setup fee in the beginning and have that as a one-off and then moving forward all the other ones are just recurring yeah so I see that happen quite a lot that people are are doing something up front like a hardware or software or whatever it is or you know some kind of thing so oh yeah yeah yeah same here um yeah the setup for you is a common example cool so a couple of points to note um firstly as we have uh as as I mentioned our recurring invoices are templates for invoice creation now what's important when considering templates for invoice creation is the use of dollar variables so this will generate invoices at the start of each month um and I it's very common that you're going to want to on those invoices return the duration over which uh the services licenses subscriptions are applicable for so you know invoice generated start of August and that might be for licenses throughout August so I might want to say that you know just these lines are going to to be for this first of August until the first of September and then next month that's going to be September to October and we can we can achieve that by making use of our dollar variables now the list of dollar variables that can be applied to recurring invoices can be found by clicking the pencil against our recurring invoice line where we'll see a small paragraph at the top here with a link to view our available variables so click that and these are the variables that we're going to be able to use in our recurring invoices now notice how when I added those recurring items in this dollar recurring billing date was automatically added so of course you're not going to want to have to go into every single recurring invoice line and amend the variables you're going to want to default that somewhere and have that globally applied but all recurring items subsequently added to recurring invoices and we can find that default option in Conflict billing General under our invoice creation variables where in here we've got our recurring item description where we're just saying we want to return the name of the recurring item or the name of the recurring product and then this dollar recurring billing dates now this leads me on to my second point since we first spun this trial up we've actually got some more applicable variables that we'll want to make use of because this recurring billing date is just going to be a single date and it's just going to be the date of invoice creation so in this case it would just be the first of August which doesn't make much sense we actually want to return a duration uh of time over which the license is um relevant for yeah so like for the month we can do that sorry Chris what was that no I was going to say so like for the month of August right so we can go yeah these are your services from the first to the 31st of August that we believe that's it that's exactly it yeah um and to make use of that functionality we want to use dollar Period start date and dollar period end date so start date okay you might want to use it in there that says for the period of or whatever so I I do that because it's that says yeah the description and then yeah for the period whatever to whatever yes yes um as a side note a question often comes up is okay well I've got these um I've got this dollar Period start there and I've got a dollar period end date these are going to return dates I want to change the format of those dates I don't want it to be day month year I want it to be month day year or I don't want it to be numerical I want it to actually say you know uh o1 org so 01 cents right um so a handy point to note throughout the application is if we're making use of date dollar variables uh you know the data ticket was logged Period start day uh the resolution day any if we're talking about dates in Halo and we're using variables to return them we can actually add curly brackets directly after the variable and add our own formatting in well I might want to use dashes instead just like so cool so I've added that in to config billing General and notice how it's not actually going to update these existing lines it will only be applicable to lines added after that change is made so that let me just do that notice how now we've got Period start date and period end date has disappeared still that's one problem probably um what's this just put it on run the invoice and see if it shows up I think it does show up actually when you do the invoice yeah I think it's just cached I think it was taken in incomplete values I'm just going to click F5 there it is periods go back in here set my schedule customer at my lines there we go it's better yeah yeah so notice how uh based on the default um variable we put in from people in general that's then been applied to all of those lines subsequent to making that change now naturally the next question is Okay so we've got Period start date and we've got period end date uh what what are those dates how how where are they being pulled from in the system um and those are being pulled from our creation period that we have over on the right hand side here so in this case Period start date would be the start of July and period end date would be the end of July naturally the question that follows on from there is okay well I actually want this invoice that's generated at the start of August to be for August uh and hence I want Period start date to be the first of August and I want period end date to be the 30th so that's all based on this option directly below where we are specifying uh whether we are basically billing in arrears which is previous period billing in advance which is current period or uh billing in advance plus one which is next period so we were using previous period I'm going to change this to current period save that and notice how my period is now throughout August instead of throughout July now I believe that there is an option in configuration billing recurring invoices to set our um our default option for that in here so you know if you do just bill in advance globally and you don't want to have to worry about changing that for each recurring invoice you can come in here and you can select your your default option in confident billing pairing invoices cool cool so um let's go ahead and think about the creation of this invoice now um this is the most basic setup for a recurring invoice we will be coming back and having a look at some additional options like how we adjust the quantities of these based on different parts of the system but you know we'll work our way up to that point but now we're just worried about creating and recurring it so here we go um bar recurring invoice here and there is the ability to have these recurring invoices automatically created again that's an option in configuration billing recurring invoices where right at the top we've got our automatically create recurring invoices yeah now my advice would be at least while you're getting up to speed with Halo while you're understanding the platform and your understanding why invoices have the certain bits of data on them that you would expect or that you wouldn't expect um while you're doing that probably recommend leaving this off just as a means for you to manually check those recurring invoices before you generate them um and make sure that you understand everything that is on those invoices however after a couple of months once you're comfortable with everything and you're you're happy with the invoices that are generated you can come back in here you can enable this and then once that schedule has been met the invoices will be automatically generated and you'll see here as well if automatically generated they can be automatically sent to the accounts email address for the respective client where the account's email address is something that we set within our client or within our customer record under the billing tab just here in accounting address yeah and this is something that um again and so you know people coming in from tools like autotask will actually be quite familiar with that um well the ability to automatically create recurring invoices because at the moment in a water task there is no ability to automatically create them you have to run the process manually so you have to run you know every single invoice they call it a proven post so you have to run that process every month in order to generate these these invoices um and there's two schools of thoughts on that you know a lot of people kind of say well why would you want to do that if they're always the same but from my point of view I actually leave mine turned off because I would much rather at least in Halo I you know I'd much rather manually every single month make sure that my invoices are correct and make sure that you know the quantities are correct you know before the invoice goes out so I think um depending on the type of of company you know if you're if you know that absolutely nothing's ever going to change and it's always the same Services then yeah by all means set it as automatically but I think it's nice to be able to say I especially with invoicing well I don't want to get it wrong I don't want an invoice to be sent out to a customer or especially if you've got that box Tech to automatically send it to the customer you know I don't want to have an invoice into a customer go I should I should have billed you for 10 licenses and I've only billed you for five or you know oh you're no longer on Microsoft 365 business basic oh actually it should have been premium you know so I'd much rather do it manually um but I get why the automatic one's a good thing that people want to do I couldn't agree more to be honest I I would be exactly the same uh I you know I'll double check an email before I send it let alone double checking an invoice before it's sent to a customer so yeah I I totally agree as you mentioned the option is there for for people that are checking it month in month out and they're finding it a waste of time and they're just happy with the numbers that are there and yeah like you say especially if you're recurring invoices are all static nothing's going to change so there's not as much of a motivation there to double check the biggest things cool so sorry Chris no I was gonna say exactly and I mean I think it's um uh you you see that a lot right you see it that people are are I think if you have a bigger team of people maybe you want to leave them as as manual because maybe those people can check but you know I understand if you're a one-man band or you know a few a few people in your company you really don't want to be manually sending out your invoices every month so maybe in that particular instance you might say actually you know what I'll just click the box and let Halo just kind of send them out because they never change as you say yeah yeah yeah now if that box is left unchecked of course you will have to manually create those recurring reports now the process of doing so is again achieved by uh going to the invoices module where in our invoices module we have this ready for invoicing section now the ready for invoicing section of Halo PSA can be thought of as an interactive dashboard of everything in Halo that can have an invoice generated for it but does not yet have any invoices or does not yet have an invoice generated so of course that's going to include all of our recurring invoices based on the schedule that we had set for those recurring invoices that's going to include all of our billable labor on service tickets that's going to include all of the hardware that we're issuing on those tickets it's going to include any sales orders free pay as well so and everything that can be invoiced that hasn't been you'll find in here invoices can be created by selecting the respective records that you want to create invoices for so you can get quite granular here you can pick exactly what it is that you want to invoice if you want to invoice everything within a subset so if I want to generate all my recurring invoices but not any of the other types of invoices I can click the check box against the header and that's going to select everything within that subset I can also filter by customer in here so I might only want to generate Mario and Luigi's invoices um at which point I can filter by customer I I can again I have the option to select my subset or we'll see up here in the top right I have my select everything option so I can just pick everything for Mario and Luigi and just invoice all of that and finally we have our billing cutoff date so for example we've got our recurring invoices in here with our next duration date of the 1st of August if I set my billing cart update to the 19th of July we don't see them in here so of course our recurring invoices will only be returned in our ready for invoicing section based on the schedule being met for them based on our billing cutoff date being there for them so yeah and and that's very similar to to the other PSA tools you know very similar to being able to say I want to do this in a particular date range or I want to you know I only want to build for August or I only want to build stuff for um for September or whatever and then picking it down to specific customer what is nice though is this is all on one screen um yeah is you know in in some other tools you see this on kind of multiple screens so you have to click on multiple tabs at least so you have to click through different tabs to get each one of these these areas and you have to um do each area individually and then do the next area whereas it's much nicer to just have everything on there because as you say you could just go select everything and then if you had labor and projects and items and sales orders and everything else do the whole lot and Chuck them onto an invoice that's yeah that's exactly it for those individuals that are used to working that way that like working that way and do want to go through each Tab and want to check the the individual types of invoices and create those uh one at a time you'll see under are ready for invoicing section we do have our sub lists which do return the specific types that we just saw a moment ago on their own unique tab so you know instead of seeing it all on one screen personally I prefer this instead of seeing it all on one screen you can go through each subsection and of course create your invoices that way yeah yeah and I guess it's it's the same with me I mean I I'm I much rather have everything all on one screen because then I can see what there is that I need to invoice but I do know I do work with quite a few customers in in Halo that kind of like to go through each section because they want to you know make sure they really looking over everything that's that's labor that needs to be built making sure it's all correct you know without all this other sort of noise on the screen that that they don't need to be focusing on so yeah yeah it makes sense cool so let's go ahead and create our recurring invoice you'll see that I can expand my recurring invoices so I can actually double check what's going to be on the invoice that's generated I'll select that I'll click create invoice set my invoice day and it's as simple as that um notice how our dollar Period start date dollar period end date have been replaced with the uh the creation periods that we saw previously um and also note that the formatting of those dates has been returned based on my own specification yeah and I think you know again most people would probably at this point have some kind of integration into QuickBooks or xero or something like that and at that point it would not only create the invoice in here but also then create it in your in your respective accounting tool as well at the same time yeah that's absolutely correct we'll probably take a look at some point in in the future I know that Integrations are incredibly important and they probably need some better uh explaining but yeah you're absolutely correct the zero integration QuickBooks Sage intact uh all of the online accounts package Integrations will all immediately create invoices as soon as they're created in Halo that's also applicable if we're automatically creating our recurring invoices so uh you know in an Ideal World everything's set up you set your recurring invoices up you automatically create them and then based on that schedule the invoices are automatically created they're automatically pushed over to QuickBooks uh and you don't even know that billing is happening in Halo so yeah and actually I'm a big fan of of I I know we you know we have that tick box where you can send these invoices directly to the customer from from Halo anyone who knows me for a while and and you know has read my book will see that you know I'm a big fan of kind of not sending a an invoice from a PSA tool directly I you know I I would much rather push it into the accounting tool and send it from there um for lots of reasons you know mainly that at some point your accountant is going to need that information so you might as well get it into the accounting uh into the um you know yeah accounting tool um so it's someone you've got to get it in there and you might as well send it from there because I think it just looks nicer um to to send it directly from there and you're not then having a mismatch of um invoice numbers and all that kind of stuff um so yeah so but there is the option as you as you mentioned earlier on if you really want to send them directly from Halo and then push them into the accounting tool you can do that but I mostly get them into the accounting tool into xero and then I'll send them from zero yeah yeah I I'd I tend to agree um it's like you say you want you want it you want the invoice in the accounting package anyway or your accountant and another point is if you have come over to Halo but you've been using xero previously the the invoice PDF that you've got in xero you're already happy with why try and recreate that in Halo when you can just push the invoice over to zero and make use of that template you've already gone yeah and what's nice about the zero integration at least is we also have the ability to uh allow the invoices to be automatically sent from zero that is contingent on making sure that accounts codes and nominal codes are all set up for your products and your invoices uh such that the invoices go over to zero with them authorized or submitted status but yeah if that's the case then they can be Auto sent from from zero so that's quite handy yeah exactly and I think and that um and that's a good thing to do is to kind of say especially if you're automating the whole process right you just want to say like like you say especially if you're a smaller company right I don't want to be spending all weekend thinking oh you know okay my invoices have gone out of Halo and now they're sitting in in zero and now I have to go into zero and manually send them from there so I think that whole process of going I know it's just done my invoices are gone I don't have to worry about it I can go and enjoy my weekend do whatever I need to do and I've got invoices have been sent out of the system automatically so there's um you know so yeah I and I'm a big fan of doing that I'm a big fan of kind of sending them from the accounting package itself and having all the customization and everything done there and then also when it then comes to payment gateways and I know there's a bunch of payment gateways that work directly with with Halo you know like stripe and those kind of things you know I do all of that kind of stuff in the accounting package as well so that you know when somebody pays on on stripe or by a direct debit or something like that it's it's updating it in in um uh you know in in xero in my case automatically rather than kind of doing it in Halo and then doing it in the accounting tool as well yeah yeah makes sense I'll actually be interested I mean and if if anyone wants to put a comment in the in the comments below you know how are you guys doing it in terms of of invoicing and I do a lot of people do that same approach do they send it from you know from the accounting tool or you know how many people are actually sending it from the PSA tool and also then having the PSA to update the payment and and all of that kind of stuff I'd I'd be interested to know um you know how many people are doing it both ways yeah yeah cool so excellent I think this will be a good place to to wrap things up um just an introduction to invoice creation uh the creation of recurring invoices getting an understanding of what they are conceptually in Halo and a brief look at the ready for invoicing screen so yeah absolutely you know I think that was definitely good and and that's um I think that's going to answer a lot of questions for a lot of people because people you know especially that I talk to you know people who are brand new on Halo kind of want to know what yeah what is a recurring a recurring invoice um and you know whereas a lot of um yeah and again a lot of other PSA tools kind of don't have the concept of a recurring invoice it's the invoice that the the services or the products are invoiced from the actual contract itself and yes that contractor generates the invoice so there's no con there's no kind of two separate things and we'll talk about that in a in another call about the difference between you know an agreement and the recurring invoices um and and why are they separate and I can be separate and all that kind of stuff so but I really appreciate it Morgan as always thank you so much really appreciate your time appreciate that you know Halo let us do these that Halo's given us your time to to spend with me to do these videos so really do appreciate it and they really are working I'm having a lot of people kind of you know give us feedback on on uh these these videos and saying how much they they like them so really appreciate it that's great that's that's what it's all about um you know uh but as as we said long time ago prior to to these videos implementations were kind of locked away and I would have the same cause time and time again and now we can help hundreds perhaps even thousands of members of the community learn how to get a speed limit um so yeah it's it's no hassle at all it's what what I'm here for so yeah happy to hear that the feedback is is positive from the community yeah absolutely so really appreciate it again and thank you very much and we'll see you on the next video always a pleasure thank you Chris and thanks everyone for watching see you later bye