Halo Implementation series – Pre Paid Billing. Video 15

hi everyone and welcome to another installment in our um PSA implementation series and following up on our billing Series in today's video we're going to talk about uh prepay billing um you know and how to do all of that stuff in um in Halo so with me again today I have my favorite person at Halo Mr Halo himself I know I haven't said that to him for a little while so I'm sure he's uh he's loving the fact that I'm now stroke and easy go so hey Morgan how you doing mate yeah yeah good to be back he Chris yeah it's been been a couple of weeks I I was I was missing that very much had to start getting some of my uh colleagues to uh call me Mr Halo so it does it doesn't doesn't sound quite the same as when you say it though exactly I think we need to get you a t-shirt right and you can just wear that and go I'm Mr Halo yeah or something like hi my name is Mr Halo ask me anything oh God yeah that uh yeah that could go one of two ways yeah yeah um yeah so um for you know as as Chris mentioned um we've done a few sessions on billing we've covered some of the the core billing mechanisms um there there are a few other topics that we haven't covered yet so the next one that we'll be taking a look at is the the prepaid in so um I'll start off by mentioning that there are two places where prepay can be configured so the first place is against a customer record so each customer record has their own prepaid Tab and the other place uh as mentioned in one of the previous sessions was within our agreements where agreements have our labor type of prepay I just want to provide a little bit of context here as to why there are two places um and and you know sort of a little brief history of a small part of Halo development um before the labor type prepay was an option in agreements in Halo the only place to go to add and uh make use of prepaid in Halo was against the customer record so the prepaid tab against the customer has been around for far longer than it has within our agreement time types now uh the limitation of only having it at customer level is that uh there is only one prepaid tab uh and hence only one prepaid sort bucket running per customer uh so if you did have multiple different sort of you know allotted hours multiple different buckets of prepaid time then well that just couldn't happen so to to combat that we ported the prepay functionality at customer level over and we um we moved that functionality into agreements so I always say to customers new to Halo msps uh configuring Halo PSA if you're going to be making use of prepaid make use of it within the agreement section uh firstly because of consistency and uh you know making sure that whether it's a fixed or a prepaid agreement uh you know where to go to actually check in on those records and then secondly uh the fact that it will allow for multiple agreements of type prepaid to be added and hence multiple buckets of time to be to be tracked against should you need to do that in the future yeah and that's the way I do it um mainly you know a lot of the work I do with with the Consulting clian is on prepaid buckets of time um and I I always do it under the agreement tab so then I can have multiple different types of buckets or multiple different types of um you know types of prepay and and stuff like that so um yeah so that's you know I I I don't use the the tab underneath the client um name just kind of going into the agreement and do it that way so either would work yeah cool uh so in terms of setting the the prepaid agreements up uh you know we'll we go again into our agreements tab create a new agreement uh specify our unique agreement reference pick our labor type of prepaid notice how when I change this from fixed to prepay our hours per period will disappear again I just want to reiterate a point that I mentioned a few sessions ago the the fixed agreements I like to think of as sort of a use it or lose it type agreement you have an allotted number of hours or unlimited but let's say you have an allotted number of hours each month if the customer doesn't doesn't use those hours then that will get reset the following month or the following period And now when we're making use of our prepay agreements we don't have quite the same concept and so we don't have the the hours per period in here instead what we find is upon saving our agreement we find a prepay tab here against the agreement itself now it's pretty much the same options that we have in here as what we had at customer level again sort of reiterating the fact that we effectively copy and pasted the code at customer level and put it into to our agreements uh and the that configuration consists of um firstly our prepay balance so uh how much has been added uh you know throughout all the all of the time how much has been used uh how much has expired and hence what is remaining below that we have our our billing where we're specifying that the invoice lines that would be generated from PR prepay records uh what is the linked item that those lines equate to and this is more applicable to uh to our accounting Integrations to make sure that when the invoice goes over to something like QuickBooks it goes over with the correct item code or the correct GL code stuff like that and then below here as well we have an option to say that when we are um automatically uh topping up prepay or when we're automatically adding prepaid records don't create an invoice for that this might be uh merged into the the services of the agreements recurring invoices for example you might not necessarily want to uh have have these invoices generated each month but you might actually want the time to be topping up yeah and the topping up of that time is based in the recurring prepay section where uh in here we have our uh date of next payment date of next prepay record to be added we have our uh X number of months after the prepaid time has been added uh after which that time would expire so it might be that you know eight hours are added each month those eight hours will actually be valid for two or three months but then after that three month period Then the eight hours uh will get will become expired and won't be able to be used the amount is the amount that uh the customer would be paying and the hours is the number of hours they're getting for that time the recurring period again very similar to our recurring invoices this is is how frequently these prepay records will be added into Halo uh and then our minimum and automatic deductions which will uh reduce prepaid time based on that period based on that recurring period as well now as prepay is being added over time and expiring over time uh our prepay records table will be getting updated accordingly and we'll see here we can actually add manual prepay records in as well again allowing us to specify a number of hours an amount that was paid for those hours a date from which they're effective an invoiced date uh denoting that the customer has already paid for these hours y an invoice number if applicable an expiration date for the prepay time so it might be that uh this is valid until the end of the year and then a note as well if we need and of course you could leave that invoice date blank if you wanted to go then and send that ,500 in as you know create an invoice for that if you left that invoice date blank then it'll just push that through to billing and create an invoice yeah yeah and so notice how after manually adding that prepaid Reco in here uh our total is 12 we haven't used any of those hours and so our balance is also 12 yeah and then let's go over to our ready for invoicing section where we've got our 1500 uh for those 12 hours that I just added in well let's generate this invoice I'm not actually sure what we've got the description set as here so let's have a look at that oh prepay cool yeah so um this let's have a look at where this is set um or more generally let's have a look at some of the configuration options uh that surround prepaid now lot those are in configuration billing prepaid believe it or not good place to put it yeah you never know with Halo well exactly I was uh I was going to say this as as much as we love this product there's so many little places to change things that um and sometimes there's random places that they put things and I'm like why would you do that but anyway it's okay um I'm sure there's method to the madness somewhere but yeah anyway um so in configuration billing prepaid we have some options in here uh some of the more common ones to look out for is are uh Ed pay as you go when prepaid runs out so customers can go into a negative prepaid balance um if you're happy to do that and you know we sort of go back to that previous previous example where eight hours get topped up each month but uh the customer could actually use 12 one month and the following month you know when they' got the eight it would actually be four because they're already in a deficit um if you you don't want that and you just want time immediately after prepay runs out to be marked as billable similar to our fixed price agreements then we can enable this um this option prepay must be invoiced before it can be used uh says it does as it says on the tin it means that H you need to ensure that the prepay records that are added into the system have been invoiced before they can then be consumed and effectively meaning that you're you're not giving anyone Time free of charge before you've actually invoiced for it and further to that it might be that uh before the customer's paid for it so a customer um has to pay for the time before that time can then be consumed in the system and that kind of makes sense because that's the whole point of blocks right is it's prepaid up front so I think those those tick boxes are things I always recommend people to um to tick straight away because you know if you if you're G to give somebody prepaid hours the whole point of the you know the word is prepaid so you pre you know you've paid in advance for those hours so yeah I I do and I do the same thing on mine is is to literally say you know unless the customer I'll set everything up but unless the money is actually physically in my bank um then I don't I don't actually start any work um you know so it's yeah so those are great great options to have um if you were doing that kind of thing for sure for sure uh and then also down here we see our our invoice line description um so this is where that invoice line description has come from um where we're making use of the dollar prepay short date and prepay hours variables but of course this can be amended uh as you need cool yeah I think um that's prepaid in a nutshell just bear in mind again it's important to have watched the previous session on uh our billing plan combinations to understand how the time that is then added to tickets would be chipped away against the prepaid buckets of time um so you know for example we would want to make sure that Mario and Luigi's Pizza Place uh has and you know let's not do it this way let's say that the Mario and Luigi's Pizza place mp01 has an inclusion rule where we're saying that uh this will cover all remote support time and then we'll see well okay so let's have a look here so then we've seen that um this has gone to agreement with id2 which is is uh get that out of the way which is this agreement um id2 but our prepaid time looks like it's been removed moved that so that's going to expire at the end of the year make sure that that is as of today it's because you ticked those boxes I think saying that it needs to be invoiced before it can be used oh yeah yes nice yeah exactly you'd had those boxes ticked so that's why it's not allowing you to to do it I ran into the exact same problem actually a while back when I was first setting this up is yeah they have to be paid before you can actually use it so I think what it does is and actually that I don't know if that's a by Design thing but it actually makes block zero so zeros them out on that screen we looked at it which technically it's not really zero it just hasn't been paid for yet so you probably just want to uncheck those boxes and they should be good to go that's it yeah I think it it should just be that one because we have actually invoiced it so let's double check that yeah the irony yeah I I remember helping you with that and yeah yeah exactly I think I remember calling you saying why the heck doesn't this work and you help me and now now I'm so that's what this is all about right yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah brilliant so thanks for that Chris that's Now set to 12 we go back to the ticket recalculate our billing and now that's going to go against those prepay hours and that should also be reflected on the prepay tab for the customers agreement yep in total one used 11 left yeah yeah absolutely so yeah I mean prepay is is fairly straightforward you know nothing nothing major it's a block of time you use the block and it's um it's work so I I do a lot of um I use billing plan combinations I have a lot of customers that kind of have you know a um recurring service contract for you know remote support but on site support comes out of a block so you could just use kind of a you know billing plan combination for that to just decide like which contract those hours come out of and stuff like that so um yeah so I mean blocks are are fairly straightforward and I think there's there's nothing majorly on this one thing that you can do which we haven't got set up on on this database is you you do actually have the ability to have those show up on the tickets as well right so you can actually you know directly from um because I don't think I saw on that ticket um which I find quite useful as well because then can you don't have to jump back into that prepaid block to see what's been deducted it just actually um shows it on the ticket itself which is that one y yeah so show prepay balance on the ticket details screen yeah and then we've got our prepay balance down here here on the right hand side yeah and that's and that's sometimes I think a lot easier to do because then you're Engineers your technicians um you know agents whatever whatever we call them have um have the ability to kind of see that straight away so um so always make sure you check that box so yeah no I think that's great that's a a really good very quick rundown of um of billing of billing plan you know of um prepay how it works that kind of stuff so really appreciate it again um Morgan and appreciate you jumping on the call with me and going through this so thank you very much and we look forward to seeing you guys on the next video always a pleasure thanks Chris yes