 All right, so I've talked in the past of how we do our invoicing with invoice ninja and kind of our workflow for when a Problem comes in and how we create the invoice as a draft and move it over Right to an invoice for a quick billing and you know getting paid quickly And we've been using invoice ninja for a little while and we've also started using the projects and tasks system And I wanted to cover that because not everything is simply just an invoice Sometimes you have a project and there's a bunch of small hourly billing things that goes to it We have a few it clients like this and we certainly have a lot of our work that we do on the LTS creative side Which is the web business that gets built out in projects and tasks as well Now let me dive into a little bit here and also explain something first you can have tasks without a project So the task system works independent a project, but a project allows you to group all those tasks into one so to speak Container so the relationship is I could just have a task and create a series of things with that task and build it To a client or a series of tasks and bill it to the client But I don't need to have a project for that But if I do have a project the project will cumulatively organize all those tasks I can set all the tasks for a project and then I can just build the project Which will sub bill all the tasks related to it in one click so you can do it either way So if you are just doing and we have a couple we have an IT customer And it wants us to do a bunch of a little billings that are a bunch of small little things We do that we accumulate and we send them a bill one Once a month of all the little things that go on and it summarized it for us So we just create a series of tasks for that versus a project each month because it's a little bit easier So let's kind of show you how this works. So we'll first start with the task side of this so task Choose a client and we got do we cheat them and how in here? There's no projects So let's type a project in here some project work Well some tasks. I should say it's not a task Task well, I can't spell today Some task work Just fill it in with some blah blah blah. So this is whatever task work. We did some task work and some other thing oops, I'm gonna delete that and some other things So there we go we have a task and some other things in here And we want to go ahead and just start the timer start and Right away it starts the timer now we go over here to tasks We can see it's logged in running. There's a little time tracker to pops up Now this is kind of cool because they have a desktop app to connect this with So you can use it as a desktop app or use this I prefer just use it in a window because this means I can close this and Start and stop things and edit the times in it And if I wanted to there's no like so there's no projects or tell me what project it is And let's go ahead and create another task. So let's close this Create another two tasks Set up website. Oh, we'll say WordPress And we'll go ahead and say manual. We know that's gonna take us a certain amount of time So we'll assign the time instead of letting it pick. So we're gonna say that'll go from 12 30 To 1 o'clock 30 minutes save and Now there's a text for that we'll save it And we'll do one more task for them fix printer and We'll do that one as a timer So now we go back over to tasks may have the three tasks going for do each you know how these two are running This one's just logged and we can pull up that time tracker window again And we can see each one and we can stop or resume them and Or add more time to it. So pretty pretty straightforward and like I said, I can close windows and all that all this doesn't matter It's all running on the web server. So you do actually have to remember as well to go back in and Stop and start these tasks as well. So if you once you started them and you do close all this It's closing. It doesn't stop the task just so you know So you do have to make sure you do it if you forget about it You're like, oh, I mean you can go back in manually adjust it. So we have the printer one running This is not running and this one now because this already has a time on it We can add more time to it. So now we have an hour, but then we ran into more time so now we started another time for this one and then go ahead and It's got a time overlap in it because of the timing on there. I'll discard the changes and Close that now if you go back over to the dashboard, we can also see all the different tasks that are running over here So we can go to this one here and We'll stop it Because we have a future time and another time. I'm just going to delete the time off of there So now we have that one hit save pretty straightforward how to do this Now of course, how do you bill it all? So let's go ahead and stop these so pop up this because it's easy to use a time tracker Stop stop. He knows the little green bar next to him And it's stopped. So now we have all these not running. They can be resumed You fresh the page again and They're all right here now. It also has this so you can do status tracking. It's I don't know how to say it Kanban Kanban. I Usually just label these as like created here Ready to do and you can drag these around To how they're going and You see how that changes the status here for created in progress ready to do if you use that feature We're actually not using that part as much right now We're still kind of playing with it But that allows you to kind of you know set the project and say where each of these tasks are in its process And you can easily as I shown you here Rename them just by clicking at the top and calling them whatever you want in progress or you know completed if you wanted to However, you wanted to say that Or even create a few more of these on here so you can kind of lay your project out or Task this this that works inside of both. All right, so let's go ahead and invoice these tasks So we're gonna say here's these tasks here for do we cheap and how we're gonna say invoice and we we go It is now invoiced and There it is There's the tasks. There's the times under it and we expand out the details so you can see what's going in here All the multiple start and stop times everything falls into here I only had one time for each of these but it would lay out all the different times in there So they would show up on the sheet here So pretty slick and then I could send invoice and we go so I'm just gonna mark sent them Actually don't have email set up in this And we go to these tasks now they have status of invoice so we know that they're good And if we want to clear them out of there, we'll disarchive them Now those tasks are done now. Let's do the same thing started as a project. So a new project client Joey Cheatham and how name? new computers Do date they like these new computers by Saturday budget of five hours a task rate of 150 They want new computers They want Some dels dude So there's a little project description All right project successfully created Now let's first task Order the dels dude And we know when we're gonna order them so we're gonna say we'll order them on Thursday There's an hour of time in the ordering There just so you make the times nice and clean save I Go back over to the project And we can see the task for it. So here's the task start date There's an hour of the task and to be in there And you're starting to cumulant. So that's 20% of the hours on there. So let's do another new task Set up new computers and that'll start on Friday. We'll set up the new computers Actually, we'll set a time so Friday at 12 15 And then we'll just say that's gonna take up three hours of time to set those new computers up hit save Now we go back over and look at the project again, whoops All right, now you're kind of getting a timeline for this project. So now we're here here and then We've used up 80% so another hour left on that project. So we're gonna add a new one more new task Deliver computers and they wanted them Saturday. So we'll choose the time of noon Whoops, and then we'll choose the date of Saturday and we'll put one more hour in for that start at noon should be finished by one Save and there you go. Here's those notes, you know, they want new computers They want some dels dude hundred percent of the hours or three tasks divided up You see the hours cumulative till you hit the five hour max budget for there And this is that kind of on but just for this so instead of seeing anything else here is the Statuses you can drag around You could even do things like put people's names in here to assign them like that So they would know it doesn't really have a notification system So it like notifies like a full-blown huge project manager where you give it names and emails each person about the tasks You're supposed to do it's a little bit more manual, but that actually works fine for us We know who's doing what tasks and we have other Methodologies like using some spreadsheets to really get a bigger picture tracking of what goes on with projects And who's assigned to what but this allows you to pretty easily go through and then we can start and stop these tasks Has needed or drag them to whatever status they're in Based on that so drag them back over here and go to project now To make it simpler we can build these tasks out Here's those tasks showing and here's the project new computers that they're attached to so you can see the client name what the Project are attached to versus if you create a task for that client like we did before With no hours at all in it go to tasks and this one doesn't have a project Of course that makes it easy to filter so you could filter by the project or filter however you want it on there And here's the test that shows up in this but when you start at the project go here and click on it It's only the ones related to this so that's the difference between the project Kanban versus tasks new computers Kanban project for that versus the bigger one and like I said for billing purposes Now let's pretend this project's complete. Let's go with the tasks again So I think one of them didn't have any hours in it or did it okay? They did is the test one doesn't so we're gonna go here project again Invoice now all those tasks their dates times and information Away you go now. They're all assigned and built out into an invoice So there's your invoice total based on the hours and the information put in there And of course you can still add to this invoice and other details in a rat an extra parts That might have been needed for but like I said, it makes it really easy if you're doing that type of billing to create and build That system so let me go ahead and save it as a draft right she was market ascent so we can Pretend we send it to the client. This is the free account so the emailing option I believe Yeah, it won't work. It won't send an email. This is the free account to do that I guess I'm not using it in my self-hosted system There's too much client data in there and I didn't feel like trying to blur all that out That's always a pain from an editing standpoint The last thing I'm going to show you will actually be in our production system here Because I want to show you the reporting you don't get the reporting with the free version Now I've got to blur out some of the client names and details on here But what this is showing you is some of the hours that are built out Based over time so you run the task group by client I can also group by project group by user and it would break down how all these are going I'm gonna scroll down like so I got a blur out the data as I don't share customer information there what you get an idea is It's breaking down all the hours and this can easily be exported into like an Excel Option so it's got XLS or a PDF so you can run your unreports to gather Data on there and maybe if you're watching your staff you could even do it by the projects done by your Employees and then you just change a subgroup over here to be by user and you could just sort all excel and you know Play with the numbers however you want But just the general reporting if you want to know how many hours are on there or how many hours were done by Task or groups by client they give you a pretty simple way of doing it or you can group by you know Day month here subgroup client and then whatever date range you want to apply it for so I just said the last couple days Show me that so it's pretty slick and it works really really well for that so hopefully this was helpful and You can start playing with it Like I said, there's a link below to sign up if you want to try out the invoice ninja They have a free plan where it cost you nothing no credit card needed to go start jumping on our website and Playing with some of the cool features there. 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