 So I'm going to take a few minutes this morning to talk a little bit about business and specifically invoicing. So I have some invoices pulled up here on the screen. Now my background is working in IT for 22 years, but for a while I was the IT director, CTO, however you want to title me. I basically managed IT for a large Ford supplier in the supply chain management. So I had to make a lot of IT decisions and contractors and dealing with all the things related to that. I always appreciated simplistic invoices, not ones with lots of complicated line item abbreviated parts on them, so I was always confused about things. Either the invoice was clear or it wasn't. The scope of work should explain in detail because IT can be a very complicated thing. I need that scope of work to explain the details of things, but when it comes down to the invoice it needs to be simplistic and I need to understand what I'm paying for and what I'm getting so I can write the check. So I took that same concept when I started my business in 2003 and started making my invoices really simple and concise. So maybe a scope of work and engagement that gets me going with the client so we understand everything needs to be done and especially when it's a complicated build or task related to IT, but in the end we keep our invoicing very, very clean and simple. And for example, this right here is what it looks like for us to go install five CAD 5E drops. Then one phone line and reroute a CAD 5E line to reuse on a panel. They had a giant mess. We moved the mess around. There's a flat rate charger and as a two hour charge to clean up the mess. Now I keep all the rates out of here because they're not relevant. They're going to vary greatly by where you live and I almost look at them like the housing prices. If you're in a very well off area where everything else is, everything else is a lot more expensive, then your rates will reflect that. The rates are kind of a reflection of the area and it's like housing prices. There's a lot of variation in what you pay because cost of living and et cetera, et cetera. So I have the rates off of here, but you kind of get the idea of the simplicity of it. So here's what our remote service calls look like. Mailware, virus removal, root kit removal, load antivirus, remove someone wants to junkware and toolbars. One hour of labor, it was actually really simple. Testing it from a browser working property. They had a bunch of stupid browser plugins, but we ran through these. And once again, really simple invoice and they paid it. No problem. Here's what a managed one would look like. So here's our, we have a rate per workstation and we do a lot of these small businesses managed to client deals. So they only have three workstations and we gave them a rate per month to manage these workstations. We keep it very clean as to what we're applying. So we have persistent remote workstation access by Lawrence Technologies. That is, we load our remote software and we're very clear and up front about that. That way when they call us, which very quick for us to service. We offer patch management, antivirus daily updates and web filtering, keeping all the browsers up to date. Chrome, Firefox, Adobe Flash, and Java. Monitor the hard drive status. They also have backups from us. We just back up their server and keep full 20 days of retention on site and off site. And then we daily monitor, make sure these backups are working. We do verifications on them. We have our whole process for this, but they don't really care about the details. I want to make sure that we're doing it. They know it's the line item on the bill and says we're doing it. Then our billable services, remote support build in 15 minute increments. Problems solve under 15 minutes are free. And this is part of our hybrid system that we sell to a lot of small businesses that don't really want the expense of a full managed service. It's not really in the budget for them, but they want to be able to call someone and say my printer doesn't work and have us fix it. So we have a monthly fee we attach and most of the problems we solve in less than 15 minutes are not billed. Provided those problems don't require any hardware or us to visit them on site, which the majority of them are they call us the printer's not printing or outlook is not responding for whatever reason. And we remove it. We have a client that randomly out of the 17 workstations they have, one of the plugins for outlook that's for the thing they use just breaks. We have got it down to a science in less than a minute. We can remove and restart that plugin and fix outlook. Those the clients happy. They're not billed for those random occurrences that occur. We get an overall good picture of their health of their network because we're keeping everything up to date and it works out good for everybody. Then we do have an onsite service call. So if we come out, there's a bill for that. But like I said, this is a really simple for our managed services of how easy we make it for our clients. We try to keep the billing down to one page. Now, here's a much bigger job, but you can see there's still not a lot on here. So we needed to install 122 cat six drops from the terminal room to the workstations and install a customer provided Ruckus access point. You know, then we installed test and label 122 plates and keystones, clear the equipment from the previous room walls. They actually had a dead server room that we repurposed. All the wires were cut. So we actually got to rip everything off the wall. It was actually pretty easy. We took down the old board and installed a new one. It just we put a brand new fiberboard on and we didn't have to reuse anything which made everyone really happy because there really wasn't that much to do. In terms of that, and then we ran one fiber optic cable to the D mark for AT&T to the com room. And these are our larger projects. I mean, this was in the $20,000 range for all the work, but you can see one single invoice scope of work and building layout was part of the back end, which planned this. We had an entire blueprint of the building. We labeled out where they wanted everything. We worked with the general contractor because this was a during construction and all this was put in while they were building up the building, while gutting and remodeling an existing building. But when it comes down to the invoice, the client had no problem paying it. They were clear. We had all the engagement worked out and now this one short, almost half page invoice is almost $20,000 worth of things that were done. So you kind of get the ideas. I love keeping things really simple. It just makes everything a lot easier. Now, some clients do like detail. This client loves detail and they lot everything we did while we were there documenting so we don't have a problem with that. And as you notice, we kind of keep our system free form. So this was done across five hours of time there, setting up new computers. They had them drive to Micro Center and we told them that's all billable and they didn't do any planning. They just bought stuff and asked us to come out and do it. We don't mind break fixed clients like that. We end up sometimes they're kind of unpredictable occasionally because they call us and like, Hey, we got new computers. We'll be here tomorrow. Can you come in the next day and install them? We say sure. And we're kind of don't know because everything's kind of haphazard there. How many hours it'll be, but the clients find just to pay whatever. We have an hourly rate. They're aware of it and they're fine to pay it and make all this happen. So I just want to go over this though because it's a question I get people asking about their starter business. How do I do invoicing? Keep it simple. Make sure you have clear scopes of work. So the client and you have some documentation behind this to what you're doing. If it's necessary, it may not be some of our clients. We hardly have even a scope of work with them. It's kind of like just come out and do a thing, especially the ones we have long term relationships with, which you have a lot of car dealerships now and they don't even ask for detail. They just say come out. Here's we need 50 drops installed at this new wing of the building we did or come redo our mechanics bay. They just put little post it notes on the wall. That's that's the documentation and we know where the com room is. It's not that complicated. Sometimes people overthink it. Sometimes people overdo it and I'm all for the keep it simple. Just overall you'll find you have better interaction. There's a lot of clarity. When this arrives at the accounting office at whoever's going to pay your bill, the people in charge of that at the business. Even if it's a larger company, they look at it one page, not a multi page of what is all this stuff. It's clear. This is what we came here to do. That's what we did and it was simple for them to read. So they pay it if they have questions. They can call us. We keep notes behind the scenes, you know, as we need them. But keeping your invoicing simple will make everyone's life easier and hopefully get your bills paid faster, which I'm actually pretty shocked right now. We have in this system that we're using over looking over the other side here offscreen 20,119 invoices. I've only ever had a couple people not pay me. We're fighting with one of them right now and they're a church that just doesn't like paying their bills and they have all kinds of issues. So we've got them and we've got one other guy. That's out of 20,000 invoices. So I complained about these people that owe us some money. But the other side of it is there's really not that many people for how much, along as I've been in business, I can only come up with a couple people that owe me money. Now that being said, it does add up all these people that owe me money and I'm looking at the numbers over here. So that is something you have to stay on top of. But having your invoicing system being very clear will help you in the long run and it helps everyone involved. The questions with the church, for example, is not about the invoice at all. It's everything of, we don't have the money right now and I'm not going to get into a rant about them, but they really, they're a mega church with the money. They certainly just find reasons of, they basically tell us every time we're there we're going to pay next week and we've been coming next week for three months. And we didn't want to get lawyers involved, but sometimes you have to do that in business to get your invoices collected, usually just a legal letter and knock on wood. I've never, ever in 20,000, 100,000 invoices, ever had anything go to court. Usually you just say the L word and people go, I guess I'll pay you and they don't even owe me that much money. So it's like they owe me a couple hundred dollars. That's it. And they've just, yeah, some people are like that. Anyways, before I get too far off topic, just if you have questions, if you have comments, if you're like, Tom, you're an idiot for doing this or you have some counter argument for why I do it this way and I'm not doing it right, let me know because I'm always interested. You know, I like, if I'm wrong, just tell me why I'm wrong. If you like the content here, like and subscribe. If you have some suggestions for improvement or anything like that, let me know. If you want some other business topics covered, email me, Tom at LawrentSystems.com. I've been trying to remember to put my email into description. I'm easy to get ahold of, easy to find. You can tweet me. You can message YouTube messaging. I really want to reply to all the messages. YouTube's not always easy to reply to all the messages because they kind of get lost in shuffle because I have so many of them coming in. It's not that I don't want to reply. It's that YouTube hasn't made it, the new update is better, but they haven't made it as good as I'd like it to be to reply to all the messages. And some things seem to end up in the clutter spam because I have so many spammers that want to comment on videos that they start. Yeah, that's a whole nother topic. They need to work on that. You know, I'm sure they're working on it. This is not an easy task to tackle. So once again, thanks for watching.