 One of the important aspects when you're setting up your business is figuring out how you're going to collect money from your clients The simple way is you know, we mail invoices, but there's got to be a way for them to get the proposals over Pay deposits and just in general how the money gets collected There's really an important aspect of it because once you've figured out all the other Fun part about starting a business and the business model you're going to use and the product or services You're going to sell and processes and procedures and everything you put into a business This is that collection side and it's something that even I have over the time of being in business since 2003 I've changed to a lot of payment systems. I've looked at a lot of systems and Right now this is where we're at in 2019 I figured why not share some of my experience and maybe it will help you with some of this struggle of Figuring out how to collect money from clients now. We have two different systems. We use We're using Stripe on the back end for collecting. We also use PayPal So those are the two ways we take in money for that. Of course, we have companies that we're here in the US Where they mail us checks a lot That's actually still probably the largest amount of our dollars come in through physical mail and checks That's the way a lot of our local businesses like to do business with us And we're fine with that, you know, it makes a mega trip to the bank deposit Those are kind of obvious ones a stripe. We switch to this year. I really like stripe I'm gonna share some of the experience I've had with that. It's been very good and PayPal is nice PayPal is just really convenient for ways to get people who just need to send you a few dollars and things like that and When you have a PayPal business account using PayPal as your back-end business account, not bad So we have a PayPal business account and we have our standard local We actually use a credit union. We use that as our bank account for standard banking And that's all the back ends us. Let's talk about how that money gets there and some of that process and procedure So invoice ninja, we're gonna cover in a second But this is our primary methodology that we send out invoices to all of our regular clients but we offer consulting via YouTube and That has been a learning experience as well Like I'm always looking for easier ways for clients to find time book us and pay us online and we were sending him invoice ninja Invoices out and we realized because a lot of these are one-offs It's creating a lot more customers and we already have 6,500 customers and invoice ninja and we was like well Do we want to keep adding these people to that customers because a lot of them are one-offs wanted a half-hour an hour of consulting to get Some tasks done or needed some help with a small project, but those clients were using the you can book me You can book dot me system. It actually is really nice this one We looked at a few different ones one of the things I liked about this is it didn't bug me about the way it wanted Permissions and the permission problem was some of them wanted full access to like my Google account to link to it And I'm like no I only want them to see a calendar and share a calendar with them I didn't understand them wanting full access I guess some of them do because they want to be able to send emails on your behalf and everything else as You in your Google account or whatever account you link to it And I decided not to because we do use G speed on the back end this only wanted calendar permission That was the first thing that made me happy The service is relatively cheap and it's an easy way for people to book us Now you can see the booking up here. It's Lawrence systems dot you can book dot me But that's not how we actually do it the our process and intake procedure that sometimes people choose not to follow Is you go to our contact page you fill a form out we read what you are requesting in a form We will email you back with a link if it's something we can do or sometimes you say you've asked for something That's beyond the scope of our services we offer so I do recommend before you book and pay us because we have this You have to pay us for the booking make sure something we can do but people are strange and we'll just send us money sometimes and it becomes a confusion This is what it looks like embedded in our website We call it schedule human interaction and you can general support with Lawrence systems one hour half hour And we set the prices in here We were very open about how much we charge for things because I Disliked companies that try to hide prices for everything we do custom quotes when it's something not just hourly But some people I just want 30 minutes of your time Well, no problem We have a fee for that because that's a when you book a time slot and we like to be very upfront about it because that's that was a Lot of the questions we were getting before is how much is it for 30 minutes your time I'm like, well, let's just answer that question and put it on there I don't like to be opaque about any of the ways we run our business, but you can go in here and you can book Pick the time slot that you want 30 minutes first name last name What would you like help with and we have you reiterate Basically after even after the contact form just to reiterate Well, exactly what the task is that you want us to do you put your credit card in send us the bookings We send a confirmation and done it is odd to me the number of people that want to call us and just read us a credit card Over the phone. We don't do that. We don't support that We make you go through a system by which you fill out forms and things like that You can't just call us with a credit card over the phone not not the way we do it So that's the you can book me system and this is going to stripe on the back end so that's That's this particular system and maybe your business doesn't do this But this was kind of an easy way for us to sell time slots Now there is an integration that I'm not using but you can actually have the you can book me clients auto Generate with a Zapier integration into an invoice ninja and have it generate the same client data and fill it all out In invoice ninja, we just didn't really see the need to do it there We figured we just do it this way because our one-offs I'm gonna close this and now we'll jump into invoice ninja So invoice into what is it? It is open-source invoicing and despite someone angry commenters on some of the other videos It's open source, but that doesn't mean you get the hosting for free Someone says it's not free because they charge for hosting kind of their business model But you can have all the software and host it yourself, which is what we're doing So I'll jump over here pricing. This is what their pricing is as of July of 2019 They have their free forever plan ninja pro plan enterprise plan And if you host it yourself you essentially are getting the enterprise plan because you get every feature. There's no Nothing, there's nothing you don't get when you get the Self-hosted version all the features are there as long as you have it up to date But if you host it yourself think about that if you're trying to save $12 a month You have to set up your own mail server and all the functions around it and make sure you did the security Right for your site and then you're on your own for updating the source code and the site So there's all the things that you should be a good sys admin to do I have a lot of freelance friends some designer friends and some consulting friends that you know They're not techies so to speak and as far as back-end or DevOps, so they choose this and they've been really happy with the Version on here just like a $8 a month a lot of them are like, you know independent I have a couple independent artist friends and they're like, yeah, this is easy to quickly send out invoices So you check them out. I do have an offer code for them. Don't have to use it But you know, hey, whatever it helps channel out and lets them know that I've talked to the developers quite a bit And they're amazing people great I've like as I can go through history and I go in-depth on the system of how much I love it And they're still using it since we switched to it about a year and a half ago This all you gotta do is change.com.org if you're wondering because some people said hey Where is the free version? It's right here and they even have a whole guide on how to set up the self-hosting They have great documentation for how the API works dev guide has integrations work and it's all on github So when you hit download you can download all the source code right away and or go on to their github and See all the source changes. I love companies doing this in the public. It's being very actively developed They are working on the back end of kind of like a code refactor of getting a new version set up So there's lots of active development on here and it's been great Now let's get into actual invoice ninja itself and I'm going to show you how it looks in the back end here for our stripe This is our test data So this is the invoice ninja interface in least this is where most of our clients up But this particular system is our demo system. So in case you're wondering you're not seeing any real client information here Do we cheat them and how great law firm? This law firm is the fake law firm and but it is a real address. That's big beaver road I think that actually I pulled up a Tim Hortons There's just some amusement because we have a road called big beaver here that is at exit 69 Equipping childish and get back to the topic You can look that up though So do we cheap and how was there's our address it nicely embeds a map and everything else So if we have to do directions to that particular client We can pretty cool And let's walk through the process of how we extract money from clients and how we give quotes and how they pay us Because that's what we're here for but we're gonna start with let's give them a quote for something new quote And let's do data drops because it's easy and I have a template in here for it So data data network drops real basic, you know, you can set products up in all that I go in depth on the whole thing By the way, it's been up the free version if you want to test any this out and just play with it I highly recommend it. They have that free version. It does not require credit card on her site So if you're just curious and you're like, I don't know if I should sign up Use a fake email address if you're so concerned with it But they never spam or send me junk mail or anything and I signed up with my real address And it's not because they know me. They just aren't spammers So sign up with an email address and you can play with the system yourself hands-on without even having to download the code And like I said, it's gonna well when you get the free version. It is a little a few features are disabled They have the comparisons on our versus the self-hosted one where everything's on so back to this. So here is the Install network drops wall fish tested plated and this is what it looks like when we start drawing up the quote This is actually because you can customize the invoices. This is what our invoices look like We have them custom, you know, give it your logo on there Kind of like the keep the theme of the orange. We like orange. So it's got the client name that way and a little right Here's the quote. Let's update this quote. We're gonna say They needed five data drops. So, you know, and this is a common call we get We get a call for infrastructure and we have some pricing for installing data drops And we go out look at the look at the job or sometimes are just really simple Or we have a lot of what referred to as move ad change work with existing clients And that's what this would be, you know, your client say, hey We just hired two more people but we realized we don't have network drops where those two people are gonna go So we'll go put this here partial deposit. That's frequently a thing in here. So we're gonna go 400 bucks partial deposit and just like that Partial do total do it it generates the invoice now emailing the quote Just hit email Customize it. I like to customize it and they use out they have a whole lot and there's a lot of documentation here So a quote from account so you can see what looks like new quote 012 from lts demo invoicing because it has our company name in here You know Or data drops. I like to do this because that becomes part of the email header How are you seeing there and we have a different wording that we use but it's kind of cool It's going to send them the email with an attachment With a pdf attachment so they can see it but they get to click the link and go into their client portal which i'm going to get to here And uh So it's pretty straightforward, but if they go in the client portal, you get to see if they view the code So we're actually going to help mark it as sent. I'm not going to actually send the email Those email addresses don't exist at Dewey Chapin house. So you wouldn't be able to see it Now we're going to go view in portal so You can get their view. I'm opening an incognito window So we see it exactly as a client like not logged in You can put passwords in the client portal. You just do that in a custom file. It's really easy to do So now Here is what that looks like to them So they can see quotes sent to them and this is actually the whole client portal overall So they can see the quotes invoices documents payments payment methods They can keep payment methods on file and that's part of the stripe integration We'll get to in a second But we send a quote. This is what it looks like they go that looks good to me. I approve Now the approval process is only partial here The approval process is the first step the next step is paying because there's a deposit on this If there wasn't it would just be a converted a quote and converted over to the invoice style So we're gonna go ahead and say Pay with they can pay with a new card and it'll bring them up to put a new card in But they can keep cards on file and this is where the stripe integration comes in So pay with the visa card on file and we've got all fake demo numbers in this So it goes through the process and pretends to pay and so you can walk through it So now they've done that Successfully applied payment awesome. So now they have This invoice actually I did this twice because I was playing with it earlier So now they actually have two of them for the same amount because I only sent one But this is the one they approved. So there are two of them in here That's what looks like on their side. We're gonna get this out of the way And we'll go ahead and just refresh this page You see how it's converted now, please note I right clicked on this portal and each person gets their own link So you can see which one they viewed so if you emailed the quote to multiple multiple people that you can see Who viewed it and who did it a few little miles over here viewed on july 11th This person just sent not viewed so there's no activity on there And if we go to view the client here, we look at the activity When you scroll down the activity, you can see uh, Dewey here in child viewed invoice here Do you join entered payment and gives you a payment reference? For this to let me know they entered a $400 payment And away we go and you can see I've played with this over time going back and forth with the payment system on it You can go to payments and see how the money came in and the source of the payment they've paid with visa on file So that's all cool And let's look over at the invoice So the invoices are partially paid so amount and balances 400 So now we know, you know, can you get started on a project? We know we got the money It came in because we can confirm the payment here And by the way, all this is sending me an email for each step of the way You can choose it So it notifies you when someone approves the quote when someone pays for the deposit Uh, which is of course our cue to go all right, it's paid and get started And when you set this up, there's setting so you can set so whoever's sending it Because one of the ways we do things here at Lawrence systems is Each one of our staff sends out their own quotes and Follows up on their own projects that way when I send like Corey to do a lot of the wiring jobs He goes bids it quotes it sends it Email comes on his phone I'm completely out of the loop on the process That's an important part about the business is not having any barriers where Unless it's some larger approval amounts and there's there's limits I have set that I that Corey knows that say hey if it's this much I want to review it Or I in general like him to have one of the other staff review the larger quotes But for small jobs like data data drops that are just common Move ad change orders that come in Gets the call puts it in there Whatever the rules are for the deposit and terms for that particular client puts it in and Corey's going to get all the emails on his Email account to say all right they approved and then he schedules the date to get the work done Really straightforward and simple and that's one of the reasons we like it Now at the end of it all once we're done We're going to go ahead and You know send the invoice to him in his final balance and just an email at the invoice and they can pay the final balance So email invoice But I'm actually hit save invoice because that's actually going to do it So they can go back to their dashboard and final pay it once the work is done Let's come back over to client dashboard and show you how that looks again So partial they can click on the invoice. We'll click on this one the 13 one. I think it's the one we just did And we'll enter a new card to show you how that looks And we'll put in a credit card number with an expiration date of Now this is a demo account card number You can do this and because our stripe for this because this is our demo account It's in there now. This is what's kind of cool is it gives them the option to save this card on file With us. So we'll go ahead and pay now and save the card on file. So pay now $400 Oh, it was declined In test mode, but using non-test card. That's uh interesting That is listed as a test card that period on there Well, let's try this card. I'm curious All right successfully applied payment on there now the clients can do With the payment methods they can see because I didn't save that one you can I have a credit card on file right here Now the other payment options that it doesn't let me unlock this I believe in the demo mode are the a ch So we have that enabled ours too because it also stripes supports doing bank transfers And they can update and have all this information on file And then they can say auto bill payment method and then we can set up auto billing for them Let's be over to that because that's the other side of Important aspect is what we have an msp we have recurring Invoicing we do for clients and this is how that method is handled We go in here We let the clients up a payment method and we do make sure there's a password on portals for that Let's go actually and view this client And we're gonna hit view in stripe To bring you to the stripe page now It actually takes me striping is an error when I do this because it says hey this client is in test mode So I just brought you to what the stripe page looks like. This is what we get to see This is an important aspect is how token billing works with stripe So with stripe and token billing We did not have the credit card the credit card did not pass through our hands That is an important aspect stripe handles that they've done the integration proper with invoice engine to hand it off to stripe To do the payment and then hold on to it for tokenized billing So this keeps you out of the middle of it I mean, you'll obviously there's still the potential somewhere to break into our system and hijack it and Change where the payment pages were but they wouldn't get existing credit card numbers because all's that we can see is the Last couple digits of the card number and it has a fingerprint unique ID that's created for it Their postal code whether or not it packed past the cvc or zip check And we can remove cards for them So if the client doesn't want to manage it themselves or just as keep take that card off file We can go in here and delete it Um, if they have an a ch that shows up in here as well And I think it's kind of nice right here's how we can add it for them Of if they needed help doing it But the nice thing is with invoice engine and the integration stripe It'll let them add all their bank account and it does the bank account verification where it puts in stripe handles this part where it puts into two deposits and then they go back to their client portal and From there they will Go and do those verifications and confirm that is their bank account and in fact they own it So it's actually really a convenient form and once they do that they can set up the billing for it. Now. Let's go over and Close too many windows getting open Let's look at what we do for like recurring billing So go over here and we'll do a new recurring invoice Now this is where You can choose how they want to do it and this is an important aspect You want them to have to opt in or opt out of it. So Please arrange this with your client. Don't just bill them and tell them to do it You know, you work it out with them how you want to do the billing and Put that information in there so like let's just put I have a template It's up for msp workstation what we're going to do unit cost And we'll just say it's you know 50 bucks a month for this services and you have five workstations There's your 250 a month that we would bill you You Start date end date use client terms for the due date for it Where we'd all even let's pretend we've already arranged for the client They want to do this and this will allow it to actually once they go through here and check the box when we do this We're going to mark ready yep All right, and it's going to it's pending and we've the system is actually set to automatically do it So it'll say send on july 11th It's actually going to send it an hour I was going to go fire this off and send out that invoice to them and then when they go over to the portals Which we're going to go over here and refresh because if we weren't well, let's click on invoice That'll be enough to refresh it now. They got this recurring invoice option And they can enable or disable autobill. This is the opt-in and out So it's currently enabled and they have a payment method on file So it'll automatically Build them and if we make any adjustments to this We always notify the clients and they still get this as an attachment as an email With the PDF attachment so they can see the invoice But at any time they can go into their client portal and Enable or disable automatic payment format or update the payment method on file And then the system's going to notify us for it So this whole workflow works really well for us. It's worked well for our clients Just making life easier is the goal for a lot of this as a workflow And other side notes about the client portal they can come see the history of it So this helps so much with reconciliation having clients have that portal and Being able to reconcile things without bugging me So probably a great way I would say to do that So I it's it's important that way they would know what was paid and what wasn't paid And that sometimes comes as a confusion to people But the other advantage of this and the of being able to have my staff quickly create invoices Is and we're gonna actually go back over to recurring invoices I don't want this to go out. So I'm going to delete it Delete recurring invoice. Are you sure? Absolutely. I don't want a bunch of Notices going out to fake email addresses with invoice and payment options But we do the invoicing really fast like this So we're going to take another client real quick like bob here and Just kind of walk you through the same thing. So we're going to send an invoice to bob And this is what also allows us to enter it past when we're doing this So fixed outlook problem and we don't do just msp We have a lot of very fixed clients As a matter of fact, we have a law firm that we've tried to get on msp numerous times We even said it would save them money But instead so far this year they've spent seven thousand dollars in support fees And by the way, each of their support fees are usually like this Half hour or We're nice to them because they're they're really easy problems All the time we've done quarter billings We usually do half hour billing minimum, but we're nice to them. We'll do a quarter billing And this is a lot of what we do fixed outlook. Whatever you do, you know deleted too many emails. This is the problem with lawyers Any emails funny that you can't get a lawyer to put you on retainer, but we like them as a client We're just always we're amazed at how much they spend with us for like you could save money We're we're being as honest as possible But they're not ready for that But this is what we do to quickly email an invoice as a client And because this system is so simple like that and for each person logged in I can look at all of my texts and see what invoices were sent out how they were sent out And this whole process of ease of payment for people makes it a lot easier Now sometimes we do it a little bit different We have clients that we know don't like paying invoices after it works done And you can set terms in there like they must pay up front and we'll go no problem I will certainly help you What do you want me to do and we'll do this and we'll fire off the invoice and we'll let them know They have to pay it as soon as they pay it. It's done. So this whole system like I said, it's really Works really well. It's really smooth. The stripe integration is nice being able to manage your clients in the stripe dashboard To see what they have on file Without having to have their credit card number. That's the important part. So you're not just collecting I don't have this big collection. So in the terms of like a data breach, which is always a worst case scenario But you hope never happens, but you always should plan for Um Making sure that you aren't the one in possession of any more data than you need I think it's hugely important is one of the reasons we chose like the stripe system Like I said, too, you can integrate PayPal when you're setting up the payment gateways in here and we did that too So some people go, I just like paying things out of PayPal. That's fine What it does when they send an invoice out to someone and they want to pay it and there's PayPal involved Let me bring up an invoice When they go to pay it it says master card on file of credit card It'll actually show two more Well one because the stripe it'll say set up bank a ch and the other options to just pay with PayPal And it'll just land on the PayPal page for them to log into their PayPal portal and it does the same thing But that I know of there's no easy way. There's no integration Currently with PayPal to do any of the recurring payments and hold the card on file like there is with stripe Uh, they actually when you're setting up the payment gateway and invoice ninja over here And we go to the online payments We pay stripe brain tree card lists is when you're doing the token billing Those are the current supportive ones for that. Did I know a PayPal doesn't have an option for it? But PayPal owns brain tree and I think that's why there's not a PayPal option So because they own brain tree instead of doing it to PayPal you just use it in your brain tree account So assuming that side goes and there are options In check legalities of this but you can add fees if you want So you can set up a fee when they use certain types of payment because maybe there's a Gateway or origination fee or something that you want to add to there. It does have that option there. Oh, we don't do it nature of our businesses We we don't add like an extra fee to use credit card versus mailing a check to us That seems like it would be I mean, yes, there is a fee associated with stripe. There are fees But for the most part, I don't see we don't pass that Directly along to the client as like a line item because mailing us a check would slow the process down and So I'm gonna go I'm gonna save money doing the check and that would just slow the whole thing down to be a pain So we just it's worked into our margin. It's the way that's fixed Oh, let's give an overview of how we use invoice inshia to collect money and you know And of course on the side, uh, you can book me and all that goes into the stripe and PayPal But the whole process is, you know, makes us easy to interact with and I'm going to be mailing to these videos Who people email me randomly going I have my credit card number or calling in or You know because uh, some people we meet on youtube are a little strange They sometimes call us to just want to start reading a credit card number to get going with that sound like I appreciate the excitement There's a process. Uh, fill the form out We'll send you a link you can pay online and these are the ways that you'll pay online So if you're going to be a recurring customer, we'll get you set up in invoice engine You'll be on the recurring invoice program. If you're one off customer, you're more likely to go through You can book me just for that service But some of the starts with you can book me they become recurring customers that we then go in And add invoice inshia because we have a recurring engagement with them Or they end up signing up for one of our managed service plans. Uh, and we take everyone from there But like I said, it's important that you have easy ways To interact with your clients and to collect payments, uh, because payments are what keeps the business blood flowing All right, thanks, and uh, I'll leave links to all You know everything I talked about I have no offer codes for you can book me your stripe I do have an affiliate link if you want to sign up with it for invoice ninja But it's free and all it really does is let them know Uh, if you signed up via one of my videos and if you buy they cost me a small They're only charging $12 a month. It's not it's not that much money that I get from it But it is appreciated anything to help out the channel. All right, thanks Thanks for watching if you like this video Give it a thumbs up if you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content Hit that subscribe button and the bell icon and maybe youtube will send you a notice when we post If you want to hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video head over to laurencesystems.com Where we offer both business it services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you Want to throw at us? Also, if you want to carry on the discussion further head over to forums.laurencesystems.com where we can keep the conversation going And if you want to help the channel out in other ways we offer affiliate links below Which offer discounts for you and a small cut for us that does help fund this channel And once again, thanks again for watching this video and see you next time