 All right, so we had our talk about doing invoicing, a little lunch table. If you didn't see it, I can leave a link to that in the description. Where we just kind of talk about how we do invoicing and one of my policies was to keep it simple. Now we don't issue a bunch of tickets. We don't have a cumbersome ticketing system. And the reason for that is I wanted to keep it as direct as possible. And this is one of those philosophies I've had about keeping things simple. I've worked in corporate IT. We currently are more of a small business IT firm, which means most of our clients have less than 20 workstations that would make up the majority of the businesses that we service. We have roughly 300 clients that we service. Only a handful of those clients are MSP. Some of those have a lot more than 20 computers that are under MSP. But there's a lot of what they refer to as break fix non-contract work in between. And it's mostly what this workflow covers, but I will mention the MSP in this. Now having a clear process helps a lot. And so I put together a little flow chart so you guys can kind of see the process. And how we solve the issues. Okay, let me move my head out of the way here. So the process starts off with issue to solve. However they contact us, email and phones pretty much the primary ways, once in a while, Facebook messages. Are they a current client? Add them to the system. Like I said, this is not a sales process. This is a workflow process. For businesses, they're generally like an engagement of will you do IT, come and assess our systems? That's a different sales and onboarding process. But this is for the one-off. So we get a lot of these small mom and pop shops that just need us to get something fixed for them. So current client, add them to the system. If they're not, go ahead and jump to the client page. And we're gonna walk you through the actual how we create the invoice next after we went through this workflow. So can the work be done remotely? This is a stopping point for some of them. If we can't just fix it remotely because they need you to come onsite, there's flames shooting out of the computer, whatever it is. So nothing turns on. That's gonna be an onsite. We do a lot of camera work and wiring and infrastructure work. That is a gather info callback with schedule. And we use a combination of things. We'll throw that message over in Slack. We'll figure out who that belongs to and get them. We use Google Calendar internally. We have G Suite and we'll set the appointment with the client. We call the client back with the appointment, send an email confirmation via a G Suite time in the calendar booking with what time we're gonna be there. Done. It keeps it really simple and we can put that in for people and stack up their workflow that way. We can all see each other's calendar so we know schedule, we keep everything in there. That becomes really easy to do. So you can look at see who's where, maybe who's even closer to take that job. But that's kind of what we take the process offline for that and just, it happens really fast. We book it right away and figure out where we can fit them in. All right, so let's go on for the internal process. So yes, it can be done remotely which does follow the majority of the work we do. Are they a managed client? Now this is where if they have one of our managed clients, we know who they are, they're in a list. We just jump right into, is that work in scope? And this depends on the managed agreement they have. We'll get into every detail of it. Basically, most things are gonna be in scope for a managed client. In case you have a call here for things that are just, that's not in scope for the way their workflow is set up. And we do have some special contracts that are really where more things are in scope. That being said, if it's nothing else to do, like it's in scope, that is called an Outlook problem which is my, I hate Outlook, but there's a lot of hate because it does create a lot of invoices. We just jump right into doing the work. Their workflow from here to here is straight down. So issues solved, current client, can work be done remotely, managed clients, MSP done. It just goes really straight through and it allows us a service and give them priority because there's no hiccups. They just, the workflow goes right away for any of the managed clients. We always have remote access set up on their computers. We just take control of the computer, click on whatever it is they need clicked on. And most of the problems in general are solved within five minutes. And that workflow works really well for us. They called us, we said, what's the issue? We see their computer, we click it, say yes, done. That's it. We've, so many people as you know, you always hear IT people complaining about dealing with some of the end users, but there is a lot of things we have people that just don't click on stuff. So getting that problem solved fast, so you're out of the way and back to whatever you were doing or solving other problems. So not managed client, that's where it gets more interesting. So create a draft invoice. Does a client have a payment history? Collect based on needs. This little process is, seems a little bit more complicated than it is. Basically, we have people that we know are opinion about to get paid from or we have special terms in here with you must prepay. So you kind of make a guess and all right, we're gonna have to create at least a one hour invoice before I even look at it. And you've got to pay me upfront. We just have a handful of those people that and you all know them. We kind of have fired them as customers. That's why we always make sure they pay upfront because we just know they're gonna pay and sometimes they argue and we just say, that's fine, you can argue. You're not gonna win. We won't do the work unless you pay us because we know that you don't like to pay. So there's only a handful of those clients that this doesn't come up too often. But if it's a new client, we're doing it remotely and we do a lot of that too where people call us out of state to fix a free NAS or PF cent set up. I have no recourse if I don't get the money upfront. If you hang up and I've did the work, then that's it. So those clients, if they're far away, also go on the, you're usually new unless we have some longer term relationship. We have a few out of state clients that have working relationship that we know that they have no problem paying their bills. So we just bill them as needed and they pay within the terms. Now, lots of these businesses manufacturing use in Net30 and we just invoice Net30, done, do the work. So both ways, whether we get the money upfront or we did that, we do the work and then we email the invoice and we're back to whatever we're doing. So the process flow is pretty straightforward here. It's really simple. And I'm gonna show you how that works in hands-on next. All right, so I got my test client which we call McTestFace in our system. We use this for doing the demos like this or whenever we're gonna try an idea in the system and we're gonna go ahead and once you're on the client page we pulled it up and you can see things like payment terms in Net15. If we put any private notes in here, that would just show up here. So if you edit this client, and let's throw some notes in here, get money first. And we can set them to like Net zero, save. You can see get money first shows up right here. So if there's some of those notes, those may go win some of the client files. Those are important, but these are ways we can right away say, okay, this is a client that we know we gotta collect from ahead of time. So now we're gonna go over to new invoice, fills in the client information and then we can start filling this in. Has default rates for the clients, default rates for the product or service, fills in at 120 but obviously we can just rate type that to whatever the rate is that we've negotiated with them. And then we just start being, you know, fixed. But I'll just use and of course reset printer. So that's way too popular. Everyone needs their printer reset all the time. We have a client that every now and then just forgets how to print and delete things out of the print queue or they manage to set the printer offline. Those are those little frequent problems. And then we can bill in increments here. I can say 0.25, 0.5, however you want to do this. The frequent clients that we know real well, this is common for us to bill in quarter increments when we have an engagement with them. Cause it's easy. It's simple for them and so many of the phone calls cause we keep persistent remote access. We were only on a phone for less than six minutes. So we have a minimum that we bill in for this and those add up. We have a lot of these little $30 invoices and from a strategy it works. It works for the client cause they got something to solve quickly without spending a lot of money and that and we're always, like I said before, we're pushing them to be managed where they don't have, they can just call us and fix these problems. We'll also, for larger companies, fix that looks for the person's name we'll put in here. So in case it goes to a specific person, that way we can let the managers look at these and they have, they've go, wow, this particular person seems to have that same problem every week. Like yeah, they forget their password all the time. And these are things that we try to suggest this to some of the clients when it comes to the break fix alliance. This is how it ends up going and it's up to the management to decide if they want that person to constantly be a source of why they need the things fixed. Okay, now auto at the bottom, it's generating this invoice and away we go. Now this is where if they wanted to collect the money upfront, we can literally just click email invoice, send email. And what this is gonna do is they can actually pay this and if they pay it, I'll show you where that shows up here. So I'm gonna send this email, send the invoice. There's like a pause here when this is actually on purpose. This pause is waiting for verification that the email was sent contacting the mail server. That noise was the email arriving in my test inbox I set up for this. And this is what the client sees. They get this invoice, we can go ahead and click pay now, it's gonna take them over to PayPal, they can pay the bill and we will see it marked paid in the system and then we do the work. So this is if we have to collect ahead of time. This workflow doesn't require anyone but the single technician. So the technician from start to finish has taken the call, got the person in the system, sent them the bill for whatever they agreed upon amount is here. Give me 30 bucks and we'll fix the problem you're having, boom, done, away we go. It's really simple. Now the other thing you can do, because this invoice is now sent, if we add more on again after an invoice was paid, the invoice, instead of having just a balance due, it'll show a payment of 30 but then if we add another, we'll put it in here like this, some other thing. And that's 120. If they were already paid the 30, it would only, it would show the 30 paid in the next balance due so you can update an invoice that easily, send it again. I'm actually just gonna hit save invoice. And now the invoice were reflect in that client portal, which I can go over here. Now the invoice has been updated. I didn't hit pay the first time I didn't complete the payment because I didn't feel like doing for testing but now the client always sees the last version of the invoice. So that's an important distinction just so you know they always see the last version of it but one thing you can do here is you can view an invoice history and see each version of this invoice. So as we've been going through and saving it while we were working, here's the one we have here and here's the latest one. And because I hit email in between, it also has the updated ones for each time. So you can look at the different versions of the invoice if you need to go back on there. Go back to edit and it stays in that it's the most current one. So it's really simple how the workflow goes and we send them the invoice and it gets done. It's not complicated and that's part of the process. This creates a very quick flow of then the, whoops, and the invoice gets paid right away and let me just kind of show you how the client can view that. So we go back over here to view client and well let's actually mark the invoice pages so that you can see what it looks like and this is how they would see it over here. If I would have, it didn't mean why don't you because I marked it paid but a transaction reference would be however they paid PayPal is our favorite, well easy way to do it for the online people but they're able to put a PayPal entry, they can see that the transaction is completed and this gives a single technician an easy way to follow through with these clients and be able to build this out. It's one of those things that keeps it really simple and that's like I said, always my goal with the invoicing is from start to finish, we start with, we're gonna start a new invoice for this client, start talking about what we're gonna do and a lot of times it's just remote hourly. Start putting some stuff in, we save it as draft, this is the most common workflow that we have and then we just solve the problem and type in what we did, email invoice done. You can see how that workflow done. This allows us to generate a invoices rather fast, it's effective and the only thing that we do a little bit different probably is for a workflow is when we create these invoices we're gonna leave them as draft for a little while because if you think you solved the problem because the person says, oh, you fixed it, you clicked on it, we will hold off on emailing invoices. This is for our clients that we have regular engagements with we may hold off on emailing it for about an hour or so and invoice injection makes this really easy because you can go over here to invoices and look at the draft invoice list and then hit send on all the draft ones once you know they're complete but usually the technicians take care of themselves. I usually just wake, you already know how that goes, you hang up the phone and then the phone rings like two minutes later. Oh, I have one more question. We'll kind of just keep the clock running on that. Now the way we get them connected is we use screen connect and we have that right on our site so they go here, click on remote support, get started but for all the managed clients or clients that we keep regular engagements with we have a self-hosted version of screen connected and we just leave them connected. And it's generally our rule to leave the unless a client implicit request that we leave the remote sessions on it. You know, we're clear about it. We're gonna leave a remote tool on there. It logs and has a journal for all the times that people are connected but it's like I said, it's really simple that workflow for us for doing invoicing, getting people connected and a lot of times we'll even make sure they get connected before we start the whole session and I can pull this up and screen connect. So when we're in screen connect and I filtered out and have to blur out some of the details of the client here but what you're seeing is we know who's logged in and this is the server for one of our business clients. We know what version server they're running. We know the detail of the processor. A lot of times you will have people get connected right away and the reason for them getting connected is this just answers a bunch of questions for us right away. I haven't blurred out but you can even see the BIOS serial number. We can see the service tag and like this Dell server that gets pulled as soon as they get connected and load the screen connect software. So sometimes when they're having some type of workstation problem, this information is really handy. We don't have to look and see what processor they have. We go, okay, this computer is running slow but it's also a slow computer. So these kind of answers get picked up right away with screen connect so we can kind of, you know, have an each friend. Like I said, this is more of the break fix clients because people who are on managed services, we have them all on the, when I've done a review of this, the SolarWinds dashboard, we know all the assets on those. So it's very clear and there's not that fuzziness to it but I just want to give that quick overview with kind of the hands-on for invoicing. It's really as simple as I said here, we just go in, create the client, create the client invoice, do the listing out of the work we did. And this is the same thing like when Corey talked about when he goes out, he, we do, you know, onsite, you know, onsite hourly, whatever that engagement is for those clients, whatever the rate is for that particular client, we fill it out, he types in what he did, done. Just goes out and does it or, you know, for example, he does it from home. He doesn't have to come into the office to do these things is the way the portal works is get out there. And the point is that people get their work done very fast and the invoice gets fast to the customer and we can frequently get paid right away on these things which is of course really helpful. So the process and flow goes right away. So hopefully this was helpful and gives you kind of an idea of how we work internally and why we don't fill out really convoluted ticket systems. I understand the need for ticket systems, I get it. Like I like dashboards, I love also, I love to pinpoint a lot of stats on things but I can also just go through and look at descriptions and I can look at work history and a client based on the descriptions that was put in so we know what was solved. And this allows us to work fast without having this convoluted process all the time that burdens people. Cause this is a lot of times I've seen large IT companies they just are so heavy doing it and they're got, you know, people ranting and complaining about it on Reddit and things like that or just the submins I know that hate their jobs are like, oh, the paperwork process and you end up like not getting a lot of work done because you've burdened them and then you get in trouble and yeah, you can kind of see where I'm going with this and if you work in IT you're probably nodding your head going, oh yeah, we got this really hard system and the same thing with your clients. If you force them into this they got to fill all these things out. We're actually working with a very large client with an internal IT team. They're contracting us to do stuff and they're having trouble getting their users to it but when we did the workflow ourselves and we're like, wow, if I'm a user I would just say I'll just grab the pen and paper cause you guys have a nine questions with a series of pull downs and then a series of checks boxes before they can fill the tick out and your goal is to try to get the client to answer or try to get your internal people to answer every question but it's just not an easy workflow and there's got to be a better way and this is what we try to focus on is making sure everything's very efficient. That's what keeps the clients really happy. They just, I don't see what you're doing with businesses. They just want to get back to work and anything that's, you know if they can't send on an email to get their proposal out you've now stopped work. So their interest isn't getting it working not wasting your time. You're not interested in wasting time so you can find a happy middle. We can all communicate like adults and a way to go and get it moving. So hopefully this was helpful. If you like to come in here, like and subscribe and let me know what you think.