 So in this video, I want to share with you our philosophy for how we do our client quotes. And I'm of the keep it very simple. And this is just something I've seen played out quite a bit, because if the client can't make heads or tails of your quote, or you've thrown as much technical jargon in there as possible, because you think, well, I want to make sure they know every detail what I'm doing, I, yeah, that doesn't really work for me. And I generally find it doesn't work for clients. We've had them a lot of times going, can you make any heads or tails of this quote, and can you just give us one that makes sense? We did a wiring job where our quote was one page and their quote was seven pages, because they counted every little thing they did. And this goes just in general. You have to think like a business owner. Now we're dealing with mostly small businesses, so add that little piece to this equation. You may deal with some larger companies, or in an example might be we deal with IT departments of other companies, like when we do work for large corporate companies, they may want more detail in there because they care about which model fire while you're using, which model, any little detail is important to them. So this necessarily doesn't qualify to them. This is more about how we deal with the business owners. And I say that because with business owners, you're providing them a service and solution. That's the goal. And I think of it this way, and this is like my own logic applied to it. I got a guy that plows my lot for all the snow. We're here in the trade area. We get snow. I don't want to know how many ounces of salt he put out. He tells me a price to get my parking lot cleaned. I give him that price because I think it's a fair trade for what it takes to get my parking lot clean. I'm not going to compare ounces, brands of salt, and things like that because I don't care. It's not my details. Most business owners, same thing. They have an employee that needs a new workstation, and that's the example we're going to use today. They're not concerned with processor specs, hard drive specs. They're like, I need another salesperson to have a computer because we're hiring. And we are expanding the company. Make it happen, Tom. That's more like what we're going to get. Like I said, if you're dealing with an IT company and they want to know exactly what parts you're putting in, that's different. But when you're dealing with the business owners and their business isn't technology like your business is, which is in our case, then this is how we do the quotes. So those little bit of qualifiers out there, but I want you to think about this because this is an important aspect of it because we're very techie people. I'm assuming a lot of people watching this or other working in the IT industry in one form or another. We tend to really enjoy and we get excited about fast processors and hard drives and access times and the details of the product. If we're here to provide a solution for our client, we got to cut all that out. And I'm always working with my staff on this as well because they do. They get excited as well. They're like, I want to sell them this model and tell them the exciting features about this processor. And I'm like, they don't care. And matter of fact, make the sale quickly, make it painless for them and so they can get it approved. And I'm also going to show you the approval process and how we walk through it here and we're using Invoice Ninja. So I'm going to cover how that works in here. So let me get my face out of the way. And we're back in our client McTess face. Easy one to do. So once you got the client pulled up, we're going to go over here. We're going to go to new quote. Simple enough and I've already got something I'm just going to paste in. So we're going to say a computer and I just pasted it. Now it supports simple markup language. So I put two asterisks before and after. Let me show you what that does. So when you're looking at the quote, it just makes it bold and it looks kind of clean on the invoice here. So there's the quote. Then of course, I put computer. Then labor, onsite hourly. We have this client with a rate of 120 an hour for onset. So we'll just say, sup, new computer. You do not have to go into every detail. Most business owners don't care about every detail that you're doing. You may want to put in there though. This is the basics which you don't want to set up new computer. Connect printer, connect to domain. And now this is something we just literally did the other day. This is me copying and pasting from on the other screen. One of our clients, this is all it took to approve this. We put 689 on it. They needed just one workstation, one hour to set up because they have a really simple. You connect them to the domain, connect the printers. They have a, most of them connect through the domain anyways gets all set up properly. And then you drag a couple shortcuts on the desktop for their software. It doesn't actually have an installer. So it literally takes no time at all to put the things on there for them. And we get the computer shipped. They doesn't even need to have, cause they're a G Suite people. So other than having Google Chrome on there when we set up the computer and I can put on your loaded Chrome but you pretty much load Chrome on all the computers. It's the only reason the internet explorer or edge is on there is to load Chrome and get them set up. Everything they do is web browser baits. So, you know, small hard drive works. These works, so as you're looking at the details here going, why did you pick this computer? It doesn't take much to run their company. It's pretty straightforward. But from a solution standpoint for the client this is what they look at here. This number is what matters. It's $809. And I'll hit save a draft real quick. Make sure it's just refreshed down here. So this is what they're gonna see. And trust me, when you're doing a lot of small business owners, they go, all right, what's the total? All right. And they decide whether or not that is the worth it to them to spend $809 for this other staff member who needs another computer that they're expanding and going, look, how did our salesperson? We need our workstation. So you may put a lot of details in here. Trust me, they get glazed over most time unless the other exceptions of like you're dealing with other IT companies or you're dealing with some bean counter who goes like this, who takes it, copies it, pays it and says, I want to buy direct. We don't mind. We always give our clients a couple options. If you wanna buy everything direct, go ahead. You can buy direct and we will then just do the labor. What we tell them though is if they buy through us directly, we will handle the warranty and everything else. And a lot of clients are like this. They're like, you know what? We don't really, they're not worried about the markup. Those are, they just want us to take care of it. Now, those are great clients to have. And we don't mind because then everything top to bottom is us. If you buy a direct, we always tell them, no problem, I mean, buy direct. You'll save a few dollars, but if anything goes wrong with the hardware, the warranty's through whoever you purchased it from. You know, if you bought it from Lenovo, you deal with Lenovo for the warranty. If someone go, they don't have time for that. So you got to determine your markup to accommodate for that. You know, I think I mentioned before, Jim, really we're doing like a 25% markup. It kind of varies, kind of depends on the client and how big of a purchase this is and how many they're purchasing. But we'll put a markup on your nets. What that's for is to do that. So that being said, now we've got the quote. The client has a quote ready and we're going to email the quote to them. Now we have a standard template that we customized in here that sends the user says, thank you for interest in working with Lawrence Technology Services. We have prepared a quote for the services you requested. We'll need a positive, blah, blah, blah to get started. This is a nice feature about invoice ninja as well. So you set these templates up. If you have a amount for the deposit, you can put it in here at the top request. I didn't show that appears right here. You want to say partial deposit of, I want, you know, half down, whatever your deal is for putting things in there. When people that are new clients, they have to pay everything up front for us to order anything. So we'll at least want, you know, all the hard work costs up front or in some cases because we're doing remote work, the deposit is the 100%. I need it up front. Here's a quote for stuff. You got to pay me first before I do the work. So those being said, once we get to that part and those little details are worked out, we say email quote. Nice thing about way invoice ninjas, we customize these so we can say, Lawrence Technologies quote, you know, 20928. I can say customize and I may put in here for new computer. If they weren't expecting it or if they have multiple quotes so they don't have to try and separate the quotes by quote number, or if you're sending them multiple quotes because you have two different proposals for them, I'll put, you know, this proposal is for the thing you asked for this way and this is the other proposal this way. It makes it really quick cause I hit send email and whatever I customized in here, you can preview, really simple to do. So I'm actually not going to, well I guess I could send the email and I'll pull it up for you. So send the email for new computers. I just like to throw that in there and if you want to take or change anything in here, I guess that this is completely customizable and we hit send email. And it takes a second because we have it turned on to verify that the email was sent which is the default behavior for invoice ninja. All right, successfully emailed the quote. Go over to my email here. Now here we can view the quote, it's attached. We have it set up to send the attachment to them. So I can look at the quote here, we can see the details but of course we want them to view the quote here. So click on this and we'll now we'll show you the process for that. So, cause I gotta open up, I'm gonna open up an incognito browser. Let's go back to the view client. So now the quote has been viewed. Now let me move this out of the way so we're gonna show you the status windows here. So client McTesface quotes viewed on March 29th. So, great to send and I didn't show you the before but all this does is when you send the quote it just says sent but it doesn't have the viewed there. Now we've got viewed on March 29th and now let's show you the process. Go back to the view client and then switch over to the other view and we're gonna go ahead and approve the quote. Cause this is what they get, we're gonna click approve and what this actually kicks off is I'm gonna get a notice in my email that this quote was approved. Now the nice thing too, if they had a deposit it would remind them to pay it then but they can also just pay the invoice right away. And this is a great feature cause this happens a lot. So it creates a very clean workflow of them able to go approve a quote, pay the quote and then we just get the job done. And we'll tell that, you know, you're conversing with the clients a lot beforehand. Hey, I'm gonna send you a quote. If you're, if the quote looks good to go ahead and approve and pay it and we'll get it ordered for you. And this has happened, you know, frequently for us. This is a very smooth transition this way cause now we've been quoted, paid and things like that. It's really fast, it's easy for the client. You're keeping things simple. This is part of my reason for my invoices only being as detailed as they needed depending on who they're going to. And this makes it nice cause then they can go pay now it's gonna bring them to the payment portal which will happen to be using PayPal a lot of the great convenience of PayPal so we don't have to handle any credit card numbers. They throw in their information, I get the money, lands in our account, done. We see all this come through. So now we can actually go back over here to the view McTest face and we'll see that this is a converted now. So process workflow started as a submitted quote, the sent quote, view quote, converted quote which means it's converted to an invoice, invoice viewed. It would then turn green and say invoice paid. And this entire process, you can actually see this in here as well. So you can say Tom Lawrence updated quote, McTest face view quote, McTest face approved quote, Tom Lawrence created invoice. Now just so you know, because I created the invoice or I created the quote, they approved it. It throws your name in there. It doesn't say client created invoice. It kind of means that just so you know just the way the naming goes, the system did it. So it says created invoice because you're the one that created the quote. You become whichever user created it is the one that also creates the invoice even though they're the one that the client clicked approved. Then McTest face viewed it. So you know they viewed it but now you're waiting on that payment part and then this gives you that quick activity, then done. Once you see the money come in, you follow your process or like you said, if you're doing it and some of our clients are on net 30 so we're fine with them viewing the invoice. They get it, we're done. Also there may be adjustments later and this is something else just so you know if this quote gets paid or invoice gets paid and there's an adjustment later because I only put one hour of labor and there ends up being two, you can revise it and have them pay it again or you can create a separate invoice. And I say revise it because that's kind of a nice feature. So if I add it, let's say they paid off the $809 here and I added one more hour of labor so an extra 120 gets added. It'll only remind them of the balance so they can actually go back in and pay it later. A lot of times like I said with our net 30 clients which is quite a few of them in the small business market they go ahead and approve quotes then we always bill on actuals. So even though they have an approval and they see the invoice, we always adjust the invoice because they haven't paid it yet anyways and we'll adjust it to reflect the actuals as to what occurred. And just with different things you're gonna get that but this kind of brings you through that workflow of how it works and this is one of the reasons we really like the invoice ninja software is it makes that workflow very clean and very easy to document so you can see how it was done and what it actually is doing here it'll give me the client's IP address for each one of these actions of where it was viewed. So I did this all internally so it's giving my IP address internally but you just mouse over it and you can see what IP address actually viewed and approve that which I think is kind of cool as well so you can kind of, if you're in IT you probably know a lot of your clients IP addresses because if you manage your firewalls and things like that but it gives you a nice, like I said, tracking history the time that they viewed it and you'll notice some clients view things right away some of them don't, I'll take a look at it but this is a really nice system for helping to manage all of that. So hopefully this was helpful and can I give you an idea of our quote and flow of how this goes from sending something over to someone how it gets approved and like I said the thing you really want is when you see McTessFace paid but this is just keeping this easy workflow keeping it simple for the client keeping it simple for you and Invoice Ninja, like I said, we switched to it it's been over a couple of months now and we're really happy with it. This is something that I'm just kind of impressed with how well it's thought out for some of that quote from quote to sale process. Okay, hopefully this is helpful if you have comments, leave them below if you like the content here like and subscribe if you're interested in Invoice Ninja look for the affiliate link if you want to sign up for it they have a free account you can start playing with this as well or go into full production like we did with it and change it over for our workflows. So this is kind of our workflow and a combination Invoice Ninja video so like I said, hopefully this was helpful. Thanks.