Help Guide
Invoicing
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Fergus Invoicing Guide
Fergus Invoicing Guide
Draft Version
Published 18/04/15
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Fergus Invoicing Guide
Table of contents
INVOICING 4
1 OVERVIEW 4
2 PROGRESS INVOICES 10
EXAMPLE A: INVOICING A CHARGE UP JOB 11
3 QUICK INVOICING 15
4 INVOICING A QUOTE 17
5 INVOICING REMAINDER OF QUOTE 18
6 FLOATING TOOLBAR’ 19
7 IMPORT 20
8 MARGINS AND ADDING DISCOUNTS 22
9 INVOICE MARGINS/DISCOUNTS 24
10 FORMATTING 26
11 MERCHANT FILTERING 30
12 CREATED INVOICES 31
13 INVOICE NOTES 32
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Fergus Invoicing Guide
Invoicing
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Overview
As an overview, before you do invoicing it is good practice to get as many of the site visits into the “To Invoice” status. All the jobs in the status board are designed to move from left to right. Please see the manual on status board management for information about how to move the jobs through the system.
In Fergus, invoicing can be done at any time. No work or materials need to be added before you can invoice (only a job has to be created for a customer).
A common example of why you would invoice before work is started is deposits, for example if your quote of $2500.00+GST was accepted for a HWC replacement. As the job is for a new customer with no credit history you have asked for a deposit of 50% first.
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Fergus Invoicing Guide
To create an invoice you can click on Invoicing under Tools on the left hand side:
To create an invoice press the Create Customer Invoice button on the right hand side. This is what you will see when you press this button:
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The next step is to add in a section heading, type in the large text box and press enter.
This is what it looks like when you create a section heading, you can create as many section headings as you like.
For this example we are going to add in a line item by typing in the search box. This allows you to search from your price book or by adding a custom item by just pressing enter.
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A common way to add common line items you use all the time is via Favourites which is covered in another tutorial.
For the purpose of this example, we are going to preview the invoice and send it off.
To see what it will look like from a customers point of view, press the preview button on the floating menu screen in the invoice builder.
The preview button has been pressed and this is what the customer would see.
If you are happy with this, press the green Approve button on the top right and you will see this pop down:
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The options here are
● Just Approve
● Approve and Print
● Approve and Email
On the left hand side of this screen there is a tick box to choose from to close off the site visit. Click this box to complete the site visit to prevent any more labour or materials being added to this site visit after the invoice is approved.
Once an invoice is approved it will be locked from a financial perspective, go through to your accounting package (eg. Xero) and will no longer be editable.
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After clicking Approve and email you will see this screen with the invoice PDF pre-attached:
Clicking Send Email on the bottom right will send the email off to the customer and will now see it on the invoicing list below:
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When an invoice is in Xero it will have the blue infinity icon next to the invoice and you can click on that button to go directly to that invoice in Xero:
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Progress Invoices
A critical part of invoicing is the concept of understanding what the purpose of a site visit is. A site visit is the cost centre of the job, this is where you record every nickel and dime of labour and materials of the project. The costs on the site visit can then be imported onto the invoice. The costs are imported onto the invoice and can then be edited and deleted off the invoice without it affecting your back costing on the site visit.
All the costs on the site visit add up to a total in Job Summary called cost
All the charges on the invoices add up to a total in Job Summary called Invoiced The difference between cost and invoiced is your profit.
The more site visits you create the more “Cost Centres” you have on a job, this allows you to interrogate a job to see where it lost money. Eg. was it at the foundations? The fit off? Did you not quote enough materials?
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Example A: Invoicing a Charge Up Job
We will start at the point where we have pressed the create customer invoice button.
On this example we have 3 Site Visits that need invoicing, Site visit A is marked To invoice, Site Visit B&C are marked as Labour Complete.
It is good practice to review all the costs on the site visit now, if you are satisfied with all the costs here you can press the tick box next to the padlock to open the options of marking it as to invoice. Please see the section on site visits for more information on site visit statuses.
If you press the check button on the top right of this screen pops up.
Press mark as to invoice and it will move the job in the status board from “Costing” to ‘To Invoice”
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The three site visits are now marked as to invoice. This is a good habit to get into as this means you are checking the labour, labour descriptions and materials on every part of the job before you invoice it.
On the tools menu press the Invoicing button on the left hand side.
In this view we can see that the customer has already been sent an invoice. We will come back to this view in another chapter to view all the options available at this stage.
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Press Create Customer Invoice to begin.
This is the standard view you get whenever you create an invoice. In the previous chapter we showed how to create a section heading and how to add custom line items.
On this invoice we want to import the materials and labour entry from the site visits onto the invoice. To import the costs on the sites visits onto the invoice press the import button in the header.
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You can see we have a few options available to us here, we will deal with all the options in other chapters in this section. For this example we are only concerned about importing the site visits on this job.
To actually import the site visits tick the box next to the site visit you want to import.
With the Site Visits ticked press the Import 3 Site Visits button.
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The floating header bar will follow you as you scroll down the page, in here are lots of the options to do all the various functions that we need. At this point you could press approve and send this invoice and be done.
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Quick Invoicing
This option is to allow the ability to create an invoice with one click! This option is particularly helpful when invoicing smaller jobs with simple costs.
Once you have the hang of Fergus you will start to understand that all the labour is on the site visits automatically from the mobile device. (If the tradesperson does not enter his labour then he does not get his timesheet filled out and he wont get paid.)
The materials are all being entered on the mobile app or being imported automatically onto the site visit from the CSV merchant invoices. The outcome of when everyone is all working together all you have to do to create an invoice is review the information and press send. If you want to create an invoice in a few steps, this is what quick invoicing will do,.
Quick Invoicing will import all site visits marked as to invoice bypassing the need to import. To create a quick Invoice, click on the invoicing tab and on the drop down menu next to Create Customer Invoice and choose “Create Quick Invoice.”
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Below is an example of the invoice that was created when Create Quick Invoice was chosen. As with all invoicing, you can then save as a draft or Approve and go through that workflow.
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Invoicing a Quote
There are a couple of options available when invoicing a quote. We will start the example by assuming you have an accepted quote and you have done some site visits already.
If you press Create Customer Invoice and select the Import button you will see this.
The options available on the left hand side of this screen are:
On a quote there are really three options you can do. 1. Deposit Invoice (or custom amount)
2. Invoice the costs incurred 3. Invoice what was quoted
Options 1 and 2 have been covered in previous sections of this document, to invoice what is quoted select “Quote Sections” on the left hand side.
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Click the checkbox for the quote sections that you want to import and press the import button.
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Invoicing remainder of quote
A common use case is to invoice the costs of site visits and then at the end of the project simply invoice whatever is remaining on the quote. I will walk through an example of this.
Lets pretend we have invoiced a progress claim for half of the work done previously by importing the costs from the site visits. The work is now finished and we need to invoice the remainder of the quote.
At this screen, instead of pressing the create customer invoice button, click on the down arrow next to this button.
If you press Invoice remainder of quote, it will generate an invoice for the balance of the quote remaining.
This feature saves you from having to add up all the invoice totals and minusing them off the quote total.
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This is how the invoice will look, you can then press approve and finish the invoice.
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Floating Toolbar
Explaining all the options available on the toolbar
Edit
When creating the invoice this tab must be activated to be able to enter labour and material items and to do formatting.
Preview
This is the view of what the customer will see. There is no granular editing available at this point. You can however check the formatting to change how pricing is viewed by the customer.
Group Actions
Please see the formatting section for details.
If you want to print a copy of the draft invoice just to get the look and feel of it, this is what the option if for.
Due Date
There is a Calendar date to choose the created date on the invoice from. This is usually used if the cut off for invoicing was the 30th of the month and it is now the 3rd of the new month.
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Import
At the import options you have the following options available
I.Variations
If you have created a variation and you want to import the variation onto the invoice, this is where you would go. It will appear as a Section Heading with the Job Number of the Variation.
II. Previous Invoice
The use case here is when you have created a large and complicated invoice and sent it to the customer. The customer has a comment about your charges and wants some changes. If you raise a credit note in Xero you then have to send the invoice, credit note and statement to the customer.
You can void the invoice, reimport the previous one, make the adjustments and resend it to the customer. The site visits will remain invoiced. The invoice in Xero is Voided, and the customer only has one invoice to process.
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Once again tick the box and select import to import the previous invoice onto the new invoice.
III. This Job
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Margins and Adding Discounts
Fergus focuses heavily on gross margins which is covered in other sections. As a rule of thumb most trades companies need 40% Gross margin to pay their overheads.
Let us begin by pressing the % or Margin button in the toolbar.
This is the screen that displays a lot of information, once you have seen it a few times it will make sense and become very useful.
Cost:($1098.007) The Cost in purple is what the overall project has cost so far, irrespective if you have invoiced those costs or not.
Charged: In Purple %1 500.00) is what you have invoiced so far and in Blue $1 492.21 is what
this invoice is worth,
The purpose of this graph is to let you know if your costs are exceeding your invoicing, this is very useful on quoted work.
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Current status: This is the profit and margin of the job before the invoice
Including this invoice, is the profit and margin of the job as a whole if you approve this
invoice.
Green bar
This bar will show how far along a budget, quote or estimate you are if it is set. If the bar goes Red then your costs exceed your charges.
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Invoice Margins/Discounts
This is the place where we can add discounts and change the markup of our materials to achieve the desired gross margin %. As mentioned above we are after around 40% margin. At the moment we have 26.14%. To increase the margin, type in the box material markup, we will put in 67% markup.
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Lets say the customer wants a discount of 15% on labour and 20% on materials The problem with discounts is our margin is now 34.41% which is lower than we want.
We will need to increase our material markup so that our gross margin stays at 40% after the discount.
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Formatting
This section allows you to adjust the default setting for all sections on this invoice.
Here is what an invoice looks like with the item quantities and line item prices turned off.
You can see all the line items quantity and sell price have been removed, but I have left the section totals on.
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If you tick the select all button then the following blue bar in the tool bar becomes activated.
The most common option that is used is Combine to one line. When you click on this button, this popup will appear.
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After entering a description you will see they are shown below like this.
All the line items in that section have been combined to one line item. All the items in grey are what make up the combined item and will not be shown to the end customer. You can always uncombine by pressing Uncombine all line items at the bottom of the gray box.
On preview mode you can now see that section 130a has been combined to 1 line called labour and materials. This is nice and clean for the customer.
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If you choose Move Items, all the items you have selected will move that section.
The idea behind this is if you have labour and materials all over the invoice and you want to tidy it up, you can select the items you want to move and then move them all in one go to the
section selected.
Each of these perform the same function of formatting but for only this section.
It should be self explanatory of what the setting will do for the items in that section. Always toggle between Edit and Preview to view how it will appear for the customer.
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Merchant filtering
If you want to force the price book to search a particular merchant, press the truck icon and choose from a list of merchants.
Favourites
For more information on this, please review the dedicated document on favourites.
Invoice Due Date
This is where you can change the due date on the invoice
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Approve Invoices Approve
● To Be Approved ● Save Draft ● Delete Draft
To be Approved will change the status on the Status Board from Red to Invoice to Orange to be approved in the “to Invoice” column.
The To Be Approved status is a permission per employee so that you can control who can send invoices, this is often done so that the margins and descriptions are checked prior to sending.
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Created Invoices
This Chapter deals with the options available on an invoice once it has been created:
The options here are:
● Show
This will open up the details of the invoice and allow you to add manual payments to it.
● View
This will open up the invoice in a preview window allowing you to see the the details on the document.
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After clicking Show you will see this view.
In this screen you can add a manual payment. You would add a manual payment if you weren’t connected to Xero or if you had an invoice that was unpaid by a few cents and wanted to get it marked as paid without the hassle of creating a credit in Xero.
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Invoice Notes
Notes, this is where you add a note about the invoice and can mention somebody:
When you press add a note, this box will open, you can press the @symbol and a list of the people in your company will appear, this message will be in their Fergus Inbox for them to check and respond to. See the section on Notes for more information on this.
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Cog options
● Add Query
This will Put this in the yellow box on the status board in the invoice column, this will help you to manage invoices that have been queried by the customer
● Pay Now
If enabled this will open a pop up with a link to the payment portal to pay by credit card.
● Duplicate Invoice
This will allow you to copy an invoice and make adjustments, very helpful if you have to void and re-send an invoice.
● Void Invoice
This will void the invoice in Fergus and in Xero, this cannot be undone.
● Disputed Invoice
On the status board, on the ‘Invoices” tab the orange box is where disputed invoices go, this is designed for the customers that probably need to go to debt collection.
