There may be errors in spelling, grammar, and accuracy in this machine-generated transcript.
Alicia Katz Pollock: In this week's episode of the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast, Dan DeLong and I are going to do a deep dive on the new modern invoices, which have been really in development now for going on a year, and at first they drove us crazy, and now I've actually become quite fond of them. So let's go ahead and take [00:00:30] a look. Dan, how are you doing today?
Dan DeLong: I'm doing very good. I'm in the midst of driving across the country, working and and driving at the same time. So not at the same time. I'm not physically driving at this very, very moment. It is just an interesting experience trying to balance moving and working while doing this all remotely. It's fascinating.
Alicia Katz Pollock: So you you actually live in RV and [00:01:00] travel around the country and then just take breaks to to. You have like an office inside your RV.
Dan DeLong: Yeah. Yeah. That's what you see in the in the background. For those of you that may be watching the the video here. Uh, but yeah, it's everything's all packed up because right after we're done here, we're going to hitch up and go.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Well that's awesome. I actually completely envy you, and I think I'm about five years away from being able to do that myself as soon as my kids are out of college.
Dan DeLong: Yeah, I probably did it earlier than I should have. [00:01:30]
Alicia Katz Pollock: Well, you know, maybe five years from now, there'll be a heads up display so I can actually work while I'm driving. All right, let's go ahead and take a look at this. So, um, the. Dan, do you remember when they started, when they first introduced the modern invoices?
Dan DeLong: Well, let's see, when was the public outcry about that? No, um, it was probably um, it was, I would say at least a year. Well, I mean, they started hinting [00:02:00] at it. There was articles about it that it was coming and then and this is typically, um, standard for, you know, a rollout of a of a new feature. They will typically give people a chance to opt in, and then there will be a point in time where you don't get that luxury of opting in. It's like, okay. But typically it goes from, you know, less complicated companies to more complicated companies that when it gets to that [00:02:30] point, that breaking point. But, uh, short answer to your question. No, I don't know exactly when that was coming out, but it was probably, you know, like you said, about 18, 18 months ago when it started hearing about this new invoicing is coming.
Alicia Katz Pollock: I remember the first client that I ever saw with it was in fact a simple start client, and each line item on the invoice like we're used to right now, there being a grid. And then you can just add lines and lines and lines, but every line was its own box [00:03:00] on the original invoice. And so you would put one line up and then you would have to scroll down and put another line up, and then you'd have to scroll down and put another line up. And it was absolutely unwieldy. And I remember putting in the feedback, say, please, at least give us the grid so we can have multiple lines all in one place. And so, hey, they listened. And there was, you know, so when they started the rollout, it was ugly and it was impractical.
Dan DeLong: And you're being polite. They [00:03:30] say again, you're being polite. Yeah.
Alicia Katz Pollock: I'm being of course I'm being polite. And now it has. I'm still not completely used to the way that it looks. And I have to admit that when I'm taking screenshots for my book, my screenshots are now twice as tall as they have to be, so they're definitely taking up a lot more space. But for practical measures, there's actually a lot going on and I'm still constantly surprised. So as we're recording this, we have an invoice up on [00:04:00] the screen and we're going to kind of parse through the whole thing. And you will probably find me going a couple times. Oh, when did they add that. So let's let's go ahead and do this.
Dan DeLong: Yeah. One of the things I wanted to mention is that when they do major overhauls like this inside of QuickBooks, it is a take a step back to move forward type of thing. And um, you know, like you were like you were mentioning, hey, um, hey, why why did you why did you break this in order [00:04:30] to fix it? Right. So and that's part of the deconstructing of, of these, these sorts of mass changes there. And I think you had talked about it before with Hector in when this first was mass released is, you know, they're, they're re basically recreating the foundation so that new and cool features can actually take place. It's just where when we're in this, uh, [00:05:00] iteration phase, it's it's it's frustrating, I think, for, for a lot of people, especially when, uh, there is this step back type of situation.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. One of the things that's really happening and why this is kind of a constant right now, is they're actually rewriting the entire code base underpinning all of QuickBooks online because it originally started back, you know, it's like almost 20 years old. And the code that it was written [00:05:30] on 20 years ago was modern back then. But things have changed on the programing side. And what they're doing is actually rewriting it module by module by module. And as they do it, they're modernizing it and adding in new features and new technologies that have become available since then. So while it's a challenging for us as QuickBooks users, sometimes it's a good thing because, I mean, we don't want to be working on 20 year old software. We want it to be able to be agile and [00:06:00] innovative. And what Dan and I are going to do right now is talk about some of the things that are new and different, because if you're just hands on or I'm sorry, not hands on, but heads down and getting the work done, we don't take the time to go exploring and poking around in all the nooks and crannies. So Dan and I are going to go poke around in those nooks and crannies starting right now. All right. All right. The very first thing you are going to notice. Well, actually the very first thing you have to do is get there that your [00:06:30] file, you still have to pull the trigger to move to what they're calling the modern invoices.
Alicia Katz Pollock: And the way that you do that is when you're in the standard classic invoice is there's a button in the upper right hand side that says Update layout. And you go ahead and you click Update Layout and it takes you to this new modern experience. So if you're working alongside with what we're showing you, that's the very first thing that you have to do is get there. Now, once you are in the modern invoice, the first thing that you're going to notice is on the [00:07:00] left hand side. There's a lot of real estate taken up on your screen with the new Intuit assist little blue spirally logo thing that says autofill this invoice with and it's in beta. It is brand new and they're still honing it in, but it gives you the ability to create invoices automatically by dropping in a file or an image or text. Or you can even put in a [00:07:30] use a QR code scanner if you have, for instance, a file on your phone. So there's a lot of ways of getting things, getting things in here. And then what you what it does is it combs through all of the text and it it auto fills your invoice with the customer and the date and the ideally the line items or the products or services that you need when you are. Go ahead.
Dan DeLong: No, I was going to say have you have you have you played around with that? Has [00:08:00] it? Has it worked well for you?
Alicia Katz Pollock: I've tried a couple different things. So the autofill from file allows you to either drag and drop or navigate to a file on your computer. And it takes PDFs and PNG files, PNG files and JPEGs. And I've found that it did a decent job with the customer and the date, but it didn't necessarily know what product and service it was in my file that would relate to [00:08:30] what it is in that document. So if you have something that has the exact name of a product or service, then it can figure it out. But a lot of the time, what shows up on the things that are sent to us aren't the same as what we would put in.
Dan DeLong: So that's what I'm seeing with, you know, especially with bills and those types of things. If it doesn't have an exact match when you put in the file, uh, you know, you'll end up with the line item. Detail is, um, a little bit to be desired. [00:09:00] And I think, again, this is, you know, an iteration type of thing where this will, this will be built upon. So, uh, you know, don't be don't be in the, in that mindset of like, okay, this is gonna all I have to do is just drag this in and then send it off. No, you just just like, with anything that has to deal with, I trust but verify.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And some people have even asked, well, like, why would I even need to import my invoices or import anything to create [00:09:30] an invoice out of it? But it's coming from either a conversation that you're having with a client or I have I have a lot of like affiliate programs that send me money. I have places where I'm like my courses up on Udemy, where Udemy sends me money, or Skillshare, and when they send me the message that there's going to be some deposits showing up in my banking feed, this is helping me with creating those transactions, because right [00:10:00] now what I do is I have a list of recurring sales or recurring. Yeah, recurring sales receipts. And every month when I get these notifications, I go to that recurring sales receipt and I manually enter in what the dollar amount is for that for that month. And that's what I do currently. What I like about this is that it will hopefully, in the end, allow me to just forward that email in or drag and drop the text in and have it create the invoice for [00:10:30] me so that when the payment shows up, it just matches. So that's how I want to use it.
Dan DeLong: I remember when they were showing this at Intuit Connect, and where the part that you're hovering over there about the text, I mean, it sounds really cool, like, you know, when you have in the field out, you know, like a landscaper or somebody doing a quote on paper, you know, writing something and handwritten notes, being able to just throw that into QuickBooks and it automatically [00:11:00] creates the the estimate or the invoice for you. One thing that I noticed or note took a mental note is like, nobody creates notes like that on paper, right? Like the the way they were showing it on, on the screen, I was like, I don't know how anybody would do something like that, but you do have to have it in a certain format in order for this to work, you know, the way it is. But again, you know, the future is going to tell us how flexible [00:11:30] these things are. If you could write it upside down or backwards and it's still understand how this would look, or, you know, if I, I, I take notes and it's chicken scratch. Right. Like, so if you can't read it it's not going to read it either.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Where this did actually come in handy for me as I was having a conversation with a client over email and it was just text and we were just emailing back and forth, and then in the end, I was able to say, okay, well, here's the price that I'll charge. And so I just copied that email and pasted it in, and [00:12:00] it did make the invoice. So that part did actually work. Cool. Yeah. So right now it will open up automatically every time you open an invoice. And it's doing that and being a little pestering because it's in beta. They need it used. They need to make sure people know it's there. And the more you actually try it out and use it, the better it's going to get. So if your gut instinct is just to, it pops up, shut the box, it pops up, shut the box. I get that. And I've seen some people [00:12:30] say, well, can we at least have a choice? And but if you had a choice and nobody used it, it's never going to get any better. I encourage you to find reasons to use it and actually put it through its paces so that into it can study what's working and what's not, and actually make it something really practical and usable.
Dan DeLong: It's definitely a catch 22, right? If you don't use it and provide feedback, it's not going to improve. If you don't, if it doesn't improve, nobody's [00:13:00] going to use it.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Exactly. And that's why I love trying to break it so that it can get better for for all of us. Okay. The now I've shut the door and Dan and I are looking at the invoice itself, and it starts with the customer's name box in the upper left, just like we would expect. And there is a little another I intuit assist next to it, and when you click on it, it pops up in about this customer and it says, in this past year, this [00:13:30] customer paid this many invoices through credit card, this many through bank transfer and this many through PayPal. And they have this many open invoices, and they have this many overdue invoices. And they've been a customer since November 2022.
Dan DeLong: I'm checking in on my own file and, uh, yeah, it's, uh, it's pretty cool. Like, it actually does have contextual information about the customer that's there. So it's nice to have it all in one place. And you don't have to go navigate and look [00:14:00] in the customer section to see see those types of insights.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Exactly. I'm kind of used to having to have multiple tabs open where one I'm doing my invoicing and one I've got the customers open because when I'm in my customer screen and I open a new invoice, now I can't see my customer anymore. So this kind of invoice or this kind of insight is definitely helpful, I like it.
Dan DeLong: Thumbs up. Yeah, give it a thumbs up.
Alicia Katz Pollock: I gave it a thumbs up and it's actually [00:14:30] asking for feedback right now. Why did you give a thumbs up? And I'm going to put in so that I don't have to have the customer open in another window. So good. I left them feedback. Once you've assigned the customer, it puts up the email address. And then there's a little link that you can click on to add CCS and BCS, and you can have multiple emails in them separated by commas. And then below that it has the bill two information, the ship two [00:15:00] information and the ship from information as well. And there's also right below it a little link for edit customer. And I love this I love this. That way if you pull up, if it pulls up their address information and it's missing, if you add or change the information in an invoice, it does not open up their customer details and add it in the customer details. You would actually have to go stop [00:15:30] what you're doing in the invoice, go edit the customer and then come back to the invoice again. Now you can actually open up the customer details pane from inside the invoice and make permanent changes to their address and contact information.
Dan DeLong: Yeah. These are I mean, this this is the common theme of what I think they were solving for with, with modernizing this this whole invoice experience itself is not having to navigate elsewhere to make those changes so that they show [00:16:00] up. And then you have to toggle and those, those types of things, it's just more of like a building on top of in, you know, whatever you're needing to, to, to modify without navigating away and then losing your, your changes.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. I think that's a really great way of framing it too, that now you can do activities inside the invoice. Around the invoice. So cool. Okay. Now as far as the bill two, the ship two and the ship from [00:16:30] addresses, those are directly tied to your sales tax because some states are home states, meaning your sales tax is calculated off of the location of your business, and other states. Calculate their sales tax based on where the customer is located. And I have found this to be kind of mission critical, that if you are in a sales tax state where the tax changes like California, based on on whether you're [00:17:00] on premises or delivering. So sometimes it's home and sometimes it's destination, the sales tax changes according to which of these boxes you have open and filled in. So this if you are in a sales tax state this is mission critical information. You ready? There is a link under the ship to box that says remove shipping information. And when I hit that the shipping information closes and the it becomes [00:17:30] a location of sale. And then it has my business address in it. And now the sales tax is calculating off of my business This address or now that I've collapsed it. It now says add shipping info and when I click Add shipping info, I now have a new ship to box, and whatever address you put in there is what the sales tax will calculate on. So for those of you who are having trouble with sales tax calculating incorrectly, this is your game changer. [00:18:00] This is what you're overlooking. So pay attention to the bill, to the ship, to and the ship from boxes and make sure that you have the right addresses in the right places.
Dan DeLong: Good point.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah.
Dan DeLong: It's like it's like you have a sales tax course or something like that.
Alicia Katz Pollock: So yes, I do have a course on how sales tax works. And so this is such a hang up for some people and some states that when I was troubleshooting that's how I discovered this is like why [00:18:30] has it got the wrong sales tax in there. Why is it calculating wrong. And then I clicked that little link and boom, it was right. So that's that's the sales tax secret is the addresses showing on your invoice. Okay. When you have the the shipping information off then the next set of fields are your invoice number, your terms, your invoice date and your due date. Totally standard stuff. Nothing special there. But when [00:19:00] I do open up the shipping information field, then you also get the fields for ship via shipping date and tracking number. In other words, if you you know on the old invoices they were either on for everybody or off for everybody. Now you have a toggle for whether you want to see them or not, depending on whether you show the ship. The ship to box.
Dan DeLong: Makes sense, because you wouldn't need to do any of those things if you don't have any shipping information.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Exactly. [00:19:30]
Dan DeLong: Logic. My goodness.
Alicia Katz Pollock: I know right? Okay. Below that you then have any of your custom fields. The one that I'm looking at has a sales rep field, but any custom fields you have that are attached to the customer forms you will see there. Okay, next up I have tags, but I'm not going to talk about tags because they're going to be gone like next week, maybe even by the time you hear this. Tags. So let's pretend that's not there. Okay. Below [00:20:00] that, if you have classes and locations turned on, you'll see classes and locations. I do want to note that each one on the screen says hidden. And that's because right now I don't have the classes and locations showing on the customer facing view of the invoice. This is just internal to the company, so the whole invoice will tell you if something is hidden or not. If you if you're the only person who can see it, it will be labeled hidden. If it doesn't have a hidden label, you know that it's something the customer can [00:20:30] see. Okay. Below that we have the products or services And this is all just the standard stuff that we are used to. So I don't think there's anything here surprising. Dan, do you have anything that you want to point out about the product or service grid?
Dan DeLong: No, I think we'll we'll get to that when we get to the, the manage the sidebar that that will come up as well. But these are customizable as what you can see on the screen. But you can't. You have to go into that manage in order to to see [00:21:00] it.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. Hold that thought. We will get to the manage the customization features. Okay. Below the product or service grid, there's a button that says add product or service. Technically that is for adding an extra line, but don't overlook the drop down. There is an option for adding subtotals. If you were wondering where the subtotals went. They're still here. They're just hiding under the add product or Service button. Continuing down on the left hand side, there [00:21:30] are now four different communication Boxes and they all show up in different places across your qbo experience. There's the customer payment options, where you can put in information that says, tell your customer how you want to get paid, so that's where you can put in, you know, send a check to this address or click the button to pay automatically. That's where you put in your instructions. Below that, you have a note to the customer. That's where you put in, [00:22:00] you know, thank you for your business or our CCB number, whatever it is that you need to communicate to the customer so that one is going to be on the invoice. Then below that you have internal customer notes hidden. This is where you get to talk about the invoice or the customer and they can't see it. This is a great place to communicate with your team.
Alicia Katz Pollock: It's a great place to put in notes about the transactions, things that you have to remember. [00:22:30] And this is new. We didn't have this on the old invoices. So this is something that I really like. And I have used, you know, customer got a Pita discount, things like that. Okay. Then there's the next one is memo on statement which is also hidden. But it does appear on the statement. So it's kind of hidden but not hidden. And the reason for this is one of the things that was confusing is on the old invoices [00:23:00] there you have the line descriptions, but then there's also the transaction memo. And if you are running customer statements, you don't see what's on the description lines. You only see what's on the memo line. So this is their attempt to make that a little bit more transparent. So if you are running statements and you want something specific to show on the statement about this transaction, you have a place to put it. And then down below that is adding attachments. So yes, you can put any evidence of the transaction [00:23:30] whether it's images, PDFs, contracts, whatever you want to attach and that will live on with the with the invoice.
Dan DeLong: Now the side note there is that if you actually do use the Intuit assist to create the transaction, that automatically gets added as as the attachment at that point, so you don't have to attach it again if you if you used it that way.
Alicia Katz Pollock: All right. Now on the right hand side underneath [00:24:00] the products and services grid, you have your subtotal and your taxable subtotal. So you have now two different subtotals depending on whether the items are taxable or not. You have your select your sales tax rate. It usually will default to automatic calculation. And 95 or 98% of the time you just want it to do what it does. Don't try and micromanage it. Sales tax is a whole different conversation for how to get it to do right, but I find that more often [00:24:30] than not, if the client is trying to make it calculate the sales tax, they're the one mucking it up. And if you just leave it on automatic calculation, it does a better job. Okay. Then it will put in the sales tax. And right now on my screen there's a shipping line, a separate box for shipping that does go to a map to a shipping income category. We'll talk more about the customizations. And then there's an invoice total. And then there's a link underneath that for [00:25:00] editing the totals. Down in the bottom center you have options for print or download. Buying a shipping label. And after you've saved it, you will also see more actions. Buying a shipping label actually connects to Ship engine and I have tried this out. Basically what you do is you create a ship engine account. If you don't already have one, then it connects to USPS and then you choose, okay, is it a package? What's the size? What [00:25:30] are the dimensions? What's the weight? You know, the normal stuff that you do on the USPS website. And then it allows you to print labels right inside QuickBooks online. They have said that they get cheaper rates than than just going to USPS, but I found that they're not cheaper than my account at Stamps.com. So that's been my experience cheaper than USPS. But it might not be cheaper than any kind of shipping agreement that you have through your business. [00:26:00]
Dan DeLong: And I also had understood that if you had other other accounts like Fedex and UPS, that you can start to link those and then it will actually shop the right ship fulfillment option so that you can pick the right, right method to get your get get the most bang out of your shipping buck.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And that's that's super cool. I will through royal wise. I will probably put out a video about how to actually run the [00:26:30] shipping through the through the invoice, but this is really handy for people who are, you know, Etsy sellers and Amazon sellers to be able to do your shipping without having to go to a third party app. And then the more actions button shows up after you have saved. And this is the standard button that we're used to, that used to just say more, where you can make a copy or create a credit memo, delete void transaction journal and audit history. They had experimented with putting that button up under the pane [00:27:00] on the right hand side. But everybody said, well, why change it? And they put it back where it has always been. Now it just says more actions and not just it's a.
Dan DeLong: Testament to that feedback feed feedback. Feedback actually works. Yeah. If you let them know enough they'll, they'll they'll they will respond, you know. Yes.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. Now on the bottom right hand side where you go to save the buttons are different than they used to be. There's two buttons now. There's [00:27:30] a white save button. And that's just either save to keep working or save a new to start a new one, or save and close to go back to what you were working on. So the that button is new. The fact that you can actually now save and just stay in it is new. It used to just be save and close or save and new, and then you would have to leave it and come back in again. The green button on the far right hand side now has review and send which sends the email. Or it also now has share link. And when you click on [00:28:00] share link, what it does is it pops up a URL. And then you can copy that URL and you can text it to them. You can email it to them, you can pop it in Facebook. You know, whatever digital connection you have with this person, you can send them a payment link to the invoice. So you're not stuck with just sending an email anymore. Okay. Now. Now is where it gets super fun. Once you have saved the invoice, a new button will show up at the [00:28:30] very top for receiving a payment, and the receive payment now just opens up the pretty much the same receive payment window that we have always have. It has not been modernized to match the look and feel of the modern invoices, although I can tell from looking at it that it has been reprogramed with the new underpinnings. And so I'm not going to I don't think I have anything to add about this particular feature.
Dan DeLong: It's just nice to be able to go to receive a payment right from the [00:29:00] right from the transaction, which was originally not there, right.
Alicia Katz Pollock: What I actually wind up doing a lot is I'll receive, I'll mark the payment as received and then save it. And then if I need to go back to the invoice, I'll just click back on the invoice on the line item to go back again. And that's a workflow that I use a lot that I assume everybody else does. But maybe people don't think about it and they just close it and then go search for it and open it again. Not true. Once you have saved [00:29:30] the saved the payment, then that appears down at the very, very bottom. If you scroll back down to the bottom of the invoice, you're going to see what payment was made for, how much on what date, and a hyperlink so that you can open up that transaction.
Dan DeLong: Still nothing on the edit totals.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Nope. The totals still is not doing a darn thing. Now here's where the fun begins. Is there is a button on the upper right with a gear [00:30:00] on it that says manage. And the manage is all powerful, and there's a lot of stuff in here that is really helpful. So I opened up a brand new invoice, and on the right hand side the pane, it starts being open. And if you don't see it then you click manage to toggle it open and shut. But because this is a brand new invoice, they want you to have all the options and things that you can actually do. At the top there is a link to edit the default settings, and this [00:30:30] is one of the things that people need to realize about these settings is that in the modern experience, you now have the opportunity to change it just on this invoice and not change your default settings for all of them, which is new and useful. So the things that I'm going to show you right now are just happening in this one invoice. But if we wanted it to be permanent for the rest of our customers, we would have to go somewhere else and go to edit the default settings and do it there. [00:31:00] The first thing is a box at the top that says customization, and this allows you to turn on and off some of the different fields. We can turn on and off the ship to the service date. On each of the rows of the line items. You can even turn off the product and service. And what that does is it turns it so that you just have a description and you don't have a product and service. I think I've only had maybe one business ever that this was appropriate for. So this is not [00:31:30] something that I recommend. But if you have one company that only does one thing and they don't care about detailed reports about their revenue streams, sure you could simplify it. And then there's also a slider to turn off the skew column. So if you aren't using inventory codes, then you don't have to show them.
Dan DeLong: One thing I wanted to point out, though, I don't understand why product and service is an option to turn off because [00:32:00] if you turn it off, you can't enter in any products or services on your invoice.
Alicia Katz Pollock: That was that was what I was just getting at that I've only had one client ever where all they just used were was the default product of of hours and service, you know, like what comes with it out of the box. So if you're somebody who you only do one thing and you're just tracking that one thing that you do hypothetically, you don't need products and services, but I've only had literally, literally two clients ever who didn't [00:32:30] specify their products and services. So it's an option. All right. Going a little bit further down you have an opportunity to manage your custom fields from here, which will open up the custom fields pane. Then below that is payment options. And Dan and I have a lot to say about payment options. We are both fans of QuickBooks payments, which is the merchant services that's built into QuickBooks online. And the new modern invoices allow new things to happen in here. [00:33:00] You can the credit cards that it takes visa, Mastercard, of course discover. Although I've literally never seen anybody use discover Amex and Bum Bum Bum Apple Pay so people can actually use their Apple Pay on their computers or their phones in order to skirt the whole visa Mastercard thing and pay through their Apple products. Then there's bank transfers, which is ACH or EFT. And now it also allows [00:33:30] your clients to pay through PayPal and Venmo and Venmo. Now friends don't let friends use Venmo. Don't do it. But if you're if you're not doing business to business services, if you're doing business to client, then hey, you know, I know that the rest of the world uses it, but we all know as bookkeepers that Venmo does not integrate with QuickBooks online, and there's no way to reconcile it except for logging into your clients Venmo account. So [00:34:00] that's why I say friends don't let friends use Venmo. The really cool.
Dan DeLong: Part about this is that, um, you know, the business doesn't necessarily need to have a business PayPal account or a business Venmo account to be able to accept those payments, and they don't have to keep track of those payment fees separately, because this will just homogenize the fees underneath the QuickBooks payments fees. And then QuickBooks then handles the handles, the rest of that. [00:34:30] So all of the automagic things that the QuickBooks payments does do, like recording the payments, recording the deposits, allocating the fees, making the deposit reconciled in the bank feed. All of those things are are then done for you rather than. Okay, well let me break out my PayPal for business processing. You know, connect PayPal, which is horrid. You know, the PayPal connection, [00:35:00] especially when you're doing other things with PayPal that you, you might, you know, be doing inside of your business. This keeps the receiving funds separate from that. And I really like it. Um, and then it allows people to still use Venmo as as a payment method of however they're paying for it. But it's now the the business side of of PayPal and Venmo to to kind of get around those people [00:35:30] that have been using it to skirt the fees.
Alicia Katz Pollock: One of the things that I really like about QuickBooks payments is that it does take out the fee in a separate transaction, although interestingly, it doesn't match to the banking feed. So when you're reconciling, you still sometimes have to check them off manually. But I love the fact that it's not taking out lump sums that have the fees subtracted, and making us manage all of that.
Dan DeLong: Net deposit is horrible.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, exactly. Now, [00:36:00] Dan taught me something a couple of weeks ago that I used for the first time this past week, and that is that if you even if you have QuickBooks Merchant services turned on right now, you you have to pay the fees, but if you slide off all the payment methods, then it you get a new option that pops up that says your customer pays the fees. It only gives them ACH, [00:36:30] so it only gives them one option, but they will pay the fee instead. And what I did with this this past week, here's my use case is I always keep all of my clients payment information on file, because I've been doing this for a long time. And that way when I just I consult with somebody, I can just go ahead and run their card. The new invoices have several different payment options that were still in the middle of talking about, but their goal is to have the client [00:37:00] in charge of their own payment information, because when I have it stored, they've had to give it to me. They've either had to give it on the phone, or they used to actually provide a PDF that you would send to the client for the client to fill in with their credit card information, which was not PCI compliant. Right. So while QB payments is PCI compliant, how you were gathering the information could be your noncompliance data leak. Do you have this PDF saved on your hard drive [00:37:30] or in your downloads folder that's not PCI compliant? So the new things that Dan and I are in the middle of talking about are all ways of taking that security step out of your hands and making sure that your client's data is protected.
Alicia Katz Pollock: But the inconvenience is that I, I don't do are I my clients all pay me at the moment that I do the service. And so it's been very, very helpful for me to have all that information [00:38:00] on file. Well, when it came time for me to do my invoicing this month, I had three different clients getting their annual reviews whose credit cards had expired over the past year, and so I couldn't run the credit card, which meant that I now had to reach out to them and get the information. So what I did was turn off the payment information and send them the invoice so that they could still pay it, and they could put in their payment information and they [00:38:30] could pay the fees instead of me. And in the email itself, I wrote in there, you're welcome to pay this yourself if you want to save on the fees. Give us a call and give us your new your new payment information, your updated credit card information so that we can update our systems. And then you won't have to pay the fees. We'll pay the fees. And sure enough, I got three phone calls from people updating their information and was able to get it in my system.
Dan DeLong: So [00:39:00] it was it was kind of a prod to to update the information.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Yes, exactly. So that worked in my favor. So that was really cool.
Dan DeLong: To see that. Yeah. That's that's an interesting. Now, um, you know, for all of those people who are keeping score at home, when you invoice through through QuickBooks and they pay, it's it's a, it's a it's called an invoiced rate. And that's the fee that's associated by by QuickBooks payments. [00:39:30] When you automatically charge the credit card. That's considered a key to entered rate because it is not even though it's a stored card and whatnot, it actually puts it at a higher, higher rate. So that's just again, something to keep in mind when you are charging credit cards and collecting payments inside of the invoicing module. How you collect it may may determine what you actually get paid or charged. I should say.
Alicia Katz Pollock: That's [00:40:00] a good point, because that does mean that me having the credit card stored in my system, I am paying the higher keyed rate versus sending them the invoice and having them pay. So I guess the question is, is the fees that I'm saving worth the time to run collections or not?
Dan DeLong: Yeah. And that's the thing, is that are you needing to take the time to, to follow up with people to make sure that they pay in a timely manner, or is knowing that that [00:40:30] card was charged and you're going to that starts the money movement? Is that that peace of mind worth the 0.5% or whatever it ends up being, being the difference between charging and getting them to to pay on their side.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, I think it's like closer to 0.2. And I would definitely say that maybe the buck difference at at the outside is absolutely worth me not or my, my staff not having to make phone calls.
Dan DeLong: Yeah.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. Continuing down, we're still [00:41:00] in the payments section of the invoice and the payment options. The next one is Tips and Managing Tips. So there is a tip slider. And when you turn it on, you have the question of who gets tipped. Is it only you? In which case it will count the tip as income, so it will create a tips income on your chart of accounts on your PNL. Or if you choose your team, if this tip is going out to your staff, then the tips are created as a liability account, and then it's up to you to either [00:41:30] include them on your payroll or cash them out and then record it in your QuickBooks. How you actually pay the tips out to your team. And then once you have made that that choice, then it gives you the option of including it on all the future invoices or just this one invoice. Below that, there's a Payment Details Manage tab, and the manage tab opens up a new window and takes you into your payments settings so that you can actually go. Instead of hitting [00:42:00] gear and account and settings and then payments, this takes you straight into that section, which is fabulous. And here you can make sure that your payments are going into the right checking account. And keep in mind, by the way, that this is where a lot of people get in trouble is if they opened up a QuickBooks checking account. Sometimes the merchant services map automatically there, but there's two places. There's the bank, and then there's a chart of accounts mapping down below.
Alicia Katz Pollock: And if you have them mapped to [00:42:30] your operating account and it's really going to your QuickBooks checking account, you see the payments in your checking account. But when you go to reconcile, there's nothing there. And so this is a kind of a nice troubleshooting moment. Now continuing down still in the payment options section, there is an option to add in a deposit. And when you turn on the deposit slider it adds a new deposit field to your invoice. [00:43:00] And when I click on the manage link that's there, it gives me the ability to actually say what the deposit is. What's the amount? What's the payment method? What's the reference and where is that deposit going? This is more like a first payment on an invoice than an actual customer deposit, because it does not go to a liability account. And this has always been on the on the invoices. But this way it's a [00:43:30] little bit more transparent because what turning on the deposit field in the invoice does, is it kind of turns it into a blend of an invoice and a sales receipt, both at the same time, where you have an invoice and the deposit acts as a first payment. So it can be like when you see it in your banking feed or in your register, it gets a little confusing because there's no sales receipt. Wait, how did this come from an invoice? And that's what it was. That's how it got there.
Dan DeLong: Yeah. It's um, it's always kind [00:44:00] of been the that that term of deposit, as you know, people on the accounting side of things like this is really not a deposit, but a lot of, um, businesses were recording payments anyway as deposits. So this takes care of that and automatically applies it to to the invoice rather than having a open payment just sitting out there.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Right. And if you're not [00:44:30] familiar with the idea of taking deposits as a liability for future work to be performed, I'd actually teach it in a couple of my classes. It's in my tricky situations class and my projects and job costing class. And because if you are taking a deposit that you might have to return to the client or you're not doing the work yet, it's unearned revenue. And when you're in that situation, this is not the field to take your deposit.
Dan DeLong: And certainly not confused with, uh, bank deposits.
Alicia Katz Pollock: And also not anything [00:45:00] related to bank deposits at all. So don't get confused by that field. Okay. The next slider is a discount slider that will map to discounts given as a contra income account so that you can separate the the discounts that you give on an invoice. When you turn it on, it gives you the option of taking a discount as a percentage or as of a dollar amount, and it will do it off of the whole invoice. There's also both a checkbox [00:45:30] and a little, I don't know what you would call it, like a little arrow bracket that allows you to swap the discount and the sales tax. So is the discount before sales tax is calculated, or is the discount after sales tax is calculated so you can pick which order they actually happen in. Next up is whether or not you want the shipping fee to show up again. I mentioned it earlier. The shipping is mapped to a shipping income category, but if you're not doing any shipping, you [00:46:00] can just turn it off and then below that is an option to set up multi-currency. I don't want to go there. Do you have anything you want to do about it?
Dan DeLong: Uh, yeah. That is that is more of a tricky situation. And if you have if you need it, you need it. If you don't, don't worry about it.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Yep. Okay. And if people want me to cover multi-currency later on, we can we can do that in a separate session.
Dan DeLong: Mhm.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Okay. So we are still in the manage pane [00:46:30] on the right hand side. We have finished talking about the payment options box. And now we are heading down to the design box. The design box right now is really really rudimentary and just version one. The there's two sections. There's the modernized template which is the one that's built for this new invoice experience. And then there's also other templates which are the classic custom form styles that we've had for years. If you have used and created [00:47:00] a custom form style that has your colors and your logo and your layout and everything turned on and all the fancy features that it comes with. You can still use it, but it limits the features available in the modern invoice. If you want all the features of the modern invoice, you have to set your template aside and use their one layout called modern, which only has. It's not customizable yet. I do know it's on [00:47:30] their roadmap to make it customizable, but right now it doesn't.
Dan DeLong: The only this is one of those step step backs in order to in order to step forward. You know, and this is not the first time that sales form customization has undergone this renaissance. Right. And the same thing happened where there was, hey, we were doing all this stuff just fine. Why did you kind of scale it back? So the things that you're used to now that you can't [00:48:00] do in the modern invoice, uh, style is, you know, again, it's it's one of those things where they have to lay the foundation before they start to build the wall or the ceiling. Right.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Yep. The only things that you have control over in the modern invoice is just the color and the font. And you can pick one of their colors, or you can put in your own hex code for your branded colors. That's totally fine. And there's also a slider for printer friendly, which basically [00:48:30] just overrides the colors when you print. And it makes everything black, which kind of takes away the fun. So pick your color, pick your font, the benefit, the reason why you might want to do this. It shows up on the upper left hand side, where we've been in the edit mode on the invoice where we're actually working in it. But once you've gone to the modern invoice layout, now you have extra views. You can see what the email looks like. There's a button called Email View. [00:49:00] There's a button called Payer View where you can see what the customer sees in the portal. When they click Pay Now and they go click on the invoice and go to the payments portal. And then there's a PDF view which is what it looks like if they print it out. And there's really not much to see here. Like I said, the only thing you can control is the font and the the overall color. So some people find it really limiting, [00:49:30] but you know it being able to see the customer's experience can be handy.
Dan DeLong: That's rather than sending a, you know, a CC BCC to yourself to see what the customer sees. It's nice to see it again all in one place, which is really again, back to that theme of where you know why these changes are taking place. Because as you as you've shown on the screen, when you choose other template, you lose those two tabs of [00:50:00] Email View and PDF view, so you don't necessarily get to see what on the screen, what they what, what the customer would experience. So when they say I never got it or I didn't know where to click, you could see, okay, well it was a blue button or whatever it is that, that they, that you could, uh, you could tell them what, what they should have been experiencing without having to send it to yourself and then search for the email [00:50:30] that you got buried.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. And if you don't need any of those, just go ahead and keep using your custom forms that you have always used. But this is something that I'm sure we can look forward to getting getting figured out in the future. And the last thing in the design section is that you do have the opportunity to add a payment link to the PDF so that they can still get the piece of paper and still have a link to pay. Okay. The next section is for making it [00:51:00] recurring. And this is also one of the things that inspired Dan and I to do this episode is there are new options here that are kind of mission critical, a recurring invoice, and a recurring payment. The recurring invoice really just is make using the standard make recurring options. It's just now you can do it right while you're looking at the invoice. You don't have to go out of the invoice to to [00:51:30] to make it recurring. The other option is actually new and important, and that is that there's a new option for recurring payment. And Dan, do you want to take this? I know that you have been playing with this.
Dan DeLong: Yeah. So, um, this was this was an option, um, when you emailed a customer invoice, but if they never saw it, they never did it right. And it was a whole idea [00:52:00] of when you emailed somebody an invoice, they could select the option to make a recurring, make the payment a recurring payment, and then QuickBooks would actually create record the invoice automatically and take the payment for you and charge the whatever it was on file. But the recurring payment now allows you, allows that process to be more automated and initiated from from you. So [00:52:30] when you set this up as a recurring payment, then you'll be able to, um, have QuickBooks do that ahead of time. Um, I can't remember what the term was that they called it when, uh, auto pay, that's what it was. It just came to me. Um, it was an auto pay feature. Now it's allowing you more control to be able to set up that auto pay autopay, rather than relying on your customer to set that up on your behalf.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Right. And [00:53:00] in addition, it's really replacing scheduled sales receipts, which is when if you did have a recurring payment, you would have to get their credit card information, create the scheduled sales receipt, and then let it run. And then, you know, every month it would go ahead and charge the customer and send send the email. This is the like a sales receipt, except that you don't have to gather the payment information. Now you can make a recurring invoice and the customer approves it to auto [00:53:30] pay it in the future. So it's kind of the best of both worlds.
Dan DeLong: Yeah, I think I think ultimately what this is doing is doing the same thing that it did before, but it's automatically checking the auto pay functionality so that they don't have to, you know, find it. You don't have to tell them where it is. It's just preselecting that option to do the autopay, and then everything else then gets, you know, the following interval, whatever that happens to be [00:54:00] will be pre pre-done for you.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So I think it's a really elegant solution for PCI compliance and automation. Okay. In this section there's also options for print later and send later. Although honestly I don't I've never used them. I've never known why you would. So maybe it's just at the end of the day you do all your invoicing in a batch. I'm not sure.
Dan DeLong: Yeah, maybe you've got somebody else, you know, doing, [00:54:30] doing that that for you. Or when you've separated tasks with different people, you could put them in that queue to send later.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Got it. All right. Thank you for that use case. Okay. Then you also.
Dan DeLong: Everybody's a solopreneur.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Not everybody. Okay. Some people have separation of duties, don't they? Yeah, Yeah. Okay. And then the next section is the reminders, which traditionally were found under the settings that you had to go to Account and [00:55:00] Settings and then into sales to access the reminders. But now you have the ability to set up reminders for this client. Reminders still are blanket across all clients. You can't send a set up invoice reminders for just one invoice. Boy, am I looking forward to the day where it's granular, because right now I can't even use it because I don't want everybody to get reminded about all of their open transactions that I have on my side from my record keeping.
Dan DeLong: Exactly. Yeah. It's [00:55:30] a it's one of those all or nothing things. And, and usually there's not an all use case. It's right. It's always one person that that really needs a reminder.
Alicia Katz Pollock: So into it if you're listening, we desperately want reminders to be set up on an invoice by invoice basis. Desperately. Okay. The last thing on this manage side on an unsaved invoice. I know we've been talking for almost an hour, but we have more. Still is. You now have access to two reports right from the [00:56:00] invoice. One is open invoices. And what that will do is save your save it and then take you to go see all of the open invoices for that particular client. And then there's also an all transactions report which will open up in a will open up a report of all of the transactions for that particular client. So that's nice that you can do that right from here without having to navigate [00:56:30] out to the reports center and go generate those reports.
Dan DeLong: All right. Let's save it so we can.
Alicia Katz Pollock: See.
Dan DeLong: What's new on the saved one.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah. So now once you have saved the invoice everything that we just described is still there. But you have this new box at the top with the status. And right now mine's reading status opened. And when I click on that I can click on activity. And now it shows me the different stages and the dates when different people have interacted [00:57:00] with it. Now note that this is both you and the client definitely put in feedback that we need to distinguish when I opened it versus when the client saw it and opened it. But basically you have opened, sent, viewed, paid and deposited so you can see where what stage any invoice is in.
Dan DeLong: Those statuses are good because then when they say, oh, I never got it. Well yeah, you did open it um, [00:57:30] yesterday. You got it three times.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Yeah, exactly. I had somebody actually say that they never saw it. And I'm like, oh yeah, you opened it at 8:00 three days ago. Okay. All right. So that completes the tour of the modern invoices. Now, the very last thing I need to say about it is there's a feedback link right on the far right hand side of the invoice. If there's anything that we have indicated that you also think is a good idea, like making reminders gradual granular [00:58:00] for the invoice, please go up to feedback and flood that feedback and let them know what you want to change. They are actively listening. This is still in active development. The development has settled down, but they're still in the process of making sure that it does what we need it to do.
Dan DeLong: Yeah, I talked to them at um, at QuickBooks. Sorry. Intuit connect. Um, because, um, there were some changes or, you know, undocumented program features. We [00:58:30] would call them glitches or bugs that that were my, you know, some of my customers were, were wanting to have addressed. And the challenge was they needed everybody to get on this new experience before they got to fixing some of the things that were that were needing attention. So I think that's coming to a close. I think most people are in this experience now. So now they can act on the, the, the flood of feedback [00:59:00] that that has been. And, you know, for the past 18 months, we've been sending information and feedback on it. They've been taking care of some of the more mission critical things. Now they'll be able to further enhance enhance this experience. So that's um, we're in that phase now. So they'll actually be able to more rapidly address the feedback that we're sending them.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Excellent. Okay. So let's go ahead and get this wrapped up [00:59:30] Dan what's going on in your world?
Dan DeLong: Oh well, I'm still doing the, uh, the School of Bookkeeping and the QuickBooks Power Hour. But more importantly, we are about to hitch up and go to the Super Bowl this weekend. This is a bucket list item that I've never done. Um, we are driving literally by New Orleans this weekend, so we we found a perfect time to hey, my home team is in the Super Bowl. So let's go go Eagles.
Alicia Katz Pollock: So yeah Eagles and [01:00:00] Dan and I are actually originally from the same neck of the woods.
Dan DeLong: So Alicia what's going on in your world.
Alicia Katz Pollock: Well just this past week I taught my intro to Bookkeeping and accounting class, which is a zero level class that's really designed for your clients who are starting up their own businesses and don't know what it takes to be a business owner. But it's also fabulous for beginning bookkeepers. You know, if you're a side hustle bookkeeper where you're just getting started as a bookkeeper, this is a really, really good [01:00:30] class for making sure that you have all your all your ducks in a row or all your eagles in a row. And then coming up on March 4th is my banking center class. And, you know, for those of you who know me well, I'm a bank feeds geek. I love the banking feeds, and so I am literally going to comb through every single feature in the banking feeds and the whole banking center, all the tabs across the top. We go deep dive on rules, the receipts, functions, [01:01:00] literally all of it. And we even touch on reconciling. And that is a three hour class. So you can imagine how deep I'm going on the banking feeds class. So if you're interested in.
Dan DeLong: Taking three hours is going to give you enough time.
Alicia Katz Pollock: I can firehose you in three hours okay. So if you're interested in that class, the link will be in the show notes for both of those two classes. And you can always check us out at Learn Royal Comm. So [01:01:30] that wraps it up for today. We will see you in the next one. Hi everyone.
