How Do I Create Repeat Billings?

By using our Billing Manager Pro Deluxe or Inventory Pro Deluxe you can setup the software to create invoices for you automatically. Each program has a repeat billing module built into the program. This makes it very easy for you to create invoices which you can generate daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly or in any other time frame you need. We have a lot of customers who use this feature to bill their customers for apartments, storage, internet services, rentals, pagers, lawn and pool maintenance and many other reoccurring products and services.

First you create a new invoice. You enter the customer, products and pricing. Then you turn it into a repeat billing by choosing "Repeat Billing Setup" from the Invoice Menu in the Invoice Manager and tell the program how often to generate the repeat billing and what the starting day will be. This will turn that invoice into a "Repeat Billing Master Invoice". These "template invoices" do not do anything to your customers account balances. They are simply used to create the repeat billings from. Only the generated invoices will effect your customer account balances. There is much more detail in our software's online help about setting up a repeat billing and using the Repeat Billing Wizard, but for this writing, we simply want to say that you will need to setup a master invoice for each customer that you will be creating a repeat billing for. This method allows you to repeat bill some or all of your customers, sell different products and services and have different pricing for each customer. You can even create multiple repeat billings for the same customer. Once you have all of your repeat billing masters setup, there is also a report called "Repeat Billing List" in the Reports Manager which you can use to manage all of your repeat billings. The report tells you who is being invoiced, how often the invoices are created, when the next creation date will be and more.

Then, once a month, daily, weekly, or whatever you need, you run the "Repeat Billing Wizard" to create the invoices! Each invoice generated is fully editable and deletable, just like any regular invoice. Once the invoices are generated, you can either batch print them or batch email them, and you are DONE with your billing cycle. That was easy! Our Inventory Pro Deluxe software also allows you to batch email PDF invoices and PDF Customer Statements! Why not visit our web site today and try it out for free!

Quotes and Estimates

Using Inventory Pro Deluxe or Billing Manager Pro Deluxe, you can easily create Quotes or Estimates and later turn them into invoices.

When creating a new invoice, there is a check box in the bottom left corner which reads "make this a quote". If you check this box, the invoice actually becomes a quote. Although a quote is created/edited just like an invoice, a quote does not effect the customer and Accounts Receivable balances. You can run your Quotes Report to view and manage your open quotes.

If your customer later accepts your quote, simply edit the quote and uncheck the "make this a quote" check box and the quote will be turned into an invoice, deducting all items from your stock balance, unless they are marked as "non-stock" items. You can make any changes to the final invoice as needed.

It is very simple to offer quotes/estimates. Why not download our software and give it a try. You have nothing to loose and everything to gain!

Using Automatic Discounts and Sub-Totals

(Click on picture for larger view.) You can easily add discounts and/or sub-totals on your invoices. You can issue discounts using any percentage and you can have multiple discounts and sub-totals on a single invoice. For example, you may have a group of products on an invoice that you want to issue a 10% discount for, and a group of products on the same invoice and issue a 20% discount to those items. Likewise, you may have multiple groups of products you want to sub-total. For example, you may want to sub-total all LABOR items and all PARTS items. You can easily do one or both on the same invoice! NOTE: The discounts and sub-totals only apply to invoices, not Purchase Orders. When ordering items, simply use the correct purchase price, even if the vendor has extended you a discount.

Lets say you want to issue a 10% discount on an entire invoice. Simply create a new invoice and add all the line-items (products) to that invoice. Then add the DISCOUNT10 product to that invoice as the last line item. The program will automatically create a 10% discount line item and reduce the invoice total by 10%. This happens because you placed the discount line-item under all the line-items you wanted to apply a 10% discount to. For example, if you have 4 line-items on an invoice, and then add another line-item as a 10% discount, all 4 lines will be totaled and a 10% discount applied to the invoice for them. Discounts and Sub-Totals work the same way in this regard. All line items listed above them will be used to calculate the discount or sub-total, until a previous sub-total or discount is reached. For example, if line items 1, 2, 3 and 4 are listed and line item 5 applies a 10% discount, lines 1 to 4 will be totaled and a 10% discount applied to them. If you then wanted to add more line items 6, 7 and 8, and applied a 20% discount on line 9, only line items 6, 7 and 8 would be used to calulate the 20% discount, as line 5 was used to apply a different discount (10%) to lines 1 through 4. Another example, if you add a discount or sub-total on line item 1 of your invoice, they will both show ZERO, because there are no line-items above them to calculate the discount or sub-total for.

Demo Movie Examples - Free Trial Downloads

Have you seen our demo movie examples? They show features such as creating a new invoice, posting a customer payment, viewing statements and reports and more. View our programs in action without downloading our trial versions. However, we highly recommend you download one of our trial versions, as they provide you with the FULL program, limited only by our trial period.

As a matter of fact, you can download our trial versions and get started today! If you decide to order, we will send you the latest version on CD with a printed users manual. It will install over your trial version, leaving any information you have entered into the trial version. It's totally painless (and totally anonymous) and a very effective way to show you the power of our programs! Go ahead and download a free trial version today. You have absolutely nothing to loose and everything to gain.

The Power of Key Codes

One of the great features of our software is the key code field. This is a user-defined field and you can type anything you want into this field. This makes the key code field a very powerful, customizable tool for you, as you can sort most of your reports by this field. You can also filter your reports on your key codes. The key code field is available when you create a new invoice or purchase order, or setup a new product. There is also a key code report in the Report Wizard.

For example, our customers ask us how to track sales by sales person. When creating an invoice, you can use the key code field to enter a sales persons initials, employee ID or other text to identify the sales person. Then run your key code report which will sub-total your sales by key code. Simple!

Another example is classifying your inventory by key code. For example, you may sell tires and use the key code field to enter the tire sizes, i.e. 14inch, 15inch, 16inch, etc. Then you can run your inventory report, sorted by key code, to group and subtotal your tires by size. You could also filter your report with the word "tire" (assuming you have the word "tire" in your product code, product description or key code) to see only the tires on your inventory report. Very powerful!

Another example could be grouping your sales by cash, credit card, check or money order payments. On a new invoice, you could type in "cash", "CC", "check", "MO", etc. and sort your Invoice Register by key code.

The possibilities are unlimited! The trick is to make your key codes long enough so that your reports can be filtered by your code. For example, a key code of "12" is no good, as this matches to many items, such as dates, invoice, customer numbers and product codes. A much better key code would be "tire12" or "sales12" or "order12" or "emp12", etc., depending on what you are trying to filter. Create good (lengthy) key codes and they will provide you with valuable information.

What fields are searched when you filter your reports? That depends on the report. Next to the report filter is a help button (the question mark). Click on that to find out which fields are searched for the filter you enter by report. The key codes will provide you with user-defined custom sorting and filtering capabilities. Let your imagination run wild! Our key codes and report filter can provide with very powerful tools you can't find in any other software!

PDF Invoices, Purchase Orders and Customer Statements

Using FF Inventory Pro Deluxe, you can batch email your invoices, purchase orders and customer statements in PDF and/or plain-text formats. All of our other products can also produce PDF files, however, you can process them only one at a time, which works fine for many of our customers. The batch-email in our other products offers plain-text emails only.

The beauty of PDF (portable document format) files is that you can email them to your customers, and when they print or view them, it will look exactly like it would when printed on a printer. This means all of the graphics such as your company logo, fonts, lines and colors will be displayed. It is a much better look than plain-text emails could ever be and with the free Adobe PDF viewer, millions of people all over the world are able to view your PDF.

However, each format has it's positive and negative features. Using left-justified, plain text, word-wrapping format allows it to be read by ALL email readers. People around the world have their email readers setup in MANY different ways. Some block emails with file attachments (PDF's). Some block HTML invoices and only have their email reader setup for plain text emails only, or use an email reader that can't process HTML. Many use different fonts and font sizes to display their emails and/or use a small viewing window to read their emails. Therefore, using plain text means that the majority of people who receive your email will be able to (A) receive it and (B) to view it. Since we do not send our email as an attachment, all email readers blocking attachments will receive our plain-text emails. Since we do not use HTML, all email readers that are blocking HTML will be able to receive and view our invoices, using whatever font they choose. We added the PDF invoice feature so you can email your invoices to your customers using graphics and colors, but note that any of your customers who are blocking file attachments, will not receive your PDF invoices. Which format you use is up to you.

You can email some customer invoices and print for others.

The email address for the customer is the key. The "Include Customers without E-Mail Address" option will cause the system to send e-mail for ALL customers, even if the customer does not have an email address entered in their customer setup. When this option is turned on, all email for customers without an e-mail address will be sent to your return e-mail address, alerting you that this customer has an empty email address in their customer setup. If this option is turned OFF, customers without an email address will NOT be sent. They will not be marked as printed either, so you will need to run the batch print option to print out these remaining invoices. This allows you to have some customers who receive their invoices (or statements) by email and some customers who have their invoices (or statements) printed and mailed. This is a powerful option which allows you to interact with your customers by postal mailing their invoices, while trying to save money on postage costs by sending email to your customers who have an email address.