Cost plus contracts and invoicing

Well, again, thanks everyone for joining in for our deep dive webinar today. If you haven't been part of these in the past, if you haven't attended in the past, what we do is, twice a month, I'll do a deep dive webinar on a different topic inside nullify where instead of doing the high level overview that we like to do, for just kind of welcome to nullify type of, sessions, this is more of a let's give as much information as we can on a single topic type of session. And today's topic is gonna be on cost plus contracts and invoices. We covered the standard fixed price flow. We like to cover AIA, but each contract type has its own little quirks differences inside Noify. And so, I like to spend a little extra time with cost plus because it does work significantly different, from a lot of the other contracted invoice workflows in Noify. So we'll be going through the idea of how to set these up and how the workflows actually function inside Noify when we're using these types of jobs. If you haven't, bid these in the past, we haven't spoken. My name is Taryn. I manage customer experience at Noify, mainly just, in charge of making sure that you guys are as happy with Noify as possible. So whether it's from an understanding standpoint, from a product standpoint, you know, you'll see me jump in on success, support sales calls here and there just to make sure that things are running nice and smoothly. And so that's kinda how we started this webinar series is to make sure that, when you have your subscription with Noify, you're getting as much out of it as possible. And so, hopefully, these series are, useful to help you, learn different pieces of the system that might help your day to day use of Noify. We'll start today with our standard slide deck and go through some thoughts or concepts like what our cost plus contracts, how we build them, so the different types of deliverables that are available, different types of cost plus contracts that we can support inside Notify. And then we'll go through the process of actually tracking the costs and invoicing. Once I get through my slide deck, I'll pull up my Notify account, this is gonna be the majority of the section itself. It's just kind of, explaining, what this, actually looks like in Notify in practice. And we'll do a q and a at the end where I can answer any questions that maybe my normal workflow didn't, answer for you. Through the session, if you have questions, you can throw them in the Zoom q and a. That's when we are going to be responding to anything that requires a longer form response. But if you have, any questions that are thrown in that are maybe quicker to answer, my associate Vin usually joins in and, just responds to a bunch of the quicker questions as well so we can make sure that every question that gets thrown in the q and a does get answered. So, again, just use that Zoom q and a, and we'll make sure that we respond to everything, you have, in here. All that being said, I'll go ahead and get us kicked off, and we will start with the idea of what is a cost plus contract. The simple answer is that a cost plus contract is one where instead of quoting a price, we quote a rate. In our fixed price contracts, we can make a deal with the customer where we say, we will complete the entire scope of work for $10,000, $5,000, whatever the actual dollar figure is gonna be. In our cost plus contracts, we create a contract that's more along the lines of, I will charge you 10% more than I spend. So instead of having this concept of we are going to keep invoicing until we hit the agreed upon, final price. This is we will invoice as we spend money. What is different with this is how cost driven it is to receive revenue. In theory, in a fixed price contract, you don't actually have to incur any cost to invoice, and incurring cost doesn't generate an invoice. With our cost plus contracts, true to the name, we need our cost in order to get that plus, which is our profit on the job. So we do see people who go through workflows of setting up a cost plus contract, and before they start working on it, wonder why they can't invoice any of, let's just say, those information in the budget. It's because you haven't actually incurred the actual cost yet, so we don't create the items that can then be billed to the customer as our revenue. There's a variety of cases where these are used, and I'll say most of the time people are... Come to know if I already know which of these types of contracts they need. It's not really a last second decision. But when it comes to cost plus contracts, they do end up being, in a sense, safer for a contractor because your profitability is built into the terms itself. You know, if you say, however much it costs me, I will add a markup and charge you, then there's no real way to spend more than you make because everything that you're spending is automatically passed along to the customer with profit included, afterwards. As a result of this, sometimes it could be less appealing to customers. They will find more comfort in having a fixed price of I know exactly how much I'm gonna spend. But in cases where you can charge cost plus, there is some benefit to having this type of secure workflow that says, I know exactly what my, final margin will be at the end of this project. On the other end of the spectrum, if you end up coming in, under your expected cost, you do result in less overall profit on the project because you didn't have as much to mark up. So, again, there's pros and cons to any contract style, but I always like to kind of just explain that difference because it it does come up from time to time. Like, why would I ever use a cost plus, or why wouldn't I ever use a cost plus? You'll see that people will call cost plus contracts time and materials. They're not necessarily, different. They're, not mutually exclusive things. Time and materials is a type of cost plus billing, really. And in Noify, you see that we throw this slash other after the, cost plus when we're building this contract. That's because we can get into other types of billing that are, part of this contract style in Noify that aren't necessarily always cost plus or time material, I should say. And to go into that a little bit deeper, when we're setting up a contract in our cost plus slash other style in Noify, we'll give you four different options of how you can bill inside this contract. And the standard one is that time materials. It means I'm gonna see how much time my staff takes. I'm gonna see what materials I buy, and then I'm gonna add my markup and charge the customer accordingly. As you're incurring the cost, we create what we call a billable, which is an item that can be invoiced to the customer. We can go into workflows where we separate the billable from the cost, things like that. The idea is that as I am entering time, as I am entering material or any vendor cost, really, any cost, It is generating items that can be billed to the customer. Inside our cost plus slash other contracts, we also do allow you to create fixed price line items. Just because we allow them inside this contract style, it doesn't mean that you should lean on this contract style all the time, because, hey, it's usually fixed price, but sometimes there's time material. If you're mainly doing fixed price, the functionality that's available for that inside our fixed price contracts in Novi is gonna be a little stronger. So I wouldn't recommend trying to always use cost plus slash other if you're mainly doing fixed, We do have that option, and it's usually there for things like a, signing payment that's required. So, yes, we bill cost plus, but in order to start the work, we collect a thousand dollars just to, start the job or just to, acquire us as the company doing the work. Things like that, end up being very, handy for our fixed price line items here. Similarly, we can have a recurring fixed item, which is the idea of every month while the contract's active, we send an invoice for this much, every week, every two months, every year, however you're gonna set this up. It's kind of like having a retainer of, hey. Yes. We do bill time and materials, but we also bill monthly for, just the retention of our services that locks in that time material rate, something along those lines. And so after the recurring fixed comes in, and this is where we're really, again, building out this concept of, yes, it's a cost plus contract, but there's a lot of custom billing. This is agreeing upon a rate at which we will perform the work as opposed to a price at which we will perform the work. Then we get... When we get into variable, this is where we're getting very custom, which is billing per unit. So it's not for everything I buy, I charge you this much. It's whenever I do one of these units, I will charge you for it. So if you do something like, this comes into road striping often, for every foot of striping we do, for every mile striping we do, maybe I install guardrails, lampposts. If I have a rate that I bill per unit completed, that's where variable comes into play, where I could say every month, we'll see how many of this item we completed, and I'll bill you this rate for each of those items. And so all of these together can be combined in one contract that comes down to, our cost plus slash other format inside Notepad. And when we work with cost plus, there are different formats that we can use that all fall inside the standard cost plus logic and rules, but they have some slightly different behavior of how we're communicating with the customer more than anything else. So you'll see the option to either quote a total price or not quote a total price. The standard option of not quoting it is where we truly just say, here's the rate. Here's what we charge in markup for everything we buy. Here is our hourly rate. We'll see how much we spend, but this is how much you'll be charged based off of what we end up spending. If you quote a total price, you still have those rules of here's our hourly rate. Here's our markup. But what happens sometimes is a customer will be hesitant to sign this very open ended project because they don't know how much they'll end up spending by the end of it. So what we could do is send them this peace of mind number that says, yes. We do charge $90 an hour. Yes. We do charge a 50% markup on everything. Here's a ballpark number of what I think that'll end up coming out to. Now that number isn't the same thing as a fixed price. It doesn't become an invoiceable number. It doesn't automatically incur the cost. It's just a way for me to communicate to my customer, hey. Here's how much we do expect to charge by the end of the project. Once it's live, that number is a bit of a, you know, a fake number in that I still have to generate cost in order to invoice. We still are, going to be working on this standard cost plus workflow. But, again, that number is just a way for us to communicate something, ahead of time so that, the customer feels a little more comfortable signing something so they are not worried about, well, what if you decide to spend millions of dollars? We're not ready for that. We're kind of assuming it'll be closer to 10,000. We could say it'll be around 11,000 based off of our expected number. If I spend less, we charge less. If I spend more, we charge more. But here's our ballpark number. Then another similar type of that workflow is the idea... We'll call it transparent contracting, where the same general rule applies of I'm going to charge based off of how much I spend, but I will provide you with a total price, that is expected. And I'll also let you know how much I'm charging in markup, along the way. This also allows for a schedule values, invoice, which we see a lot of times people wanna use. If you're tuned into our standard fixed price, we cover the concept of the schedule values invoice, which is I don't just send an invoice of here's a thousand dollars of this item. It's a whole breakdown of I'm invoicing a thousand for framing. I told you it would be 5,000. I invoiced 2,000 in the past. Now there's, 2,000 remaining. Just giving that whole breakdown of, how much is remaining in balance of contract. Since cost plus doesn't have a remaining balance because it's open ended up until you, finish the work, The schedule values here is more, hey. Here's how much I told you that you would end up spending on this. Here's how much I've charged you so far. And so you can give that breakdown along with... And here's how much I'm charging for my own personal overhead profit, my fees that go into this, contract. If you have picky customers, sometimes they do like this type of, workflow so they can see your cost versus budget through the life cycle of the job, and they can see how much they're paying you. Again, it depends on who your customer is. Sometimes you just don't wanna share that type of information because it gives them a, little bit more opportunity to, pick everything apart and how much you're charging, but it does give them a lot of information. So the more savvy customers, do often appreciate this type of flow. Now when we are actually creating the invoices, you know, we've now incurred our cost at this time to invoice. All of those billable items that are created will automatically show up on the invoices that we create. The actual tracking of the cost works just like any other project to nullify. I create purchase orders. I log bills, my employees at your time. All of this still happens in the normal workflow. But as I create something like a purchase order for 250 feet of wire, this then creates a billable item for 250 feet of wire plus the markup. Once you've invoiced it, we then remove that billable. We, mark it as this has now been invoiced so you don't ever, end up invoicing things twice. And if you are in a situation where you say, well, I need to retain the cost, but I'm not gonna bill the customer, you do have the ability to do things like deleting a billable while retaining the cost so that, you could still see how much you're spending on the job, but not actually go through the process of deleting... Sorry, without actually invoicing the customer for it. So we still get a nice accurate cost versus revenue comparison without requiring that all cost is revenue just because it's a cost plus contract. And when we put together our cost plus invoices, we can create groups of items as well so that instead of just having a massive list of here's all of our cost since the last invoice, You know, please just expect us... You know, be ready to pay this. If you wanna make it a little bit more digestible, you can say, here's all of the materials we bought. Here's the label we bought, or here's, all of this, type of person's hours. Here's all of this type of person's hours. Do the grouping for the sake of, making it just a little bit easier for the customer to read the invoice so they, are a little bit, more at ease when they're, than paying the invoice. So, I'll pull up this demonstration, pull up my account here. Cool. And set up a new project so we can walk through this workflow and, how it's all going to flow through the system. I'll set up my job cost plus webinar. I'm type in today, Terren. 10:20, And we'll choose a client cost plus. And you'll see that when we do cost plus, we default to advanced. This is the standard workflow, because the concept of budgeting before creating a cost plus contract doesn't always flow, correctly because we budget usually to plan and then markup and quote a price to the client. With cost plus, since the profit is built in, we usually don't need to focus as much on the budget ahead of time. But I'll cover all of these different workflows as well. You may see that your account is locked to advance, you don't have the ability to change it. If you're in complex workflows and have a need, we do have the ability to update your account to, choose job costing styles. But even with this advanced, I could still create a budget if I need, and have a lot of other power around that. So I'll start and create my job, and I'm gonna choose this do not quote total price as my first, version just to, start with a very simple, iteration of this. Now a lot of the contract stuff is gonna be very similar, where it's... You can put in a contract number. If the customer has a PO number, you can call out an estimated start and end date. You can request a deposit and have that credited back to the job. I have the ability to write in a scope of work, a general project description. But you'll see now that instead of building deliverables here, we are building... Or sorry. Instead of building line items, we're building what we call deliverables, things that we are providing the customer, and their corresponding rate. So I could say, add a new deliverable. And, before I get into the time materials, I'll go through some of my other options. So fixed, I could say, we are going to, require upon signing, like, a signing... I don't know if bonus is a good word for it, but why not? And I could say, on signing, we will require a thousand dollars just to start the job. You can see that we also have the ability to say this is due when the item is marked as complete or to do this as a percentage of completion. This is more, common in progress invoicing. Again, if you're mainly doing percentage of completion, stick to your fixed price contracts. But for right now, we'll stick with a due on signing. I'll also create a recurring fixed item where I'll call this my retainer, and this is going to be a monthly charge of a $100 for as long as the contract is live. And then I'll set up, by a variable item where I can do things like... Can light installation is a good example. So can lights where for every, light that I install, we charge a $100, and we'll sum that up monthly. And so these are all the non cost plus or non time materials versions of setting up different lines in the contract. Now when I set up a time materials one, let's say miscellaneous services. This is gonna be just generic. It's gonna start by prompting me for an hourly rate. A lot of the times people ask why do we do an hourly rate and not a markup for cost plus jobs on the labor side. Because we work with this loaded labor burden that is a little bit more abstract than the concept of I received a bill, so I add a markup. It's usually easier to just have this hourly rate in the system as a solid number that the customer can lean on. Because when I have a labor burden of this person costs me $67.32 per hour that they work, and that's made up of their salary, benefits, taxes, insurance, training. If I have so much that goes into it, it's harder for me to provide a customer with a a document that's here's why... Here's how much we're spending on labor and what is happening pre markup. So it's usually more straightforward to just say, for every hour we spend, we charge a $100. We do have the ability to get more granular with this, though. It doesn't have to be everything is a $100. I could say, well, if Charles is on-site, it's $1.50. When it's Frank, it's $1.50. If it is Mike, it's 95. And we could set up custom rates per each person. So as these different people track time onto the job, we know what rate to build the customer. To go less into depth than this, but more than just the universal, I can also go based off of role where I say, if it's a foreman, we charge $1.50. If it's a laborer, it's 95. And then anyone who meets these designations could track their time to this, and it can be, put on the invoice accordingly. I'm gonna stick to universal rates for today. It's just a little bit more straightforward. I'll say a $150, and my markup for everything on this is going to be, $50, 50%. And now I have my list of line items that are deliverables and the rates that we charge for them. One thing I do like to mention as well is that this is just one deliverable and one set of rates. Let's just say there's something that is more risky for me. So, you know, let's just say roofing as an example. I can say everything goes in that $1.50 rate. If I'm roofing roofing, we actually charge $2.50 per hour, and the materials actually cost me a a good amount more just to cover myself. It's a 75% markup. Now I can call out as I'm tracking my cost, which of these items I'm going to be costing my, purchase orders, bills, time entries to, and it's gonna know to charge the customer accordingly. The rest of the building of the contract, again, is very similar to what we would do in our standard fixed price. It generates a document for me, and I can send it out for esignature and get it signed. But I'm gonna go ahead and just make this active. And because we used our advanced job costing style, I will now have the ability to have a phase for every item that we, put in the contract, every deliverable in the contract. Now, again, we have the ability to control how things are, billed to the customer based off of where we add them as costs. So miscellaneous services has its own rate. Roofing has its own rate. Things like signing bonus are fixed, so adding cost to this will not create anything that I can bill to the customer. Now, usually, if we do a cost plus that's purely cost plus, if I went to create an invoice right now, nothing would come up because we haven't incurred any cost yet. But we set up some fixed price items, some recurring fix, some variable. So if I go to invoice now, it's gonna go through all of those just to start. The signing bonus is there. My first month's retainer is there, and I could see the can lights are in here. How many lights did we finish? 50 of them, confirm, and I can finalize to start invoicing. Now to go through the real cost plus concepts here, I'll go to my plan and track, and I wanna start generating costs. So miscellaneous services, I'm just gonna use allocate materials to start. We did... You know, what... Whatever it's gonna be. Wire, I used 500 feet of wire, disconnect switches. Man, I really can't type today. We use just two of these. It's all kind of random here. And that is going to add cost to the job. So here's my updated committed cost, and we'll see in just a minute that it also is going to, generate, billables that I can invoice to the customer. Roofing, we have a separate billing rate, so I'll cover that as well. And the same type of concept happens if it's a purchase instead of a, allocation. There's no requirement for it to be any specific type of cost, applied from ABC Supply. I don't know why I'm using lumber on my roof. I guess it could come into play. Let's just say 200 studs here, and I'll add one more thing in just for the sake of it. I don't know why I care about these numbers. They're all kind of nonsense anyway. And I'll add a purchase into the job. Before I get into the invoicing of these items, I'm also gonna generate labor on this job. So I'll enter time. This is for miscellaneous services. I'll key in some hours for, different users in my account. And, again, just to see that separation, I'll also pull in some, roofing hours. And a important thing of note when it comes to cost plus and invoicing for time, we do require that time is approved before invoicing just to make sure no one's accidental twenty four hour entry shows up on someone's invoice and, gets the customer a little bit upset of, hey. This clearly doesn't make sense. Please don't charge us for this. But I'll go ahead and approve this time and go to my job, and I can see now that there is an unbilled value on the job. This is telling me that there's an amount that I have incurred as cost that I haven't billed yet. And you actually have the ability to click on this unbilled number, and know if I will jump into this manage billable item screen filtered to the specific job. And it's gonna say, here are all the items that we are looking to invoice the customer for. Here are the, time entries. Here's some purchases. Here's the catalog allocations. They're all just showing up here and ready to be invoiced. If I have... If I want to... Let's say, this eight hours from Patrick is something that I need to keep as cost on the job, but I am not actually going to invoice. I have the ability to delete this, and it will retain the cost, but it won't show up as a billable item on the next invoice. Now coming to this invoice now, screen, I'll say cost plus one more invoice now. I'll say entire job. And... Oh, I missed two entries, and this is actually a nice little flag. It's saying, hey. There are two time entries that are against this job that, haven't been approved, so they're not showing up here. That's helpful. I'll go to review time, and I will see the relevant time entries. Here are the ones. Perfect. Thank you for the warning nullify. We are now good to finish making that invoice. You could see the unbilled value went up there as a result of me approving more time entries. So I'll say invoice. Let's just say current month for the sake of example here. And you see we pulled in all of the materials. This is 50% markup on wire, 75% markup on lumber. Here's my $150 rate for my miscellaneous services and then $2.50 for, our roofing. What can help in this case, right, because this does look a little bit random, and it does help. You know, we do get that display of here's gonna be the breakdown. And, again, that can be pretty handy. But if I wanna clarify a little bit more, right, why is there two different entries for the same person at two different rates? This is where things like grouping can come into handy, where I could say, group the invoice items based off of the jobs phase, and now it's gonna separate. Here's your roofing. Here's your miscellaneous services, and I can get it to layout like this instead where it now explains. Okay. Now the different labor rates make sense. Now the different pricing is making sense to me, and kind of a, you know, call it a hidden feature. If your invoice isn't grouping like this and you like this layout more, you could chat with our team. It's something that we should be able to, enable for you. We did update how this grouping works, in the past year. So some, legacy accounts may have the, older version of it, but that is an option that is available to you. If you're in a situation where you want to remove items from the invoice but not necessarily delete the deliverable, you have that ability as well where I can actually come in here and click these arrows to remove items from the invoice. And you see it still shows up as a future billable item. It's just no longer something that is, showing up as, something that's on this specific invoice, and so you have that power. You also can always manually group things. So let me just throw everything right back in the invoice. You could see these arrows. Again, pretty quick, just in and out type of situation. If I wanna manually group, I can hit the target, create group, things like that. And, again, we have a lot of different grouping options that are available here. So, group by labor and materials. Now we have a labor versus material grouping, which sometimes could be a little bit easier for, understanding all these things. Aside from changing grouping, sometimes we wanna change what we display to the customer. So I could do things like for our time entries. I don't need the employee name, just the role, and I want the, time entry date included. So now it's like a labor on the twentieth, a form on the twentieth. This is a little bit clearer for a lot of, customers to understand since they don't know the names of your staff, as often, and they are interested in, like, okay. Sure. You had someone there, but when were they there? This now gives me that additional detail. Same idea with purchases. I could say include the vendor name, include the date of the purchase, things like that. Anything that's relevant that we can include here, we do try to give that option. Now when I finalize this, it's gonna remove the billable items essentially. It's gonna make... Mark them as invoiced, and I actually have the ability to attach a time report to the invoice document itself to, include a little bit of additional information beyond just beyond just the totals, but I can say here is the list of time entries that we are invoicing for here. And that is the simple cost plus workflow. I'm gonna get into some of the, different, options that are available here now, but I can see there's nothing unbilled. Everything's been invoiced, and here's my cost applied to the job. Now the other type of cost plus contract that I will get to really quickly is gonna be the idea of looking at quoting a total price. So, I'm going to say do quote total. Do everything just about exactly the same. We don't have to worry too much about a lot of this, but I want to turn on this switch that says quote total price. Now if I'm adding a time and materials deliverable, I could still do the same thing. We charge a $150 an hour. Do you see there's a field for estimated hours? Now this estimated hours doesn't mean add these hours to the job. It's not necessarily budgeting these hours. It's not making them invoice full. It's telling the customer, I charge a $150 an hour. In case you're wondering, I think it'll probably take me about forty hours. Similarly, I could say I charge a 50% markup. In case you're wondering, I'll probably have to buy some of these two by six studs. I charge $12 each for them, and, I will need to buy a 150. I'll probably need to buy some pipe. I charge $10 each, and I'll need to buy a 100 of these. Now this price here is how much I'm telling the customer I'm charging them. It's not necessarily perfectly accurate because what's really gonna happen is we're gonna see how much you add on the purchase, on the bill, on the catalog allocation as cost, and then add 50%. But, again, this is your way of communicating to the customer. Here's a general idea of how much I expect to charge you for this. And when we look at this document, same idea where we say 12 by foot, sorry, 12 foot two by six studs. Here's the information. It looks a lot like a fixed price item with a total, but we include note the final cost of this may differ from the estimated cost. We estimated this one, but we're actually billing at these rates instead. And so you have the ability to have contract language that protects you from having to stick to this exact number, but this does give you the ability to communicate to the customer. Here's the ballpark of what we expect it to be. Now just because I have this in here, again, it does not make it invoiceable. I could say make this active. And if I go to invoice, it's not gonna prompt me for that $8,800 because I haven't incurred any cost yet. When I go to my plan and track, we do have the ability to pull that contract information into your budget. It's not usually the best budget information because we enter it as price to the customer. But if you need to have this as something to track against, you do have that option. The quantities should all be accurate. But the idea here is that it's just providing a general concept of a budget on the project. Now if I need to start, adding the cost to the job, which will then allow me to start tracking the revenue, this is when now I can go to the contract invoice now, and you could see that the cost is going to be based off of... Or the revenue is gonna be based off of what I entered as cost plus the markup. It doesn't stay true to that $8,800. Again, that's just a piece of my number for the sake of the customer. Might as well stay in fine lines. Right? We're here. Now the last option that comes into play when we are discussing the concept of cost plus invoices. You'll see this in your admin section under customize, cost plus with schedules about... Schedule values invoicing. I do know that there are a lot of people who would like to be able to enable this themselves. In case you're wondering, the reason we don't do that is just because once it's turned on, if you start creating a project and it ends up not being what you wanted to use, then you are locked in to using that, and it can cause more trouble than it's worth. So it does have to get enabled by our team just so our team can explain to you how it works. Once it's on, you could turn it off by yourself, but we wanna make sure that no one is accidentally starting the wrong type of contract and then having to redo a lot of work. It's something that we do to protect you more than anything. Now when I have that turned on and I go through the same exact workflow like I've been going through, cost plus webinar, transparent. It's gonna start by assuming that I wanna quote total price. It does not mean I have to, but it's gonna keep that turned on. I could turn it off and on as I need. When I quote a total price here, you can see I can add deliverables, and I can add a markup or profit to this. So I build the deliverables just like any other t and m deliverable where I could say, first, I need to do demolition on the job. It's gonna say, what's your hourly rate? Now in this case, the hourly rate isn't necessarily what I'm charging the customer. This is what I'm explaining to the customer is how much hours cost me. This is my pre markup cost. It also doesn't change the actual cost of labor in my account. Again, it's just to give them that understanding of here's how much I'm paying for labor before markup. And so the number can be a close guess. I usually spend around a $100 per hour on labor, and I expect this to take me about, fifty hours. Same idea. Will you be, buying materials? Yes. I will. And now what I'm writing in is here's what I'm going to have to buy and how much I'm going to spend. So this is no longer the idea of here's what I plan on charging you. This is now truly, here's everything that I need to buy in order to complete this project. Now once this list is complete, it creates one of my deliverables, and I can add multiple of these. There's no real limit. It works just like our standard schedule values where I can put together a list of things. For framing, we actually charge a higher rate. It's a 150. This will take us a little bit longer, probably closer to a hundred hours. We'll also have to buy, lumber and strand board. Here's a list of all my materials I need to buy. Nails, why not? Well, my computer's always got funny display issues on it. But now I have this contract that's a little bit more than just our standard, cost plus where everything's built in. I'm also gonna say beyond, the items that I'm telling you I'm spending money on, here's now my overhead cost or, you know, price, how much I'm gonna charge you. Or I'll say for every item that we spend money on, I'm going to charge, let's just say, 10% to cover my overhead. And you could have multiple of these included. So beyond overhead, there's also my profit, which, you know, no customer is gonna be too shocked that you take a profit on the job, but I understand when people wanna combine these overhead and profit one item. But now it knows to add these in as well. When I look at the proposal document that it creates, it does the same breakdown of here's the items and the list of everything, and then it's gonna say, here's what we expect to charge in overhead and profit. And then, again, we clarify, hey. This is all estimated numbers. Don't worry too much about the final that is displayed here. It all depends on how much we spend. Once this job is live, just like all of our other cases, the tracking of this is gonna work just like everything else does. I can enter demolition materials, you know, dumpster rental for, fourteen days. Another thing that I actually should note, now when we use this, do you wanna use the contract as budgets? It's a little bit more powerful because what we entered in on the contract is how much we actually expect to spend. It's not the post markup number. So you do get a little bit more accurate of a budget here before you start tracking the actual cost of the job. And, again, I can go through... We don't have to get too deep into the purchases and bills process. That's always covered in our vendor webinars. So definitely check those out if you wanna learn more about this cost tracking side of things. I'll just add some material cost to this job. And for the sake of rounding it out, I'll add some time entries as well to both of these line items. And just like before, I will make sure that the time entries are all approved. And the same rule applies where I'll see here is your unbilled value of the project, and I'll go ahead and create my invoice. What's gonna be a little bit different about this invoicing process is, yes, I see all these items in here lined out like I did before, but I also see overhead and profit as their own fixed items. I can't really adjust these because we agreed upon them ahead of time, the rates that we charge. And even though I have this breakdown, when I generate the invoice document itself and I can attach that breakdown, it's gonna be in this cost plus this cost plus style, just like, if it were a fixed price contract where it's giving me the breakdown to provide to the customer, which is for, man, that is very maybe if I zoom in this way, I think it'll be stronger. Bingo. Where it's gonna give me the breakdown of, hey. For demolition, we agreed upon $89.50. So far, I've spent $61.50. That's 69% of what we agreed. It should be around 2,800 more to complete. Here's the framing breakdown. Here's the subtotal for the whole contract. And then for overhead, I'm collecting 1,500, and for profit, 2,300. And the system remembers all of these things. So as I continue to track the job, let's say we're now incurring more cost on the job. I don't wanna do it with the purchase order because I am lazy and wanna make sure we have enough time for the q and a section of this. Yeah. We'll work through this one as well. Now when I create my next invoice, it's gonna remember what we had previously, and the schedule values is gonna adjust accordingly. So it's not just, hey. Here's the total amount we're invoicing right now, but it's also going to give me the breakdown of, as of our last demolition invoice, we were at, $61.50. Now I'm invoicing, 3,200. The total completed to date is this 9,300. I'm at a 104% of what I told you. Now this wouldn't be the end of the world. It's actually pretty close to the estimate, but this is where we see the concept of estimated versus actual as opposed to pieces of a whole number of... I told you 20,000. So far, it's 10,000. I'm only halfway through the budget. Overall, I have a pretty decent number on this. I'm still under my total budget that I told you. Here's the amount that I'm charging. But this gives us that breakdown like it's a fixed price. But because it's cost plus, I do have the, freedom to go over that price to make sure that we are staying true to the cost plus format of this project. That... Let's see. Is most of what I wanna cover. I think maybe one last important bit that I think is really handy when it gets to, working with cost plus jobs. I'm gonna add some more materials onto this. And, yes, I could see the cost here. But if you're familiar with the transactions page in Noify, this is a place where I can look at all the different costs, that are applied to a job, in my account. This also shows me on a cost plus job how much is billable off of these items. So material catalog allocation, it cost us $913.50 of it is billable, and then this check mark shows me whether or not, I've invoiced for that, material. This can help in cases where maybe I accidentally deleted something that was billable. So now the cost is on the job, but there is no, billable item for it. I can look at this transaction screen and see the cost is $2.50. The billable is missing. And I can do things like, remove the cost from the job and then add it back to try to get notified or recreate the billable. And there's a bunch of different types of workflows we can go through that help with that. But, if you ever have questions, if you're having a hard time with this, don't be shy about reaching out to our team. We're always happy to help. By nature of cost plus contracts being a little bit complicated, we do find that there are work flows that can be tricky with this, and our team is pretty well equipped, equipped to, make sure that we have a strong workflow that's, smooth and make sure that we get everything invoiced for you. That is everything that I really wanted to cover with cost plus, contracts and invoicing today. And it looks like we haven't really had too many questions come in, which means that I can give everyone a little of time back. If you have any other questions, if you're having a hard time with this, if you want to set up training, never be shy about reaching out to your CSM. You can, shoot a message to the support team. And then if you have product feedback on where we can improve on cost plus or anything like that, never be shy about reaching out to me. I'm always happy to be a resource for, you know, just general product feedback, training, any way I can be of assistance to make sure you're happy with Nullify. Thanks everyone again for tuning in, and I hope you have a great day. Take care.