Cost plus contracts and invoicing

Thanks everyone for joining in. Appreciate everyone taking time out of their day to learn a little bit more about Knowify, and join another one of these, deep dive webinars that we've been doing, every two weeks or so on different topics. Happy New Year too. If you're unfamiliar with these process, with these webinars, if, you haven't been to these in the past, we're just getting kicked off with nullify the new year. Essentially, what we do, is pick a different topic, twice a month and try to go a little deeper than the high level overview that we might usually cover in different webinars, trainings, videos, things like that. And this week's topic, this session's topic is, on cost plus contracts and invoicing. I'm sure a lot of people, are pretty familiar with this type of concept, but, the majority of well, we had we covered in our last webinar, I should say, fixed price contracts and invoicing. And this is gonna be the case where we have a contract that has terms that go beyond just a dollar figure. It's actually terms of invoicing based off of whatever custom billing style you wanna do. And we call it cost plus because that's the most common one, and we'll be covering all the different options that are available in this. For anyone who hasn't seen me in the past or isn't familiar, my name is Taryn. I manage customer experience at Noify. We work in Noify for ten plus years at this point, so, there's a decent chance that we've interacted to some extent or another, whether it's part of your onboarding, training, anything like that. I'll even answer the occasional support ticket from time to time. But my job is basically just make sure everyone's as happy with Nullify as possible. So whether that's in the processes, when you reach out to us, when you connect with our team, or the product itself, I'm just trying to make sure that everyone's as comfortable as possible and having the best possible as the title suggest experience. And for today's webinar, we're gonna start with a slide deck where I'm just gonna cover a couple of high level concepts of what's gonna be discussed in this webinar, and then I'll pull up the my account to go through a demonstration of everything in my account live, and then we'll have some time for q and a at the end. If you have questions during the webinar, feel free to throw them in Zoom's q and a. I have my associate, Ben, who answers some of the questions that come in during the webinar. And anything that requires a longer form response, I'll be responding to at the end, making sure I can pull up my account and make sure I demonstrate the answer to your questions here as well. But we'll start with the idea of, you know, what are cost plus contracts? What are we talking about in Novi when we recommend the cost plus contract when we opt into this style? Also, we'll be discovering discussing the different types of deliverables that are available in a cost plus contract, so the different types of billing that we can offer inside a cost plus contract. Then I'll also go over the different types of cost plus contracts. So not the different individual items inside the contract, but the different styles of this type of contract, whether we quote a total price, don't quote a total price, the invoice format that we use, things like that. And then I'll go into the actual process of tracking these contracts, tracking the cost themselves, and creating invoices for them, and then followed by the demonstration. But with all that being said, let me go ahead and get us kicked off here and dive into this concept of what is a cost plus contract. And at its core, the very simple difference here is that in our fixed price contract, we have just that, a fixed price, a dollar figure that we agree upon before we start. You know, I tell the customer ten thousand. By end of project, it's ten thousand dollars that we bill. But in these cost plus contracts, we're gonna be doing a lot more billing that is in the style of time and material or billing based off of our cost, and that's where the name cost plus comes to from. It's my cost plus an additional amount for my overhead profit contingency, anything along those lines. A lot of the times, contractors like this type of contract because it's, in theory, the safest possible contract. You guarantee your profit. It's written into the terms of the contract. I know that no matter how much I spend, I make ten percent more than that. Easy. But you can find that some customers are a little less likely to sign a contract like this, especially if a competitor is bidding with a fixed price because there's a peace of mind that comes along with, well, ten thousand may be a lot, but at least I know it's ten thousand, whereas this person just said twenty five percent markup. I don't know how much they're gonna spend, that becomes a little bit trickier. But what's really relevant here, and this is kind of the point that I always like to make sure is very clear with the standard cost plus billing, is that in order to invoice with these, we actually do need to generate cost. And you'll see that there's exceptions to the rule while I go through the demonstration. But the idea is that in our fixed price contract, I can sign it and start invoicing based off of the value of the contract, whereas in the cost plus, I make the job active, and now I have to incur cost in order to generate that cost plus invoice. Again, it's very similar to our standard time material, which you'll see that term come up as well. Now when we're setting up a cost plus contract, we have a variety of different what we call deliverables in Noify or types of deliverable that are available for each line. And you can think of a deliverable in a cost plus contract as a service that's being provided. So if I'm doing a project where I have to offer both demolition and rough in and also installation, and I build different rates or I build differently for each of these. Each of those could be its own deliverable so I can track its progress. I can invoice it separately, everything like that. And the deliverable can either be time and materials, which is really our classic cost plus. This is just gonna track all of the cost that you add to the job and generate an invoice based off of markup, based off of billable rates for time entries, things like that. We could do fixed price items, which can be invoiced on signing, on completion, as a percentage of completion. But I always like to mention that even though we have fixed price items in a cost plus contract, if you're mainly doing fixed price, items, then you probably should just stick to the fixed price contract style of nullify instead of having a job that's cost plus, but ninety nine percent of its fixed price with a one caveat. It's probably gonna be easier to do a job that's fully fixed price and then manually invoice a t and m change order or something like that, rather than try to do the whole job as cost plus just for the off chance that there is some t and m billing included on it. We also have the ability to generate what we call a recurring fixed price item. This would be something like a a retainer. So if there's terms of the contract that say, hey. As long as we're working on this project, you owe us an extra thousand dollars a month. That's where recurring fixed comes in handy. So it's not necessarily a fixed price that's, hey. When you sign, you owe us two thousand dollars down. This is more as long as the contract's living, you're gonna owe us a monthly, weekly, whatever the fee is. Then the last item we have is variable, which is essentially custom billing. This is the idea of, we invoice for every installed unit, and we'll see how many units are installed. So, oh, we did ten units today, so we invoice for ten units. This helps a lot in cases where you have very specific billing, but you could see how with all of these different building blocks, we can get much more specific or much more custom with the contract style than we would normally get in our standard fixed price in contract. So I could say we have a fixed item that's due on signing, a recurring fixed for the extent of the contract. We build time and materials, so our standard cost plus on this type of work. But then on something else, we do variable for the rest of the way. And that can all be bundled into a single contract and nullify using this. Now when we're setting up these contracts, you're gonna have two different options, the ability to not quote a total price or quote a total price. And I mentioned at the top of this webinar the idea of some customers are a little bit hesitant to sign a cost plus contract because it feels too open ended. Right? I can sign a ten percent markup contract, and that doesn't seem like too much. But then if my contractor stop spends a million dollars, all of a sudden, I have a million plus ten percent that, that I'm liable to pay, and I don't wanna take that chance. So if you are in a situation like this and you wanna say, yeah. It is fifty percent markup, but we don't expect it to go beyond this specific number, that's where the quote total price comes into play. So, you'll see I have both types, of contract displayed here wherein do not, quote total price. It says universal rate is ninety dollars an hour. Material charge is fifty percent markup, and that's great. That's open ended. It's got as a description of the services. But then in quote total price, can accompany that with, here's how much we expect that we'll end up charging you by the end of this project. So, yes, it is a cost plus contract. But for your own peace of mind, we don't expect to spend more than nine thousand dollars on this one. And so that's a way that you can just, again, give that peace of mind number. The actual dollar figure that's displayed here doesn't actually equate to anything. It's not an invoice number. We're still using the cost plus rules, but it's that piece of mind number that we could share with the customer, to give them a little bit more, confidence in our, work here. I'm looking now. The the math doesn't add up here. I guess this is a a Photoshop thing and not directly from nullify, but that's kind of fun. Then the last option that we have when it comes to setting up different types of cost plus contracts is what we call the transparent contracting, where you can create a schedule values invoice even though you're doing a cost plus job. If you're familiar with it, the schedule values invoice is a way for you to communicate to the customer. Here's how much I told you you were gonna spend. Here's how much we've invoiced so far. Here's how much we're invoicing now. This is the remaining balance. And then the fixed price job, that's pretty straightforward because I know we quoted ten thousand. We invoiced one thousand so far. We're invoicing a thousand now. It totals up to two thousand. We could do the math right through, and that's straightforward. We have percentages. That's great. But in a cost plus contract, again, if we're quoting that total price and we wanna show the customer how close we are to being accurate with what we quoted, we have this ability to generate a cost plus contract where I could say, here's how much I think I'm gonna spend. Here's how much I charge for my own overhead, profit, construction fees, however you wanna look at it. And each invoice can show that progress as you move through the life of the job. But then it can also show how much you're spending versus how much you are actually accepting as your own company's fee for completing the work. And we'll cover these as well. I think that's a neat addition to nullify and can be really handy when you wanna be very open with your customer about how things are going. Now when we invoice on cost plus and I mentioned earlier that, when you invoice a cost plus job, you need to incur cost first. And the way Noify works is it's gonna be looking at all of your cost and generating invoiceable items as you add them into Noify. So if I have a cost plus contract and I add a purchase for a hundred dollars, then my next invoice is gonna have purchase one hundred dollars plus markup. Boom. And it just takes that from your cost and adds it to your revenue. Same thing goes for time entries. I approve a time entry. Cool. I see my cost, but now the invoice actually has the revenue. Here's how much we invoice per hour on cost plus jobs as well. And the way this works is that every time you add the cost to a cost plus job, Notify creates what we call a billable, an item that can be billed to the customer. And we track that. So once you invoice it, now we know do not try to invoice this again. That purchase created a billable. That billable has been invoiced. That purchase is still there. The invoice is still there, but no longer trying to bill this item. And so that's basically the workflow is the cost goes through your plan and track, through your cost, into your contract where it's now invoiceable as revenue. And once the different costs hit the invoice, there's a variety of ways you can group it to make sure that you display correctly to the customer. I mentioned the concept of the schedule values invoice, which is always really handy, but you can also do things like, I wanna group all of my labor and materials together, or I wanna group all of my, like, hours together. So all the form and time, regardless of who it is, put it together. And so we have a bunch of different ways that you could put this together to display in the format that you like it. Very commonly, it's on contract item or on phase, so it's in groups of work. But, again, if you wanna say, here's how much is labor, here's how much is material, that could be separated out as well just to make sure that the invoice document comes out in the, format that you like as opposed to what, the default would be in Noify. And whenever we talk about invoicing, I do like to just also mention that we have the ability to do, payments directly through, into a payment. So you can actually sign up, set that up, with your Noify account. And, when you, send out an invoice, the invoice can come with a link where the customer can pay with credit card or ACH directly through, the online portal without having to go to a separate service or anything like that. It's all just bundled in with the, process of invoicing out of Noify. All that being said, let me go ahead and pull up my account here, and we'll go through the process of creating a couple different cost plus contracts and make sure that, we, explain as much as we can on this topic. I just wanna make sure that settings are oh, turned off. So I'll add a new job, give it a name, customer. All of this is straightforward. I'm gonna choose this cost plus slash other option. Same rule always applies. You know, I like to set an address just so I have something on file. And you'll see that instead of us starting with the process of budgeting, we're gonna jump right to a proposal. Because with this cost plus format, setting up a budget ahead of time isn't always the most important because we actually have our, terms built into the contract. And, theoretically, with the cost plus job, we should be accurate regardless of how much we spend. You do have the ability to set a budget after fact, but, we'll cover that in a bit. A lot of the building is the same. I could say who I'm sending this to. I could put in my contract number, the customer's PO number. I could set up a deposit if I need, and I'm gonna start with my do not quote total price option. We can write an overall description of the project. Here's what we'll be doing, but then this is where we get to the important part, building out deliverables. As I add each deliverable, it's gonna prompt me which type, and these are the ones that we covered in the slides earlier. And I'll start with time materials since it's our most commonly used one for cost plus, where I could say, for this job, we need to do demolition, demo of x y z. And it's gonna ask me, what is the applicable rate? How much do you bill your customer for every hour spent on the job? We have a couple different options here. There's universal resource and role. Universal is where I could say a hundred and fifty dollars, and now regardless of who works on this job, we're gonna bill a hundred and fifty dollars an hour, for everything, added to this job. What I can also do is break this down based off of resource, where I could say, well, John's gonna be on this job, and, we're gonna have Alexa on this job and Laszlo on this job. And here are the different default rates that each of them make or sorry, that, we charge for each of their, work as they work on the job. And I saw a raised hand. If you have questions, just throw them in the q and a. We usually don't unmute people for these webinars. But this way, I can just define the specific rates for people. So maybe on this job, John may we pay or charge more for John's time. This is where I would say, okay. For every hour John spends, we're gonna charge the customer one hundred seventy five dollars. Then the other option here is based on role where I could say oops. Someone's been doing too much testing in my account, but it's my bad. But I could say, I need a foreman on-site, and I'm gonna need a laborer on-site where whenever a foreman spends spends time, it's a hundred and fifty dollars an hour. Laborers at ninety. And this is, again, just how I'm defining how I bill my customer based off of what happens on the job. I'm gonna set up a universal rate. I think this is always the cleanest and easiest way to set this up. We could obviously set up multipliers for over and double time, and then it's will you be billing your customer for materials and services? If you're only billing for time, you could say no. But I could say yes. Can I bill a twenty five percent markup on this item? Now that's all I really need to set up cost plus contract. I'll bill a hundred and fifty dollars an hour and a twenty five percent markup on everything I buy. But let's say I have multiple different rates that I define where, yes, on demolition, that's the rate, but we also will do drywall work. Drywall work, we don't have to charge as much. So that's one hundred twenty five dollars an hour. The materials could be more expensive. I'm gonna say a fifty percent markup. And now I can have two different rates that I track, when I'm invoicing my customer based off of where we add the cost. I'll cover a little bit more about that when we get to the tracking side of this. Now I'll add another deliverable, and I wanna cover a couple of these other options. So with our fixed price, this is where I could say something like down payment or deposit, however we wanna look at it, you know, upfront signing bonus. And I could say, when we sign the contract, we expect a thousand dollars upfront. And, again, I could say it's on signing. We can also make it so you have to mark this item as complete, so that's when it becomes invoiceable, or I could invoice this in a percentage, like, on progress invoicing. It's really just based off of how you're gonna be invoicing this thousand dollars to the customer, but I'll stick with my simple due on signing for now. I also have the ability to set up these recurring fixed where I could say I always call this something like a retainer type retainage by just, instinct. It's too much time to nullify. And then it's how much do we bill? I'll say a hundred dollars monthly for the life cycle of the contract. And now what'll happen is it creates an item each month. So whenever I invoice, it'll say also add on that hundred dollars. So the my first invoice will have this hundred dollars on it. But then in February, if I try to invoice again, it'll know to add another hundred dollar item here. And then for the variable, we'll call this can light installation. Why not? I could say per each light, we charge a hundred dollars, and we'll do this, invoicing monthly as well. And now each month, as I create an invoice, it's gonna say how many lights did you, install, and I can enter that in, and it'll multiply by the hundred dollars so we can, start tracking that. So now I have my contract. I have two different time and material deliverables. I have a fixed price, a recurring fixed, a variable one. And before I get into the other styles of invoicing, or other styles of cost plus, I'm gonna just cover how this gets tracked a little bit. So this is gonna be live. I can go to my plan and track, and we'll have a phase for each deliverable that we put in our contract. This way, I know how I apply cost to put it in track, how it's going to react to the contract, and how it's gonna invoice. So just for the sake of example here, I'll add some materials to demolition. I always use my same answer, option of dumpster rental for ten days. Submit. I'll enter some time here as well. Time tracker. I'll say Eli for one hour, and then I'll do some more on our drywall as well. And this could be purchases as well, so it doesn't have to be the allocation like I had. I could always say, you know, we just bought something from ABC Supply. It was drywall, and this is how much we bought. And then I'll enter some time for our drywall phase here as well. So labor, enter time, and it'll be the same users. We can see how the rates end up being different. A quick note on this, and I mentioned it earlier, but in order for time to be invoiceable, it needs to be approved. So these two one hour entries are not, invoiceable yet. But when I say check these approved time, that's gonna generate what we call billable item. So before I go on too far, I'll come back to my contract job screen. I can look at this job. Here's my current cost, and here's the unbilled revenue on this project. This is showing, hey. According to what you've logged against the job and the terms of the contract, you're good to invoice, twenty nine hundred and seventy five dollars on this. And if I'm curious what that what that's made up of, I can click view details. We'll go to a page called manage billable items where it's gonna say, well, there's a fixed price item. There's a purchase. There's another purchase from ABC Supply. There's a time entry. There's another time entry. I could see all of these billable items here. I also have the ability to delete the billable and retain the cost. So let's say I'm gonna be offering one of these time entries for free. I could delete this and then still have the cost of the time entry without invoicing the revenue. If you have more questions on that, definitely throw it in the chat. It's a rare case, but it could come in handy from time to time. Now I'm gonna come back here, and I'm gonna say invoice now on this contract, and we'll see, how all of this automation starts to, take place. So right off the bat, my down payment for a thousand dollars is pulled into my first invoice. I also have a dumpster rental for a hundred dollars, ten days worth at a twenty five percent markup, and my drywall at a fifty percent markup because of the different deliverables they were, matched against. And here's the different rates for Eli based off of what work he was doing. And here's my retainer for the first month, hundred dollars. And you'll see that the last thing here is this light, this can light where I could say we did, fifty lights today or in this month, and it creates another item here. Now I can go ahead and finalize that. It'll recognize the revenue. I can include my payment link so the customer pays me through nullify. And when this is finalized, it'll switch it from our unbilled revenue to now invoice revenue and update the profit on the job. And that's really just the basics of setting up a cost plus contract in the simple style here. You know, no quote total price, just different types of deliverables and how we invoice the customer for them. Kind of as a side note, since some of these things are time based, if I were to now invoice again, you see it's gonna set the, invoicing period to February since I already invoiced for January. The time based thing, so my retainer, here's February's retainer, and then my light here, the can lights for, February will automatically show up again. So I could say in February, we did twenty five units, and we could just as we up, change the dates here, as we move forward with the life of the project, It's gonna be updating what we invoice with time. But now I'm gonna create, two other types of contracts. They're gonna be, still cost plus, but using different, logic and rules when it comes to billing. So first, we'll do our standard quote total price. I'll come in, flick the switch, quote total price. Beautiful. And I'm gonna add my deliverables again. This is time material. It's demolition. I'm not gonna do anything really differently. We'll see that now it's not just asked for an hourly rate, but an estimated number of hours. This number of hours doesn't need to be perfect. It's just your way of communicating to the client. Here's our best guess on how many hours we're gonna be invoicing you for. So it's a hundred and fifty dollars an hour. I think we'll spend eighty hours working on this job. Yes. We'll be buying things and invoicing for them, and we will charge a fifty percent markup. But what am I gonna be buying? This is where I could say, we need to buy, I'll use my dumpster rental. We have to rent a dumpster. We're gonna actually charge a hundred and fifty dollars, and we're gonna have probably, seven days worth of dumpster rental that we need to charge for. Confirm. Now just like that, we have this, proposal document. I forgot to preview the other proposal. I could definitely pull that one up if you guys are interested in seeing it, but this is gonna be our proposal document. It says demolition, dumpster rental, seven days. Here's the rate. Labor, eighty hours. Here's the rate. We expect the job to cost you around thirteen thousand dollars. And then we have a quick little phrase at the bottom. Hey. This is just so you know, this is an estimated rate. This isn't gonna be a hundred percent accurate. It's just a way to kind of explain, please don't expect an invoice for thirteen thousand dollars. Because even though we put this number in, it's just to make you feel more comfortable so you understand the general idea of how much it's gonna cost as opposed to this is the exact amount. This is a fixed price. Right? It's just a piece of my number as I put it. And to demonstrate what that kind of looks like in practice, once this job is active, I can go create an invoice. And even though we have thirteen thousand dollars here, invoice now, entire job, nothing's gonna show up because we haven't incurred any cost on this job yet. So what I need to do is go to my plan and track section, add my cost, and now there's cost associated with the job. This is when I can now go back to my contract, invoice now, and have these items show up on the invoice. And so that's, again, really the difference between our quote total price cost plus versus a fixed price. In that quote total price, the actual the number that you put in there isn't necessarily a real number, not that it's fake, but it's an estimated number, and you don't really know, how accurate you're gonna come to that. You may never actually make it to this exact number. You may go over or under. It's all based off of how much you end up spending. Another thing that I wanted to cover is the cost plus with schedule values invoicing. So under customize in my admin section, cost plus with schedule values, I can turn this on. This is another version of quote total price, but this one's gonna work a little bit differently. So I'll set up my project, a lot of the same processes here. I'm sure you're getting sick of seeing this, but bear with me. It's going to default to quote total price here, which it doesn't have to be on, but, it just knows that if we use this type of contract, we usually want it turned on. And you'll see that I don't just add deliverables, but I also add markup and profit. So what that means is I could say, add a new time material deliverable, which will be the default for this since it's a, cost plus contracted, by nature. I could say, here's our hourly rate. Here's our estimated number of hours. Here's what we expect to buy in our quantities. And I'm gonna add one more deliverable here just so we can really get a good idea of how the schedule values, invoicing, style works. I know I'm putting in a bunch of nonsense cool stuff here. It's really just for the sake of getting some numbers in the system. So now I have my estimated cost, and that's an important note here. So when I am setting up one of these items, I said demolition, and usually this hourly rate is how much we bill the customer. In this cost plus schedule values and our transparent style contracting, contracting, I'm actually trying to display to the customer, here's how much I usually pay my employees, before markup, before I charge the markup. And it doesn't have to be perfectly accurate. Right? We're not taking the loaded labor burden and then adding a markup to that. We're saying, here's what I'm communicating to my customer is how much I pay per hour. So I have something formal that I can markup and give it to the customer. A lot of the reason we don't use the actual markup is that or sorry. The actual labor burden before markup is it's hard to nail that number to a very specific document that you can hand to the customer and say, hey. Here is why this person costs us a hundred and sixty seven eighty nine an hour. It's made up of, you know, our, workman's comp and our insurance, and we have, you know, training that they have to go through. We pay this service. It's hard to give that receipt to a customer, but it's much more straightforward to say, hey. We pay them around two hundred dollars an hour. Here's how many hours they spend. Then once we have all of this in the system to communicate to the customer, here's how much we're gonna spend, I could say, then, also, I'm gonna need some additional funds for overhead where I'll need a, ten percent markup on everything, and I can have multiple markups where I could say I also need to have my, profit for an additional fifteen percent. And now it's gonna create a similar type of contract. But instead of having that situation where the pricing is somewhat hidden inside the totals, it's gonna say, here's how much I'm gonna spend. Here's my markup that we expect to end up charging you, and here's what you can expect to spend by end of project. So instead of, again, hiding this overhead and profit inside my markup, it's just gonna display it to the customer. Now when this is active, the invoicing is gonna be pretty similar. So I have the ability, and I'm just gonna add a bunch of cost to this job again. We'll go through a very similar process, but I'll speed up a little bit since we don't need to be too technical on the input anymore. Go a little smaller than that. We'll add some stuff in for our electoral rough in. None of this is making any sense. Beautiful. Now when I invoice, the same rules apply. It's gonna know what we spent and carry it over to the invoice. But the document that's gonna be created is gonna look a little bit different. So you'll actually see it pulled in the items at their rate, but then it also pulled in an overhead line and a profit line for me to then, invoice the customer for, that additional amount where I could say, verify and finalize. Let's see. It looks like I mixed up two contract styles here. This is what happens when I move too fast. But I'll go ahead and generate this contract or invoice rather. And this is what the invoice format's gonna look like. Instead of just displaying here's what we're invoicing you for, it's gonna have this breakdown. Oof. That is so grainy. I believe if I download it, it looks a little bit cleaner. Yeah. Still not great. Anyway, so here is the demolition. We told you we'd spend eighty eight hundred. We've spent twelve hundred so far. This is our total completed to date. Here's our progress. This is what you expect balance to finish. It puts all of this together and says, also, there's a ten percent overhead from, in our fees. There's fifteen percent in profit. Here's the total you owe us. So, yes, to date, we have spent eighty seven hundred, but that's why you owe us ten thousand eight hundred and seventy five. That's kind of why we call this transparent contracting is it gives you the ability to be very open. Here's how much I'm spending. Here's how much I'm making for myself. You can give the customer all of that additional info. Another thing that's available with this type of invoice, which I think is pretty handy and let's see if I could do it through edit. I believe I can. When I finalize this, I can say attach invoice breakdown. So if the customer isn't happy enough with just the here's how much I've spent to date and they want more information, then included on that invoice as a secondary page could be a breakdown of here are the things that I'm invoicing you for. So instead of just the lump sum totals, here's what I wanna see. Okay. Cool. That makes sense to me. Another thing that comes in handy with these is when you send via email, you can actually, in your attachments, say, from project documents and copy, bills and purchase receipts that you have uploaded to nullify as well. So if the customer challenges you on things, you actually have these ready to copy and sent along to say, okay. Here is the amount that I paid the vendor. You could see it. It's in your hand, and you can include things like time sheets as well just so everything that you've invoiced has been backed. Again, it does require a bit of a picky customer to want this type of invoicing, but if you have someone who you have a good relationship with and you, wanna be able to honor this type of contract, NoFi does have the infrastructure for you to be able to offer it. The last thing I'll cover here is around our grouping options. And let me see if I can delete my invoice from the first job and do it this way. It's a bit of a never works quite the way I want it to, but let's see. So when I delete the invoice, it should delete the it should update the billable status from uninvoiced to invoiced or sorry, from invoice to uninvoiced so I can now bill these things again. And what I'm gonna do, I have my list of different items. I could say, well, this kinda looks like a jumbled mess. I want you to group these items by contract, and it's gonna say, well, now I have demolition, drywall, down payment, retainer automatically without me having to manually group. We can use the targets to create groups as we need as well. So if I need to manually merge, we have that option. Then we also have the ability to say, well, I actually wanna group labor versus materials, and we can change the grouping that way. Here are my material items that we're invoicing about labor items that we're invoicing. With these icons, you can also choose if you wanna hide or show the items in the group versus just the total. So if I choose to hide, we'll have this ability to see, okay, materials and other. It's just sixty units at this price per unit. Don't worry about it. Whereas labor, it's the breakdown here. And then some other handy things that are here is the ability to adjust information. Right? Say, on the time entry, the customer doesn't care what the employee's name is. They just wanna know what role it was and what date they were there, And that can adjust the time entries like this for us to get a little bit more detailed info, or less detail if needed. And I could do the same thing with purchases. Make sure you include the vendor name and when I purchased this. Drywall APC supply on this date so we get that additional info. And this was a catalog information, allocation, so it didn't have a vendor associated with it. But, yeah, toggling around with these can really help you a lot with making sure that you end up using the, or generating the invoice that you wanna generate that makes the most sense to you, and your customer when you send this out. Let's see. How much to do list? That is what I wanted to cover in the demo. I did see a bunch of questions come in. I know this is a topic that brings a lot of questions, so let's start chipping away at these things. Good question right off the bat. If I'm using subcontractors more than my own labor, what's the best way to set that up? So, subcontracts will work the same way as materials do in a cost plus contract. So I use this one that I started with. Let's just say, I have a subcontract that I wanna put in the system. But subcontract is already enabled. Look look at the luck there. I could say, add subcontractor from oops. Not ABC Supply. From Ernie's Electrical. They're doing demolition, I guess, these days for five hundred dollar contract. Now as I log bills against Ernie's Electrical, these are gonna become billable according to the terms of the contract, so it'll know the markup to apply based off of the deliverable and the going rate for this. So, again, I'll go to my contract, invoice now, and here's my demolition bill from the subcontractor. And, again, if I need to share with the customer more info, this is where we say, make sure the vendor name in there is from Ernie's Electrical. For an invoice breakdown and cost plus contract, can the description be a hyperlink to a purchase order? Not at this point in time. I'm not sure that the the breakdown can have a link. But, again, if you have the ability to, or if you're uploading your receipts into Novi when you enter the purchase order, then it will also have the purchase order document, which when you send this out, I could say, from project documents, company documents, or purchase order purchase documents, they'll automatically be here so I can copy that and have it included on the email that goes out as well. For the schedule values, there's not a change order line. That is correct. So when you have the schedule values cost plus option, and I can demo this as well, the idea is that because it's a cost plus contract, the change order isn't necessarily necessary because the terms of the contract don't need you to have a change order to go above that specific number. So if that's the case, it's probably more likely, a fixed price contract, as opposed to a cost plus because in the cost plus, again, as the name suggests, it's the cost that dictates how much you end up invoicing. So let's say I have an item that goes over. That's very okay. It'll just display as over one hundred percent billed for that, specific item. Go ahead and finalize my invoice. I just saw a question coming about the side panel. For anyone else who's wondering about this, it's I I get a kick out of this because it's asked on every single webinar. You absolutely have the ability to have that enabled in your account. Just reach out to our support team. But, again, a little blurry here, but demolition as a hundred and twenty seven percent complete here, and it shows a negative balance to finish since we have technically overinvoiced in this case. With the invoicing process, the client sees the current percentage markup fee, but not the total track construction management fee. So oh, so you wanna total up construction management date fees to date? We don't have a feature for that right now, but that's great feedback. I think it's something that, you know, definitely throw into our feedback portal here, and we'll definitely be looking into that. I know, we are looking into a cost plus revamp or refactor, in the coming year. So, hopefully, there's some room for us to make improvements around there. Then there is match naming convention with your invoice line items with the individual purchase orders. So there's no way to automatically see what's being invoiced and pull the relevant purchase order document. So there is a bit of a searching process involved there. But, again, all of the purchase documents that are uploaded should automatically be stored in the purchase documents folder. So, essentially, what that looks like, if I create a purchase and upload a document let's see. I think I actually may have some receipts handy here. Beautiful. Submitting this purchase is going to give me the ability to this still gets the right job. It is beautiful. Now it's gonna take the document that was there, and it's going to store it in the project's documents under purchase documents. So when I go to email this invoice out, I can always copy from here as well. And I hope that answers the question. It looks like that's the last of the questions that came in. I hope this webinar was informative for you and helped out a little bit. If you have further questions or if you wanna sit in on a training, we're always happy to help. You can reach out to your success manager or a member of the support team and just request a session, and we'll connect you with the right person to train you on these things. Again, it's a really complex topic. I really appreciate everyone taking the time to join in, and I hope you have a great rest of your week. Thanks again, and take care.