Effective Pricing Live: Efficient Integrations - Managing Payment Plans and Software Tools

So this is our agenda for today. We're going to first look at how to price a cleanup project, which is one of the specialties that we do. We're going to look at how to price a QBO setup. These are two of the ones that are, you know, sort of one time type things that aren't part of a regular model. There's a little bit of more intricacies to them that we may not use on a regular basis. And it's also questions that I see pop pop up quite often. Some of you may know me and may have seen me in some of Mark's sessions where he's training about cleanup projects. It was a section of Effective Pricing that I was very hesitant to to do for a long time. So when I'm talking about that, we will look at that. As I mentioned, we're going to look at those payment plan scenarios and then I'm going to show you how to integrate with qbo. I want to mention I will be doing everything QBO because I'm an Intuit girl. You do have the ability to interact with Xero. I understand the integration is very similar. Definitely the connection process is the same. But I don't use zero, so I can't demonstrate that for you or even really answer questions about it. So I will be using QBO for that demonstration. And then finally we will be looking at Canva and how you can start to use that. Obviously we have some proposal templates that Mark gives us that have a lot of editing functionality built into them. Canva is just going that one step further. If you really, really, really want to be able to customize it even more, we're going to take a look at some of those steps. Okay, so let's jump over to effective pricing now.

All right, so the first thing we're going to talk about is the cleanup project.

As is most things ineffective pricing.

Mark gives us a model for that. So I'm just going to go into my model management.

And if you scroll down in your list.

Did I pass it? Here it is. You'll see this one called Cleanup Work, Cleanup project, whatever you want to call it, you'll just click on the use model button.

I am going to just change my date format.

To.

Same.

And I'll say EP.

Panel. I'm going to go ahead and make it live right away so that I don't need to come back and do that later.

I, I love that the, the little default icon that comes up for it is this little brush. It's so cute. It reminds me of actually cleaning things up. But just a reminder, if you want to change your icon you can like with any of the other models you'll also want. I'm just going to pick a couple of.

Proposal templates in here because we will be using those later and I don't want to have to come back and change them again.

I'll hit save and continue.

I'm getting an error message. I was getting this a little bit yesterday too so I will just refresh and try saving again and that worked this time. Okay.

So I'm. I've got. This is our behind the scenes work now. But you can see it has because I made it live right away. It's showing up over on my left hand side where I can use it for quotes. I'm not going to go through all the behind the scenes section for this model. I want to jump in and use it as a quote to show you how I could use this in front of a client. Let's put a new client with today's date.

Just so I can keep it straight when we're going into.

Doing various quotes and proposals today 2024, 1212.

Okay.

So I'm going to. I'm not going to be using any of my keywords. We'll just save and continue. So I have not as of yet done any changes to this model. This is exactly how it look when you clone the one that Mark gives us. So in your beginning questions, this first section of questions about your business is typically going to be the scope type questions. You can change, add, remove questions. That's all done behind the scenes edit, the pricing method, the amount. It's just like all the other models that we use. Typically you would have done or I hope you would have done a diagnostic review first and a lot of these scope type questions you would have been able to answer already. I've told you before about how I use effective pricing. This previous screen, I actually have this completed before I start sharing my screen with a client. And because I've done a diagnostic review, I do go ahead and answer a lot of these preliminary questions and then I just say to the client, I noticed these things when I was doing your diagnostic review. So I've gone ahead and answered some of them for you. We'll just quickly review the answers that I put in. Let me know if you want to make any changes. And that allows me to go through the scope questions a lot quicker and spend more time on the value type questions and then my packages at the end.

So.

Remember, as we're going through this, you would have likely also shown them a brochure. If you have a brochure for this service, like anything that we're doing value pricing again, you want to find out what's the pain behind that being behind and meeting cleanup work means for them you want to build up the value, you want to explain the benefits, you want to show them your packages, find out which package they're leaning towards so that by the time you get to the software here, the only thing that you really want to have left to do is to go through the questions and build up the actual price. So let's just quickly walk through this as if you're doing this with a client. So we have our scope questions. I'm not going to worry about changing any of these answers. What I am going to ask everybody to do as I go through this model is to take a look at the questions and share in the chat box if there's any other additional questions that you've added. And at the end of covering this cleanup project section, I'll review those and I'll also let you know a few of how I've changed my model and some few, a few that I've added as well. I'm pretty much just going to be hitting save and continue on every page because there will be a price that generates. So some of the questions that are important is how many months behind are you? Which accounting system do you use?

You could of course have other options in there that one, you know, if they're on an accounting system that you're not familiar with, a cleanup project could take a little bit longer. Are they registered for sales tax? Do they use invoices as opposed to a cash business? How many bank accounts, how many credit cards? These are all fairly self explanatory type questions.

I'm going to hit save and continue now we're starting to get into some of the preference type questions and then the next page is really when we start getting into one of some of the more value type questions. So this one again is pretty standard. These questions are are going to be pretty much yes or no. It's not going to be anything really value driven at this point. It's compliance related. So are you behind with filing your tax returns? I'll tell you one of the questions that I have added is if they say yes to this, then I also ask them if cra, which is our governing body here in Canada, has started contacting them, which to me means are they a little bit behind or really far behind? Because once CRA is starting to send out those little brown envelopes in the mail or ringing down their telephone, I know there's a lot more urgency that will drive up the price behind the scenes. Are you behind with your payments of your tax? Going to hit save and continue here again. Now we're starting to get into the value type questions.

This is where often when you reveal a price on the fixed price page, if the price seems a little too high for them and you want to go back and review some of their answers to their questions, this is where you're usually going to find that changing their answers on this page would what would be, what would decrease the price for them? So they may have initially said yes, they want the fast track service, but if you change that answer to no, it would obviously change the price. So this is where you really want to use your value based questions that will really build up the price based on things that they value.

We haven't gone through a brochure.

Today, so let's spend a little bit of time looking at what comes up in the packages. So if I was doing this in front of a client, we of course have our tool tips just like the other models. So I would spend some time going through this. So.

You know, identifying and resolving age balances, making sure payroll entries are accurate if they have payroll, comparing opening balances, full accounts and tax reconciliation. So I'll tell you again, one of the questions that I have is about which method of cleanup service do they want? Do they want, you know, basically like a quick and dirty cleanup method that reconciles to the bank accounts or do they want a more thorough one? Which I like to say in my proposals or my service agreements is more audit proof where I have actual source documents with every transaction. So that's one of the questions that I ask. I be very careful when I'm explaining the differences to them for that because I don't want them to just automatically choose quick and dirty without understanding the benefits. And I would actually have a different line if they've chosen quick and dirty. I would actually have a different line in my service agreement for them for that. And my goodness, time is flying. So I'm going to hit choose a package will reveal my price, choose a package that's really low, by the way, for cleanup work. And now in this model you will see there aren't any enhancements.

You can certainly add some. One of the enhancements that I like to use is for the fast track question. I do have it in my regular questions, but I Actually have it set up as a 14 day fast track and in here as an enhancement or Sorry, sorry, I'm confusing this with my QBO setup. I have. Depending on how far behind they are for my fast track method, I would have number of months available, so I could add it as an additional option. So if they say that they are one year behind, I may talk to them in the fast track question. When I'm explaining it to them, I may say, we'll have this cleanup done for you in three months. We have one year's worth of work to be done. We'll have it done within three months. And then here in the enhancements, I may turn around and offer them a one month fast track option instead, which I could quickly do if I choose to add an additional option here.

Okay.

I'm just going to go back one page. We've talked before about behavior rewards. I don't recommend using these. This should be your last resort. If a customer says a price is too high, your very first result should be to go back to the questions and review if there's any questions that can be changed. Barring that, if that doesn't work, maybe see if they're interested in a lower level of project or package. And if that doesn't work, then come into your behavior rewards. If you really want to work with this client at that point, it might be that you've decided you don't want to work with this client. You might not want to offer any discounts. That's primarily why the button doesn't say discounts, because then if everybody would ask what that means. So if you want to offer behavior rewards, do leave it as a last option for you. So there are a few in here that Mark offers in the model.

All right.

Some other options of enhancements that you might do could be a fancier method of a report package with some nice charts and graphs. If you prepare taxes, maybe this is a bookkeeping cleanup that you're doing, but maybe you're also a tax preparer. You could offer to get them caught up on their tax returns at the same time. Basically what I do with my enhancements is I pick a couple of things from my and this is for all my models. I pick a couple of things from my middle package and those become enhancements for my base package package. I pick a couple of things that I've learned just through experience from my most popular package that then become enhancements for my middle package. And then the enhancements in my top package are things that are just really off the charts that I'm going to charge phenomenal amounts for. So I'm going to hit save and continue here again. Now we get to our payment plan page. You would review this with your client and then when you're done with this section you would end your screen share with the client at this point. You could do the review screen with them here and end with them at this point, tell them your next steps and then conclude your meeting and the rest of what you do in effective pricing, you would carry on on your own. You wouldn't do that in front of the client. So I'm going to hit save and complete.

And complete the quote.

I'm just going to see. Oh, nobody posted any questions in chat of other questions that you may use. So I'm going to go ahead and tell you a few more that I do. But please do share. We we're all here to help each other and learn from each other. So if you have other ones please do share those with everybody. So I mentioned about how if they are behind with the tax authorities, I have a follow up question about if they're getting any notifications from CRA yet because it increases the urgency. I asked them this is one I really like. I asked them if they have accounts receivable. I ask them about the amount owing to and I'll have it as a drop down list with the answers being in a range of dollar amounts rather than a number of outstanding invoices. I just think this goes back to price psychology that if they have, you know, 100,000 or 200,000 or whatever that's sitting in accounts receivable because they are behind on their records and they haven't been reaching out to these customers to collect and pay. That question has a pretty powerful impact on being able to have a large price calculator built into your model behind whatever they answer there. I also asked them a few more questions about staff. Are they behind on any issuing any T4 slips? Which of course would also have the government knocking on their door. Maybe they're behind on processing year end bonuses or providing reimbursement allowances or paying expense reports. Any of those types of questions that would impact their employee morale and their employee loyalty. I mean who knows, maybe. Maybe they're behind on treating their employees well. So maybe they're getting a higher turnover rate because their employees are going somewhere else. That would be a pain point that we could help them with. Right? I asked them about any upcoming plans they have for their business. Do they intend to apply for any loans or financing, are they going to need accurate financial statements that are up to date? That may create a little more urgency as well. Perhaps here we are in December, maybe in January they have a meeting at their bank where they're going to be applying for a loan. Not January, because I would never get a cleanup done that quickly. But you know what I mean, Maybe they have a bank meeting coming up in a couple of months and they need this caught up in time for that meeting. If it's a client that's planning on doing their own bookkeeping, which is not my ideal client by the way, I'm a bit of a control freak. I like to do all the bookkeeping. But if your ideal client does do their own bookkeeping, I asked them do they want a routine review and cleanup. And I have it as a drop down style of question with the option of quarterly, semi, annually or annually. I do have my basic package is kind of a do it yourself package, but I really steer my clients away from that. But if they were to choose my basic package, this would be an option that I would offer them. If they're doing their own bookkeeping, do they want me to come in and clean up after them on at a certain number of time throughout the year?

And then I mentioned about how thorough they want the cleanup to be. The quicker method that's based on bank statements or a more thorough method based on all the source documents. And again, use that question cautiously and be sure that you have a great tool, tips that you're explaining it and that the customer understands the difference. And that would be how I price a cleanup project. It's actually a lot less intimidating than what I thought it was for my first. I don't know how many years in the academy, I just had this feeling that I was always going to lose my shirt on cleanup projects. But honestly, there's so many tools available out there for us right now that make this so much easier. So I guess maybe that's why I used to hesitate. Back then we didn't have as many integrations available to help us, but it is a lot easier now.

I'm just going to do a quick question check and then we're going to move on to the QBO setup.

Ue says I used Mark's cleanup model, so I'm looking forward to seeing what other questions you added. So I did mention a few there Yui. I hope hopefully a few other people may post some, but I hope some of those ones helped for you. And when you used the model, did you have any Additional ones that you wanted to add as well. And then Elnis has asked a bit of a general question, Kim, but do you know where you can change the payment plan dates? Currently on my side, it gives the monthly. So we are today going to be talking about managing payment plans on these and we're going to deep dive into that a little bit. So I'm going to table your question for a little bit and I think I will be answering that when we get to that section. But if I don't answer your question, just poke me again and we'll cover it during that page.

Okay. And I see Lynn's giving you an answer there too. All right, so we're going to move on to pricing. QBO setup. I'm going to go back into my model management.

Again. There's an option here I call it QBO Setup. The model is actually called Cloud Setup. It could be their whole cloud ecosystem that you're setting up. I just call it QBO because that is where everything really starts for me. So I'm going to click on use model again. Let me just quickly rename the date format here. It's the OCD in me.

I'm going to go ahead and make it live. Choose a couple of templates here.

And then save and continue.

Okay, all the same concept, guys. Gosh, I don't know why I'm getting that error message again.

It always works the second time. Okay, all the same concept, guys. Using a brochure, doing some type of diagnostic first of their current system, even if they're just using an Excel sheet or another accounting software that they give you accountant access to to go in and take a look beforehand, you always want to try and do that diagnostic review first.

And I like to say as well, I think I actually have this in my notes somewhere else, but I'm going to mention it now. Using a brochure, don't let that stop you from using effective pricing. You know, Mark gives us tons of information in the academy. Just jump in and start doing something. You may not have a brochure for every service that you offer right off the bat. We're talking about ideal situations and what's really going to give you the most bang for your buck. But you can certainly use this model even if you don't have a brochure set up yet and then you can do a brochure later.

One of the things that I particularly like about this model or this service is that it's really, really profitable. It's a really high value item, but it does not take me hardly any time at all. So as we mentioned, I use qbo. Intuit actually offers a service where they will move a client's books from pre existing software over to qbo. For me, I don't really have to do anything. The only thing I, I may spend a little bit of extra time afterwards on some enhancement type features that I've sold my client to do because Intuit really just does the bare minimum to get the books over. But the bulk of the work is actually done for me. So if my client has actually chosen the basic level package that's done for me by Intuit, I don't really need to do anything. I've heard that Xero has a similar system in place. I don't know that for sure. If we have Xero users in the room, if they could maybe let everybody know because it's a huge time saver and then you know, we're charging for a service not based, we're not charging hourly, right? So we're charging based on the value of what the client gets from this. So if you can charge a thousand or two thousand or three thousand dollars for this and it takes you an hour or maybe a few minutes to send an email to Intuit or Xero to do it for you, it has the potential to be a really, really, really profitable service.

So in this case we're going to take a look at the model.

So I made it live right away. Let's go over here.

I'll select my same client.

Okay, so just like with our previous example guys, if you.

Have questions that you don't see here in the model, please do drop them into chat, share them with everybody. Let's all help each other. I'm going to be sharing some of mine as well. So here of course we have our scope questions. Which system do they want to move to? I don't actually ask this question in my model because I don't give them a choice. They're moving to QBO or they're not my client. And that's actually part of my screening process. Very, very, very early on in my qualification of clients. If they're not willing to work in qbo, I will happily refer them to somebody else. I do however have the question about what system are they currently using. And this is really important and again, really high value. Stephanie actually just mentioned it in the chat. And Mark, I see your messages as well about Xero. Thank you for sharing that. So Xero users, Mark has said that they have a similar conversion process available. So Stephanie mentioned specifically about this question. If a customer has a manual set of books currently, maybe they're using an old ledger journal. And I've had that before. Oh my gosh, did I ever have that. It's going to take you a long time. You're going to have to do a lot of manual keying of entries. So that would be a very high value item that you want to know. If they're in a spreadsheet, it's a little bit easier. Maybe they're already in QuickBooks Online, but maybe they have a file that's not very good and needs some cleanup first. Or maybe they just want to kind of. Maybe that file is so nasty dirty that your recommendation is going to be to just scrap it and start a new file from when the books were last clean and then do some catch up work for them. So that could be an option as well. And then obviously some other choices here that they might be coming from. Is your accounting up to date? So it could be that you need to offer your catch up service or some cleanup service. If they're anything more than a couple of months for me. Is there anything more than a couple of months? I will do a separate pricing model, but if they're within a couple of months behind, and I'm actually going to talk about this in more detail when we get to the payment plans, I would not price them separately for a cleanup job. I would include it here still.

So now we go on to again, some questions that aren't really going, you know, obviously will impact your price, but aren't really going to change anything at all. Like they can't go back and say, oh, I have five bank accounts. Oh no, I have 10 bank accounts. These types of answers won't really change too much once they have determined what they are.

Now we're getting into some of the preference questions and the value type questions. So these are again the ones that are really going to drive your business. So this first question assumes that you did use a brochure first and you have shown them that and you can ask them which question are you leaning towards? I don't use this in my model. I do definitely ask them this question, but I ask it when I'm on the fixed price page. Do you want us to set up bank feeds for you? Do you want us to set up employee records, set up your products and services? Do you want our seven day fast track service? So this is where when I was talking about the cleanup project, I accidentally gave you some different days. So in my model I have this question as a 14 day fast track service which Intuit at their busiest that I've ever seen it, they said we'll get it done within two weeks. Usually it's within a week. So I like to get say do you want our fast track service? And we'll have this set up for you within 14 days. And then later in my enhancements, I offer an enhancement for a fast track service that is seven days and if that's the case and Intuit does have the backlog, I go ahead and do it myself. It's still very easy. It still usually only takes a few minutes with the conversion tools that are available, depending of course on where they are converting from, but still very easy to get done within seven days. And I can charge a premium for that in my enhancement section before I move on to or let's go ahead and move on to the fixed price page and I'm going to tell you some more of my questions. So if you're not using a brochure, this is where you would want to review some of your packages. This is where before I reveal the price, after I've reviewed the packages, this is now where I would ask my client which package resonates with you or do you think would work best for you? I would select whichever one they said so that it's highlighted and easy to see and then I would click on my reveal price button.

So.

I'm going to before we move on, I'm going to tell you some of the other questions that I have in my model. I like to ask how many users they'd like to have set up on their system in qbo, if it dictates which package I need to set them up on, whether it's plus or advanced, depending on how many users they need. And if they want me to set up those users and invite the users, do they want to take advantage of my wholesale billing rate or do they want to manage their own subscription? Do they want customer and vendor details entered along with any open bills and invoices that may be outstanding for those customers and vendors? Do they want us to create.

Templates for their invoices or their sales receipts or their customer statements? Would they like a training package? You know, maybe they want to do some of it themselves. Maybe they have. Maybe they have their own bookkeeping or accounting department already. They want to move to the cloud, but their existing staff or employee doesn't know how to do that, so they're hiring us to come in and get it set up for them. And then they want a training package to train their employees how to do it. And then maybe they want an ongoing support package for the first few months or the first year. And then of course I talked about that enhancement question.

With the fast track service. Here are some of the behavior rewards that are in here. If they don't want comparative balances, they can save a little bit, so on and so forth, and then let's save and continue.

So this model does have quite a few enhancements in it. Unlike the cleanup one, we didn't have any enhancements in the actual model. This one does have quite a few already. So here's similar to what I have a training library. So I'm in the process of setting one up still. But when it's complete, I will have a library that I can share on my Microsoft SharePoint if they want to have access to that.

If they want us to set up specific payroll information, do they want training on a payroll software? Like remember we're talking about their whole ecosystem. So we might be setting them up on Dexter hub doc or wagepoint or bill.com or all of these softwares that we use that integrate with the core accounting program. We're setting up everything for them. It's their cloud setup. So they may want training for everything. Right. Here's a three month education program option. So a lot of similar questions that I have, but you can offer them in different places, you can offer them in your questions, you can offer them as enhancements, so on and so forth. So we're going to move on in just a moment to payment plans.

But I'm just going to take a look at chat.

Mark says when pricing, I assume there's also a service differentiation to enter the individual. Yes, absolutely. That's the quick and easy versus the more detailed audit proof version. Stephanie asks how do you determine the values to assign to each system? Converting from. Do you have some guidelines? I don't have specific guidelines, Stephanie. I just go based on what I like working with and what I don't like working with. I do not like working with Sage, even if somebody gives me access to their file. And some of the people I know in this room are Sage users. So I apologize to you. I don't like Sage. When, when I was in school we actually learned QuickBooks, Sage and Act Pack was the three programs that we learned. And I very quickly, way back then decided that I was an Intuit girl. So if somebody is coming to me from Sage, I charge more for that. Definitely. If they're coming from a Manual system or Excel, I charge more for that. It's more about what you like to do, what you're comfortable with. How familiar are you with the software for me to do a Sage conversion? Because I'm not super familiar with it and there's a lot, if I remember correctly from the last time I looked at it, it has a lot tighter constrictions of what you can necessarily export and move and manipulate.

So I would charge more for things that I know are going to take me longer, but again, it's all behind the scenes because as far as they're concerned, they don't need to know that it's taking me longer. Right. And I see a couple other. Mark has answered you as well. Again, very similar. It depends how familiar you are with the system they're coming from.

So, Stephanie, the struggle, it's really going to take some trial and error and this is where you need to be familiar with who your ideal client is. It could be that you don't want to do a conversion from a particular accounting software. Like I. I tend to have what I call yellow flags and red flags in my qualification process. If somebody's coming to me from Sage, that's a yellow flag for me. And they're allowed to collect so many flags before I eventually say no, this is no longer my ideal client. So it's really a preference thing. There isn't an actual formula that I would say.

Give a bit more detail on setting up a training library. So a lot of people refer to it like an internal Wikipedia. Stephanie, if you are familiar with the Wikipedia website, I basically just have a folder structure set up in my SharePoint that I'm building. How to process payroll, how to enter a journal entry, how to do this, how to add a new user, how to connect your bank feeds. It's all very, very short videos. I try to keep them. I think my longest one is about five minutes. I really try to keep multiple videos, but really short snippets. So if you think about YouTube does this as well, they'll have longer videos and then they have shorts. I try to keep my training library to shorts. Like I said, I haven't actually given a client access to it yet. Myself and my team are still very much building it up. It's something we're going to work on a lot more in 2025, but it's basically like an internal wiki that. That you can then give your clients access to.

Okay, I don't see any more questions, so I'm going to move on. Let Me just complete this quote. Okay, so we're going to move on to managing payment plans. Perfect timing because we are on a payment plan.

Code. I'm going to actually.

I'm going to use a bookkeeping quote for this.

So let me just quickly do.

Second year, guys.

Okay, so now we are on our payment plan website. They've chosen my middle package. It says right up here, silver package is 12 payments of $385. And now we're going to review the payment plan with them. So we did cover this in another previous session. So I'm not going to go through the whole standard payment plan process for this page. If somebody does have questions, drop them into chat. What I want to cover today is some specific situations that are a little bit different that other users have created workaround for. And again, I invite everybody to use the chat. I know a few meetings ago.

Sorry.

I know a few meetings ago somebody actually had a question that they invoiced their question client every two weeks rather than every month. And there was some conversation going on in the chat with quite a few members about.

How to do a payment plan that's every two weeks instead of monthly. And I'd have to go back and review that chat. I, I, I. We didn't really address it during the session, but there are ways that you can do workarounds. So that's what we're going to focus on today. So the first workaround is exactly that. Somebody needs a payment frequency other than monthly. So anytime you change the num this first question, the number of months that this is going to be spread across, it's always going to change your first payment date, but then all remaining payments are going to default to being a monthly after, it's always going to be one month. One month, One month. So what happens if you have.

A payment frequency that's not monthly? So one of the workarounds that you could do is if we look at what this table looks like.

Payment plan. If I were to, if I were able to change this in effective pricing, it's just taking a minute to generate here. If I was able to change this in effective pricing, I would get this nice little layout that has here's your first payment, here's all your remaining payments. So the first payment is going to be December 12th and then all the other remaining payments for 12 payments are going to be exactly one month later. If you need a payment frequency that you can't do other than monthly, I would recommend setting this up in Excel, a nice little format that Looks very similar to this. And when you are doing your proposal with the.

After you have finished your meeting with the client and you're doing your proposal, you can im, you can save that Excel plate as an image and upload that into your proposal so you still get this nice little table view. It just doesn't come directly from the software. So that's one workaround, saving it as an image and then uploading that image into the specific proposal for the client. Because remember, proposals are specific for each quote, right? You can have your, your proposal template.

But when you're inputting information specific to a client, it's going to be specific to that quote. So it will not change your entire template. One of the other situations is what happens if you are quoting an annual price, like a lot of these prices that we're quoting, especially for bookkeeping on quoting an annual price. What happens if you take on a client partway through the year and you need to manage a payment for them for just part of the year? This could be really common for. I'm going to use the example of people that do income tax filing. I do not do income tax filing. But it could be that your income tax is due to be filed in six months from now. And we definitely want to be paid before the work is done, right? We don't. Just like any other service, a mechanic, when you get work done at the mechanic and you go to pick up your car, you pay for it before you take your car away, right? So we are not working on an accounts receivable basis ourselves. We are being paid either in advance or at the time of the work being done. If we're doing monthly payment plans and obviously we're billing in advance. So if you're doing income tax filing, let's say you quoted the client, your annual tax filing is going to be $2,000. But price psychology, of course, we want to chunk that down into monthly payments for them so that it seems smaller. So when you got to the fixed price page, you would need to have a conversation with the client that your price is monthly based on an annual amount.

But because the work that needs to be done is only for six months worth, you're going to need to change the payment. You still need to do one year's worth of tax filing, but there's only six months left until when you need to do that tax filing. So this 12 payments of 385.

Is based on. I don't have my calculator up in front of me. I don't know what 385 times 12 is I'm a bookkeeper, I use calculators. So I would need to explain to my client I still need to do one year's worth of tax filing for you, but because you are hiring my services partway through the year, we need to bill you over six months. So I would change that. What you're going to see is now my payment has doubled six months of 775. So the annual payment is still going to, the annual amount is still going to be the same. I'm still going to get paid in advance of doing the work. I've just changed it over another period of time.

Another situation could be that, so that's taking on a client mid year and you can play around with this. It could be that they're coming to you three months before it's due or eight months.

There is another workaround that you can do for this. And, and it's kind of a bit of a combination of the next step that we're going to talk about as well. And that's providing a quote for current work but also having a little bit of catch up work to do as well. So I mentioned this when I was talking about quoting for a bookkeeping job. And maybe they're two, maybe three months behind. I may not necessarily do a separate cleanup work job if they're only a couple of months behind for that. It is recommended if you have a customer that is severely behind to do a separate quote for cleanup and then a new quote for regular ongoing work. But let's pretend there's a situation where your client's bookkeeper was on leave for a month or two. Maybe they were sick and they were on leave for a month or two and they were expecting the person to come back. So they let it lapse for a short period of time. But now that previous bookkeeper may have may be having some long term health impacts and they've advised that they're not going to be returning at all. Now they need a new bookkeeper. You're giving them a quote for regular ongoing work. You might not want to give them a separate quote for just a short period of catch up. But you still need to be paid, you still need to do the work for those two months that they're behind. So let's say you've landed on a price of $800 a month. I'm just going to put this back to 12.

We'll leave it at 385. I'm not going to change it. Let's say You've landed on a price of $800 a month for the regular work. And since I bill in advance, I'm going to be billing them $800 for my first month of work. But they're also two months behind. So that means that their first payment to me would be $2,400. It could mean that they can't afford a large chunk like that all at once. So what you can do, instead of doing two separate quotes, one for the 1600 cleanup and then another one for the regular payment work, There's a couple of ways you can do this. The first one would be to build it into your model as questions. So I've seen somebody do that where they build it in to their questions here, where they ask a question, are you behind? Or how far behind are you? And then the. The price calculation in the end adds a percentage increase for each additional month that they're behind.

That will work. The reason that I don't like that method is when it comes to revealing the price here at this point, those two months of cleanup work that you're doing are now rolled over into this regular monthly payment. And it makes it seem like a higher amount.

So the way that I would handle this a little bit differently. There's no right or wrong. It's about finding what works for you. The way that I would handle this is a little bit differently. I would keep my core group of questions the same. I would say this is what your regular ongoing payment will be. And then you can add on. In the enhancements page.

We talked about adding the additional option. You could say two months ketchup.

And then add. And I'm going to say 1600.

Because they're two months behind. Right. So now it tells me their payments have now changed. So they're still on a payment plan. Their regular payment is now 518amonth for 12 months instead of the 385. And they don't have to do that large chunk payment at the beginning. The other option.

I'm just going to say no to that and go back to my 385.

The other option that you can do is require an advance payment. So let's say.

That you. Sorry, I am going to add this back in enhancements.

Yes.

Okay, so now we're back to 12 payments of 518. Maybe they tell you we can afford, you know, a little bit upfront. We just can't afford 1600 or 2400 up front. So you could say that they're going to give you an advance payment of a thousand dollars.

And then that will then decrease. The annual amount is still the same because I'm saying that yes, this is in this yes or no drop down means is that a thousand dollars included in the annual price that you've quoted or if you say no, it's going to mean extra. So if I say no, my prices here are going to go back to 518 because that's what my regular monthly price was going to be. But I'm going to say yes, they're giving me an advanced thousand dollar payment that's included in their annual payment. This will now bring their monthly payment down to 434.63. So those are a few ways that you can play around with information on the payment page. You can of course somebody asked a question earlier about being able to change the dates. You can certainly do that in here. So if they're giving you an advance payment today, on the day that they're signing the contract, but the work isn't starting until January, then you can go ahead and change that to a January date and then all following payments would be one month after that. So if I go look at the.

Print for that page.

Just give it a minute to generate. I'm about to move on to integrating with qbo. As soon as I finish this, finish generates and I show you. So I'll check for questions first. So you can now see I have my advance payment of a thousand dollars payable today and then the regular first payment. Sorry, I might need to make this a little bit bigger for you guys. My regular first payment now starts on January and then every month following that is exactly one month later until the 12 months is done. And this message at the bottom here, guys, remember from a previous session, you can customize that message however you like. Okay, so I'm going to do. So those are a few workarounds. If we haven't covered what your situation is for specific type of payment plan that you need to do, I would refer you back to the first one that we talked about today about creating something that looks nice in Excel, saving it as an image and uploading it as an image into your template into your proposal. Okay, so let me do a quick.

That was my issue. You can't change the regular payment remaining dates at default to a month later. My payment terms are seven days. Yep, exactly. You can't unfortunately change.

The default date of these remaining dates.

Okay, so I am going to complete this one.

And we're going to talk about integrating with qbo. So this is actually really easy to do.

I do not have my QBO page open. Just give me a minute here guys.

I thought I had it open and it was in my other browser tab.

And I closed my other browser tab at the beginning of the meeting.

So give me just a second.

I'm going to get logged in on my other screen here and then when I'm not showing some confidential information, I'll I'll drag it over for you.

23 minutes left. I want to show you this and then I want to show you canva.

Okay, so in QBO I have what I call a test file. Guys, don't rely on any of the information that is in this file. I have played around with it so many things times. It's actually one of my $1 shell companies that I have from a long time ago. Nothing is accurate, so don't judge me. So to connect.

QBO to effective pricing, it's super easy. So I'm going to go back to my settings menu and then I'm going to go over here into my profile and along this left hand menu bar right down near the bottom for integrations, you're going to see two options for QuickBooks and Xero. If I choose QuickBooks, it's going to ask me to provide the tax rate information. So you should have this set up in your QBO file already. But you would just select from the dropdown of what you typically have on your invoices. Now obviously this may change if you're invoicing a customer in another province or something. This does not mean that it's set in stone and that you can't change it later. You just want to select what your primary one is going to be and what you would have in your primary effective pricing model. So for me that is HST.

Going to click on save. Now I already have mine connected, but ordinarily you would see another little window that pops up. Let me see if I can show even though I can't complete the 01 because I don't have a zero account, I want to show you. So you would get this little button that says Connect to Xero.

When you do that it takes you to a login screen. So for me it took me to a QuickBooks login screen. I entered my QuickBooks login information and then you click connect. I think it says connect or next or something like that. It takes a minute or two and then it returns you as you saw, back to my main effective pricing window. But now if I go look at the apps that are connected in my test file here. I can now see that effective pricing is connected and I can launch it right from here. I don't usually launch it from here. I'm usually in it already because I've just finished a meeting with a client or something. But if you wanted to, you can launch it right from here. So that's literally how easy it is to connect the two files. The next thing that you may want to do is when you have done a proposal, a quote and a proposal for client, you may want to create those invoices in client QuickBooks automatically. So I am going to go over here, I'm just going to jump through things pretty quickly because this is stuff we've done before. I'm just going to.

Quickly do a proposal.

Say price agreement, AP.

Demo.

I'm going to say my QuickBooks product. So this is a proposal that I'm doing for monthly bookkeeping. You can see some massage stuff in here, some alcohol stuff in here. Like I said, no judgment, guys. I play around with snacks. I'm a snacks person. Travel, I love to travel. So I have different things that I've played around with. This case in particular, this is a monthly bookkeeping proposal that I'm doing. So I am going to choose that. It says product, but as you know, a product can also be a service. My proposal date, you can change that. We went through that before.

And I'm just going to quickly save this proposal, guys. I'm not going to change anything. I'm going to complete it. I just. It's going to take a minute to generate here.

And now it is complete. So now if I go back into that quote and I go to look at the proposal, you'll now see that I have this button here that says push to qbo. If I click that.

I'm going to get this window where I can either create a new customer if I do. All fields are mandatory here, guys. Just to let you know.

I typically like to set up my customer in QuickBooks first. Again, there is no right or wrong way. I just like to gather a little more information. I like to have phone number, email address, so on and so forth. Their terms like things that you would typically want to have on a customer profile. And I can't enter that here.

But this will create the new customer profile for you and then you can go back and add that information just for me, my workflow, the way my brain works, I like to have it entered first. So I'm going to pretend that this is a customer that already exists. We'll use my company and we're going to say this is monthly bookkeeping. I click save. Going to take a drink of water because it takes a minute.

What this is doing right now, it's taking all of those invoices for the monthly bookkeeping and it's pushing those over to qbo. So you can see the I'm on my proposal screen. That push to QBO button has disappeared. It's not there anymore. The reason being you don't want to have the ability to accidentally push all of your invoices over twice and then you've got duplicates and you need to go and avoid a bunch of things. So once you've pushed it to QBO1, it does not let you do it again. So now if I go to my.

Customers here.

And I sent that to myself.

You can now see all of these invoices. You can see a bunch that are voided because when I was playing around with it yesterday. But you can now see, let me change the date format. Here is my invoice for today for that first payment that's due today. And then here are all my other invoices for January, February, March, April, so on and so forth. So it has pushed all of those invoices over for me automatically. That's how simple it is, guys, to integrate with your QBO file and to push the information from your client's proposal over to QuickBooks. So I'm going to pause for water and questions and then we're going to move on to our last section for today about using Canva with your proposals.

Okay, I'm not seeing any new questions. Oh, yes, I am. Stephanie, can you have both QBO and Xero connected at the same time? I would think so, Stephanie. I, I haven't done that and I, and I can't test it because I don't have a Xero account to log into. But it's not. If there's somebody else in the group that uses both, maybe they can help Stephanie with that answer. I could tell you you're certainly not going to break anything by trying. It seems logical to me that you would be able to connect both at the same time. I don't see why not. Because when you are doing the proposal and it's asking you to push the information, it gives you a dropdown to select which service you want to push it to and which customer file and stuff. I just can't stay with 100% certainty that you can connect to both same time. But it's not going to Hurt to try.

Okay, so let's move on. We've got under 15 minutes left. I am not going to do.

A huge session about Canva Emily. I defer to Emily for all things Canva related. I'm more of the type I like to. I've mentioned throughout all of these effective crushing sessions. I like to keep things simple. I start with Mark's templates and then I edit those, which I showed you how to do on our last session. I'm also not very creatively inclined. I can easily look at someone else's work and love it. But when I sit down to try and be creative on my own, one of two things happens. I either don't like anything at all. I hate it all. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Or I end up liking everything and I go down a rabbit hole and become indecisive and it takes me 10 times longer than it would if I just started with a template. Emily sessions and videos are amazing. There's several of them available. It's honestly, she flies around so quick like she she can use Canva with her eyes closed. I bet it's highly customizable as well for every individual, your tastes, your colors, the project that you're working on. So we are really. This is not a session today on how to use Canva. It's a session on how to use Canva with effective pricing. So today I am using my personal Canva account rather than my business one because I wanted to be able to show you my personal one is free. I wanted to be able to show you that everything that I am doing today I have done with a free account. I also wanted to let you know one of the handouts that you're going to get today is from Emily. It's called Proposal Dimensions. I'm going to have this open on another window while we are chatting. So if you wonder where I'm getting the numbers from, that is where. Don't worry, you will get that handout. So I'm going to start with. You would start by creating a new document. You would just click on this custom size button. I actually started one yesterday. So if you use. Let me just go back one screen. If you use the custom size, this is where you would input the dimensions that's on that handout that Emily has prepared for us. I'm going to just use this sheet that I started with yesterday to save some time.

Is there many people Quick show of hands quickly in the chat. Just yes or no. Are there many people using Canva already? I'm going to continue on and then I'm going to pop into the chat for a minute. So this was. This took me probably 20 minutes to create yesterday. Somebody else could probably do it in three. Oh, hi Kate. I didn't see you in here. Nice to see you. So I'm just going to add a page and I'm just going to quickly show you what I've done here. So over here we have our menu bar. So I went first to Elements and then down to Photos. I clicked on. See all. I'm just going to quickly choose a photo that I like and then you can resize it.

Make it the full width of the page, so on and so forth. Then I went back to Elements and I picked a square shape and I'm going to drag that over here and then I'll resize it. And then I changed the color to red, my favorite color.

Over here I uploaded my logo. I dragged that where I wanted it and then I put a text box.

You can choose which type you want. I put a text box over here.

And I typed in this prepared for created on page. So I'm going to use this one that I created yesterday. I have it downloaded and saved somewhere already. Again, I'm not spending a lot of time in Canva today, but just to let you know, that's how I quickly created this page yesterday went much faster today. So.

That is how to play around with Canva. There is so Canvas, one of those rabbit holes for me. I, I just don't like to spend a lot of time in there. Then in order, if you remember from our session last month, to upload something in to.

Effective pricing, it's best if it's a PNG file. So I saved this as a PNG file. I'm going to go back over into.

My proposal templates now.

I have one that I started yesterday. We're going to work with that one again just so I'm not going through all the details that we've already been through. So now here you can see the image that I uploaded from Canva to show you how I did that I needed to for. So there's two different things you can do. And, and you would see this in Emily's training. You can have a nice cover page like this that you want to put some keywords in. So these here are keywords. Proposal name, client name, proposal date, so on and so forth. And then you can also have a nice back page or footer page and that one typically won't change. So to do this as a cover Page where I want to put keywords in, I need to put it as text. If I upload it as an image, I can't put text over top of it. So this is actually a text box.

Which I then went to the little abacus symbol over here to get my settings for this text section. And then I uploaded my image from Canva. So that's how I've got this here in my proposal. How we do third time. Okay.

I will be honest with you guys, and I'm going to show you in a minute. I intentionally left this. Partially intentionally left this. Doing this through Canva does require some time to get it set up where it looks nice in effective pricing. I like to say it takes the same amount of time as setting up your first model. You're going to want to tweak it. You're going to want to play with the questions, you're going to want to play with the calculations. You're going to want to test it a few times. There will be a lot of tweaking required when you're setting up, and you're going to be back and forth between looking at your preview screen and then going back and making changes, and then going back and looking at your previous screen, going back and looking at your pages. It is going to take some time and some effort, guys, but it only needs to be done once, once you've got it set up. It's a beautiful cover page and back page that you can easily put on all of your proposal templates without needing to do them again, so it's well worth the time. So, as you can see here, and a lot of times it's just a matter of hitting the return button a few times. You can see I put my cursor there and I'm hitting return a little bit. But if you noticed, when I hit return up here, these lines also moved down a little bit. So one of the other things that's a little bit tricky.

About. So I'm just going to hit backspace a couple times. Remember my keywords. You can use your formatting buttons in here to pretty much do any type of word formatting. You can change the font, the size, the color, the alignment. Most word editing functions that you have, you can do in here if you just highlight and then you get that little bar underneath.

A couple of recommendations. Make sure that your section margin is all the way over to zero and not somewhere out on the side like this. If it's somewhere out on the side, you'll see that you'll get white Margins at the side could be that you want them. I would think for a nice cover page and end page, you probably want it to go up all the way to the edges and then same thing for your page margins down here. So section margins and page margins, you want to sure that those are both set to zero. So we're going to upload our background image and because we've uploaded this one as text, I can now put keywords over top of my image because it is a text section that just has an image loaded into it. So let's say I wanted to put another keyword in here. Maybe my company website. Oops, it's a little finicky when you're moving around with it. You can see I now I put it in twice because I wasn't paying attention the first time. You can now see that that company website is here. I probably should have put it down at the bottom, but I'm now able to put keywords in.

Over top of an image. So what I want to show you because we've only got a couple of minutes left and then I want to look at questions. I wanted to show you how this previews. So I'm going to hit enter a couple times here. Again, too many.

Okay, so right now this looks on this image that it appears pretty good. I mean, technically I probably would have put that down a little bit, but it looks like this keyword is lined up pretty good. This keyword is lined up pretty good. It appears like my logo looks good. Everything looks like it's going to be properly aligned.

Just wait, let me show you this preview. When it takes a minute to load here.

This is my preview. So I have white space at the top of my page. My logo is cut off at the bottom of my page. My proposal keyword is exactly where I wanted it because that is my proposal name. But you can see my keywords down here. My prepared for is right, but my created for looks like it went down here somewhere. So this is what I mean when it said. When I said it requires a lot of tweaking and editing. I personally get frustrated very easily by stuff like this. I wanted to let you know there is a wonderful, wonderful solution where Emily will do this for you. It's a paid service.

Gabby is going to drop a link into the chat where you can get more information and pricing about it. Basically, you give Emily access to your effective pricing account authorization for her to go into your account. You give her the text that you want in your proposal. You give her any images or logos that you want to use any, you know, rough guidelines. I think it's a great idea if you can draw it out on paper of kind of what you want, where and then she will do all of this fiddling around stuff for you and put it into your effective pricing for you. It's a really great deal. I don't think it's expensive, expensive at all. For the amount of time that it would take ME to fiddle around with this myself and Chic and probably hammer it out very quickly, it's worth it to me. I, I think in Canadian dollars, I want to say it's 200 or $300, I don't remember. It's a one time fee. Again, you could use that for each of your proposals. If you have different appraisals, it's definitely worth it. So we are out of time. I'm sorry, I'm going to wrap up. I just wanted to. We're just basically going to check for questions. I wanted to tell everybody if you need to jump off, we are going to be back in January.

I think I'm good to stop sharing and then I'm going to turn my camera back on.

Okay, so I am going to be here. Gabby's going to play out some music in a minute. I want to thank everybody for attending. I hope you've enjoyed these sessions this year. As I mentioned, we are going to be back in the new year and I'm very happy to say it's going to be a monthly session next year. We're going to do 12 sessions instead of seven that we had this year. So we are going to be able to do a deeper dive into some things and to get into some more detail. I did not show you one additional resource that you will get.

With today's material. It's basically a, it's called a startup checklist or a quick checklist. It's a resource from Mark that is basically a checklist for all things effective pricing. A checklist for setting up your settings, a checklist for setting up your model, a checklist for doing your first quote as checklist for doing your proposal. It's about 12 or 13 pages long made up of all different checklists that you can do. So I don't see any questions coming in. I'm going to mute and shut off my cam. Gabby's going to start the music. Happy holidays to all of you. I hope you enjoy some wonderful weather and some time with your family and seasons and we will see you in January. Thanks everybody. Bye.