Effective Pricing with Kimme Lafayette: Mastering Software Settings for Optimised Pricing

All right, so you should be seeing the effective pricing software now.

And the first thing that you want to do is set up your base price. So remember, we're going through these things in order. Okay, so step one is your base price. You know what, let me quickly show you the handout first.

This is the handout that you're going to get. It's 12 pages, obviously a page for each of the steps and then, and then the COVID page. So it's going to tell you, here's the base price. I'm going to be showing you how to get there. But it does give you a screenshot. Step two, we're going to talk about the questions. Step two is actually split into part A and B. Step three, multiplying by the global gesture. So this is basically the handout that you're going to get. Everything that's in this handout I am going to be demoing today.

So you will be able to refer back to it later. All right, so the base price, I'm just going to go in and grab one of Mark's models. So to do that, like I showed you last time, we go into our gear settings and into model management.

I tend to, for demo purposes, I tend to typically use the bookkeeping model. So I'm just going to click edit to go in there for today. None of this information is relevant for us. I just want to get into the main model. So now here we are. This is our behind the scenes view. This is again not what the customer is going to see. And this is where we are going to do all of our work to get our models set up.

So to set up the base price, you'll see that we have this menu option over on the left hand side. By the end of the program, just side note, by the end of the program we will have gone through all of these options. But we're really building our house from the foundation up before we expand on it. And, and as I mentioned, the 11 steps go in order. So I am going to be jumping around a little bit. So I might be in one section and then leave it and go to another section and then go back to that first section again.

But mostly where we're going to be today is expressing the price, pricing parameters and then rewards and enhancements packages. We, we will pop into each one a little bit. But for base price I am going to start in the expressing price section. You'll see we have two sections in here. We're going to look at the standard text later. For now, in the global Pricing parameters. I have this base price box which will always default to zero. You don't need to change it if you don't want to. But this base price is the starting point of where all your calculations is going to start. If you put a number in here.

Sorry, I just heard something beep on my computer, but I thought I had everything turned off. I hope you guys didn't hear that.

If you have a number in here, then every time when you're pricing a client, the calculations are going to start from that number that you have in here and will build on top of it. This, if you picture you can't see me, I'm using my hands. If you picture a column of numbers that you're adding up from top to bottom, this is going to be the very first number at the top of your edition for me. I use this base price as a starting point for my software subscription fees.

Gosh, I am hearing so many beeps. I'm sorry guys, I'm going to try to ignore them.

I use this as the starting point for my software subscription fees, which I choose to include. And I'm doing air quotes for my clients for the programs that I deem are mandatory. And this goes back to working with my ideal client. I require all of my ideal clients to use QBO and DEXT at the minimum. If they won't work with those, they aren't my ideal client. So because I have those two programs mandatory, I pay for them at my wholesale rate on behalf of my client. But then I go into my model and I set this base price at twelve hundred dollars. And at that point, I want to mention something that's important to remember. The numbers that we're using in here are based on an annual price for our calculations. Although it's a monthly price that gets shown at the end for our customer, the calculations behind the scenes, we want to think on an annual basis. So my base price, if I put twelve hundred dollars in here, will cause all of my subscriptions, all of my prices to start at a minimum of a hundred dollars a month. And I'm going to show you a little bit as we toggle back and forth of what this would look like. So I'm just going to hit save and continue jump to the review tab. I'll show you this in a bit more detail later, guys. But here you can see my price is starting at zero. If I go back in here, change that to 1200, save and continue back to review. Now my price is starting at 1200. So before I have asked them even a sample single question. I am making sure that I am covering the cost of my subscription fees. Okay, so I'm just going to go back here, change that to zero. I hear a lot of chat. I just want to mention I hear a lot of chatter, just as a side tip, not really related to the software, but I hear a lot of chatter on Facebook.

About people being upset when software companies that we deal with raise their prices. And I get it, I, I, I get it. But you, you have to try and have the mindset that they are a business. We can't not expect them to raise our prices. We raise our prices right, or I hope everybody's raising their prices.

And, and I hear people say that the amount of the price increase is causing them to be in a negative position with their clients, that they're not making a profit on that client. My advice is going to be to never have your margins that tight of a software price that if there's an increase it puts you in a negative profit position for your clients. So I put in $1,200 or $100 a month for my QBO and my DEX subscription prices. They don't cost me a hundred dollars a month. But I have a buffer built in there already that should there be a price increase throughout the year, it's not going to put me into that negative position. And if I find that the price increase this year has gotten to the point where my software subscriptions are getting close to $100 a year or $100 a month and I know that next year there's likely going to be a price increase again, then I'd go into my model for future quotes and I would raise my base price to let's say 1800 a year or $150 a month, whatever I need to cover my costs and give myself that buffer pace space still so that I'm never out of pocket for subscription fees.

I do have other subscription fees that I may pay for but that are calculated into the price but those are question specific so it might be related to payroll. These are the only two that I use in my base price area because they are the only two that are non negotiable for every single one of my clients. Some of the other software subscription fees that I have could differ from client to client so I don't include those in my base price.

Another reminder, guys, sorry, when you hear me pause, I'm sipping my water.

Another reminder we talked about last time. Always. You saw me do it a couple times. Just now.

Always remember that you're hitting that save and continue button when you make changes.

And the other thing that I want to mention about base price, if you've heard me talk before or it really some people we talk about a get out of bed price. I do have a ghetto to bad price that is different than how I use this base price. And that is something that I'm going to show you today of where I put that I'm going to do. We're going to move on to step two. I'm just going to see.

Yeah. So Michael has made a comment that he's using the base price for the cost of the software as well. I think that's a pretty common use.

Okay, let's look at step two.

So step two we're going to move into the questions.

So over here on my left menu bar, again, this is where your price is really going to start to build. It's the heart of the software and where you need to have a very good understanding of your calculation types and formulas that you're using for each question. As we get into some specific model management next month there's going to be a whole session dedicated to understanding the calculation types and some examples of how to use them. We are going to look at them today. We're just not going to get into too much of the details about how to specifically use each one. So remember guys, these 11 steps are building in order. So if you've started with a base price on the previous screen, my very first question is going to start with that $1200 price and it's going to start adjusting my price on top of that. Your questions. I'm just going to go into one to edit. We have calculation types here. It could be a very simple addition or subtraction. You can multiply by a factor, apply a percentage. You can even use square and square roots. I've never actually felt the need to use those two. But if you want to get into some type of calculations that those would be helpful for you, the software does allow for it. And then there's the ability to use a combination one which is unit price and number of units. Those two are used in tandem, which we will go into detail in next month's session about how to use those. You'll hear me say this a lot of times throughout this course, guys. I keep my models pretty simple. The ones that I typically use the most are add and multiply and number of units and unit price.

Then we have four different question types. We have a simple dropdown. If I choose dropdown. You'll see we get a submenu down here. These are ones that are in Mark's menu already. There are ways to edit these and also create your own. Also covered in another session. But just to show you there is a question type that is a drop down where obviously your answer as it states would be a choice of drop down answers. And if you.

Do that, I'll just choose one. There is a value added per choice of that drop down which is part of like if I went in here to modify, I could change the price that is included. If they choose the answer 1 to 10 from the drop down I could choose that, change how much I'm going to charge if they have one to ten sales invoices. So this is all again customizable. Another option that we have for question type is a really simple yes or no answer. And then if the, if they answer yes, this is the amount that's going to be added onto the price. If they answer no, do you want to do anything with the price at all? Again, we're going to talk about specific specifics with that later and then also what you want your default answer to be. And this is going to become important later when we get into some troubleshooting, which is some of the more advanced stuff we'll do. I think about three or four sessions in when we started reviewing the prices that get calculated at the end and troubleshooting where it seems like something has gone wonky. Looking at some of your default values would, would be one of the places that I would come to. And then there's another couple of options here. We're not going to talk about those today. They are advanced options that we will talk about at the end of the course later this year.

By the time you reach the end of the question stage, you'll have what we call the calculated price.

And I, I did show you that a minute ago. I'm just going to quickly save and continue go back to my review page. This is what we call our, our calculated price. When we hit calculated and we're looking at the bottom. Okay. That's where. When I say calculated price, that's what I'm referring to. It's important to know that the order that you ask the questions also builds on the price. So if you have your, for example, if you have your base price at zero like we talked about in the previous question.

In step one and then your very first question, you have a calculation type of multiply that is not going to do anything to your calculation. Regardless of what answer they choose, if you multiply by zero, you're going to get zero, right? Or if you have a percentage increase, type this option here. If, if your first question and your base price is zero, asking that first question is not going to have any impact on your price at all. Okay? And as you're asking these questions, like if you saw on the review page, the price builds in the order that you go. So that's why it's important to ask the questions in the order that you want. Because if you have, like if I look for example at the what type of business are you? And the price here has gone from 600 to 720. If I go and look at that question, it's a multiply type. And so the answer, the default answer that was there was one was $120 increase. That's because it's multiplying the answer from question one by 1.2. So question one was one through 10 sales of invoices, which is $600. Then question two is multiplying that $600 by 1.2. So this is why it took me quite amount large amount of time when I was getting my first model set up. It definitely gets easier, guys, but there's a lot of tweaking and moving questions around to get the price adding up in the order that you want it to add. If you have a question later down and all of a sudden your price, you look on the calculation page and all of a sudden your price is building, building, building, and then it drops back to zero again there and it starts building again from zero. There's a mistake in your question types and that will also be part of our troubleshooting session. So remember, you can we covered this last time, but you can move your questions around to different orders. You can of course move sections around and stuff as well.

So I showed you the base price for today's training. I'm going to be playing around with a lot of things, changing a lot of numbers. I'm going to ask for your forgiveness. Don't worry if any of the numbers appear weird at the end. I may intentionally do that in a couple of places. And like I said in the session where we covered troubleshooting, I'm going to be giving and even today, I'm going to be giving you a couple of tips of how to make your models insurance proof that you're not going to have some strange number appearing when you're doing this in front of your client.

So another thing you can do in here is adding sections. You can see in Mark's model, he has a section called about your business and then there's another section called bill pay services and another section, other things you might want. The way that the sections work is when you. Right now, in our view, we just have this long list of of questions. When you're doing it in front of a client, each section will appear as a different page. So you would be sharing your screen and all the questions your customer would see is this first section. And after they've answered those questions and you click save and continue, then on the next page they would see these two questions. So that's the way that sections work. You can move the questions around from one section to another. You can add another section. For example, I have sections. I have a section for government. I have a section for AR or sorry, hr. I do have a section for AR as well, but I have a section for hr. Because who out there would agree with me that there's a lot of crossover between the accounting industry and the HR industry for when we're running payroll and managing vacation accruals and stuff for our team or sick time and stuff. Right? So I do have a section for some HR related questions as well. And then I also might have a section for payroll. It depends on.

Which model I'm using. So if you.

Oops.

Sorry, just moved my slides. If you add a section.

And you're wondering where it went.

It shows up down here at the bottom and then you can move it wherever you want. So you can add it and or delete it.

Okay, so that is part 2A.

I'm just going to my slides moved. That is step 2A about the questions.

There is an exception. So when I was talking about how the price builds, starting with your base price and then going in order of the questions, the ex. There is an exception that could be useful for you if you need to use it. And that is when I was adding a section. Some of you may have noticed there's a button here called isolate section. If I choose that.

What happens? Or if I just click isolate here essentially. And I'm going to show you this on my slide in a minute. Actually, let me go to my slide because I'll show you now essentially I've shown you where it is, how to do it in the software. I want to show you on my slide.

When you use that isolate section, you may have your base price. You may have some answers that have built up from your first couple of questions. Let's say you have a Math question, that's 10 plus 10 times 2.

You would end up with an answer of 40. Right. So imagine this is the order of your questions. First question equals $10. Second question, not that we'd ever have a question that's only $10, but, you know, first question equals $10. Second question adds $10. And then third question, we choose the multiplier type and we say multiply the total of the first two questions by two. We're going to end up with a price of $40 at that point after our third question.

But what if.

You wanted to multiply the second question that was an answer to a 10 by two, and then add it to the first question, which was also an answer 10. So now your answer is going to be 30. We do this by creating question two and question three in an isolated section. So the answer to question two would be $10. The answer to question three would be multiply the answer by question two by two, and then take the combined total of those two questions and add it to the running total that you already had prior to that section, which in this case was only question one, which was $10. So now we have 30. It's very similar to when we're doing math on paper to using parenthesis in a formula.

I'm going to do a quick.

No questions. Oh, hi, Kate.

Okay, let's go back to the software. We're going to move on to number three, which is about the global adjuster.

Okay. So we did see this a little bit earlier today when I was showing you the base price. We kind of skipped over it because I did mention we're going to jump around a bit because I'm going in the order of how the software calculates the price. So first thing was the base price, then our questions. The next thing the software is going to internally look at. Once it has that calculated price, after the first two steps, it's going to go back within itself and look at this global adjuster. So.

It'S always going to default at 1. If you're just getting started with the software, you should leave it at 1. You don't really need to use it at this point. But what happens if you are doing your annual price increases and you want to increase Your prices by 10% across the board for everybody? Are you going to go into all of your models one by one and edit every single question and adjust the price by 10%? I would not want to do that. So the thing that's great about the software is we have this global adjuster. It's a tool that lets us adjust our prices every year without having to edit all of the questions. So the calculated price, which, remember, is the price we arrived at at the end.

Would then go back and look at this global adjuster. If I wanted to increase my prices across the board by 10%, or I would put 1.1 in here and then that calculated price at the end will automatically get 10% added onto it. Okay.

So this is an easy way to be able to adjust your prices annually. Gosh, we're only on step three and.

Almost halfway through. I need to stop drinking so much water or stop talking so much. Okay, so that is step three. Pretty simple. Leave it at default one until you're ready to start using it for your price increases.

Step four is calculating our package prices.

So.

This is going to be in the pricing parameters section over on the left hand side here. If this is the first time you're seeing this screen, or if you're still just kind of playing around and experimenting with the model setup, this screen does look a little busy at first. It's a little intimidating. It was for me anyway. There's lots of things that can be customized in here and I promise you we will look at all of them. We're going to look at several of them today, but by the end of the course we will look at all of them. Today we're going to be looking at a few sections. So effective pricing calculates the price for each package individually in the pricing parameter section. You have two different ways that you can calculate your prices in here. So I'm just going to scroll down a little bit. We're looking at this section here. Relative price multiplier and relative price multiply or sorry, relative price add and relative price multiplier. So let's pretend your calculated price at the end of step three is a thousand dollars. I'm going to use nice easy numbers. If we look at the essentials package here, we have.

A thousand dollars as our I. I also have it here as minimum. We're going to look at that in a minute. But I'm going to pretend that a thousand dollars is the amount that was on my calculated price.

If I see that the multiplier is one, that means that the price that's going to show up is going to be the same as the calculated price. It's just going to stay at $1,000. But then if I move over to my full package, I now have a multiplier of 1.3. That means that regardless of how the people have answered the questions. The, the calculated price at the end is always going to be the same. Okay? It's the multipliers that we add in that will determine whether the price goes up for the full package and the premium package. So that same thousand dollar calculated price, if I have a multiplier for my medium package of 1.3, that full package is now going to display to the customer as $1300 instead of a thousand.

And the premium price is now going to be fifteen hundred dollars instead of one thousand. Because the thing about the software guys is the questions aren't dynamic in respect to our packages. So if they choose that they want monthly meetings, and monthly meetings are not included in your essential package, the calculated price is still going to be the same. But when you're showing them your package display page at the end and they see that monthly packages or monthly meetings are included in your premium package, they that may lead them to want to choose your premium package. And so this is where we change our settings so that our price is higher for those premium things that we are.

Giving to them as part of that package. There's also an option over here. I don't use more than three packages, but there is an option over here as well. You can see we actually have five choices.

There is an option over here if you have a light package, I just want to quickly show it to you where you may want to actually decrease your price. So if we take that thousand dollar calculated price based on the questions that they ask, you could add a multiplier in for a light package. If you have a light package option, which would make that package $750 instead. The other option that we're looking at in here is relative price add. You could use this in tandem with the multiplier. We'll use our premium package as an example. So this would be. We've already set it at 1.5, so using that 15, that thousand dollar calculated price example, that would make the price fifteen hundred dollars. But let's say for your premium package you include some really extra bonus things that you automatically, regardless what the price is, regardless what the multiplier is, you want to automatically add on an extra thousand dollars to.

Whatever price gets calculated. You can do that. So you can choose to add a relative price addition in a. In addition to the multiplier. This is a mandatory field. So if you're not going to use it, just make sure that you have a zero in there. Okay, let's move on to step five. This is the next way that the software is going to check the software. Also in the pricing parameters page, it's going to check this minimum and maximum. So we've got our calculated price from the base price, the questions, and the multiplier. Now it's going to go back and check if you put in any minimums and maximums. So I told you a little while ago I was going to show you a couple insurance policies and, and also about the get out of bed price. This is where I put in my get out of bed price. So my base price covers my software costs. This is my get out of bed price. It's also your safety net or your insurance policy, if you will, to make sure that you're not going to get a ridiculously low price. That surprises you at the end when you click on reveal the price and the customer just automatically jumps and they're like, oh my God, yes. And you're thinking, oh my God, what have I done right? This is where you can set up that no matter what calculations have happened in steps one through four, the price will never go below whatever you have put in here. So if they answer all the questions and that calculated price comes up at $750, $1,000, it's what's going to be provided to them. Some of you may have heard me talk in the past in other sessions about how my get out of bed price was $500. I'm actually going to be changing that because my ideal client has evolved.

I previously would not do a client's books for anything less than 500. That's why I call it my get out of bed price. I'm not even opening QuickBooks for you if you're paying me less than $500 a month.

So that, so I had my minimum price on my starter package. My essential package was here as 6000 because remember, these are annual prices, right?

So I currently don't have any clients that are under 1400amonth. So I'm likely going to be, and I, and I don't anticipate changing my ideal client list. So I'm likely going to go in and change my models, not my demo model, to make my minimum price $12,000 a year so that my minimum price would not come up as a thousand or less than a thousand. You also have a maximum option. By default it's set to a hundred thousand.

I, I, I don't really, I leave it at that. Except in my model, my top, top, top high, biggest client is getting close to the hundred thousand dollar mark and they are on my premium package. So I Will likely this year, when I'm doing some work on my models, will go in and change my premium maximum. I'll probably just up it to 150,000. It doesn't mean that a price is going to show up as 150,000, guys. It just means that the leeway is there for the software to be able to check. So if I set it at 110,000 and the calculated price comes up at 120,000, it's only going to show 110. So I'm going to be leaving $10,000 on the table. So I'm just going to switch these back because there's some things that I want to demo for you later. Actually, you know what?

We're. We're back on target with time. Let me show you how this one works. So if I change, show you quickly first how it is. Now, if I go to review.

Calculate.

I had a minimum price of $1,000, right? So you can see the way that they've an. My essential package is coming up as 3279. That's right. It's above my minimum. But now if I go back into my parameters and I change this minimum to 6,000, hitting save and continue.

Go back to look at my calculated price, you can now see that it is implementing my minimum rate that I have for my essential package. So no matter how they have answered the questions, my running total is still 3279. That part hasn't changed. That's how they answered the questions. But the software is now looking at my minimum maximum price. And it's saying, oh, the question answered the question, the question. The customer answered the questions, giving a price of 3279. But Kim doesn't want her price to be less than 6,000. So we are going to automatically make this $6,000 for her and make her life simple so that she makes more money. So that is how that feature works. I'm just going to change it back to a th. I'm going to do a quick pause for water and questions.

Okay. Relle has a question. Oh, sorry. It was back about the isolating questions. Can you isolate questions within a section? Meaning you have questions one and two, but then you want to isolate questions three and four. So if I'm understanding your question, Rachelle, what you would need to do is create a new section and have questions 1 and 2 in one section and then create a new section and isolate with questions three and four in it and isolate questions three and four.

So I think that's what you meant. But if not, I'm going to move on to Randall's question. If that doesn't answer your question, maybe.

Explain it here a little bit more or tag me on Facebook and I can answer it for you. I can record a little video and answer that for you a little better. Randall says, would it make sense to have a different minimum for each package? So let's go back to our minimum maximum.

You may use more software in the premium package that you don't use, in other words. Or does your software amount include. So, Randall, a couple of questions in there. No, the software amount does not include software I use for all clients. It only includes my mandatory Software, which is QuickBooks and Dext. Any optional software is included in my questions section. So if there is a software that I need to use for payroll, for example, if I'm asking them some payroll questions and there's some payroll software, the price gets added in for me attached to that question. Not in my minimum and maximum, but absolutely. This is the beauty about being able to customize the software. You absolutely could have different minimum and maximums for your premium, full, and essential packages. I certainly would not want a premium package person to come up at a minimum of $1,000. So if my essential is a minimum of 6,000, I may make my premium an essential, a minimum of 10,000, and then full would be somewhere in between. Okay. Keeping in mind as well that you also have these multipliers working in tandem. So even if your minimum is the same, even If I had 6,000 as my minimum for all three packages, if it calculated. If the calculated price came out to my minimum of $6,000, my full and my premium packages are still not going to appear as $6,000. Because remember, in the previous steps, it's going to take this multiplier into account first. Right. So my full package would be 6,000 times 30%, and my premium package is going to be 6,000 times 50%. So you do have the option. There's. There's so many different ways to get from A to Z with the software. And this is where I honestly, every time I price a client, I probably tweak something in my model.

Of how I want to ask something a little bit differently or maybe charge it a little bit differently or something. It's constantly evolving. Okay, so let's keep going.

Step number six. You will have heard Mark talk about this, about chunking the price down. So we're going to stay on the pricing parameters page. I told you there was a lot of options and things that we could do in pricing parameters. Foreign, we're going to look at chunking the price down. And this is, this goes to the pricing psychology side of things where we want to make the price seem smaller when we quote it to the client at the end. So everything that we've been talking about so far is based on annual prices. Right. But we're not going to give a customer an annual price. We're going to divide it over a period of time. I don't want to quote a client $6,000 a year for my get out of bed price. Instead I want to quote them $500 a month. So to do that, I'm going to go down to this section here for the period that this is spread over and I can enter a number of months.

That I want the annual price to be spread over. So by default I'm in a bookkeeping model which is one of my monthly recurring, recurring models. By default I spread that over 12 months. For cleanup job model, I might divide it over three months, for example. So if I go. Let's just. I'm going to foreign go back to the review page for a minute.

You'll see this down here where we have our annual price displayed on the left. Oh, I, I didn't go back and change my minimum price. You. And then we have a payment section over on the right and you can see it says 12 payments of. So when we reveal our price to the customer, this is what they are going to see. It's, it's going to be in a different screen than how we are seeing it here. But this is what they were going to see. Let me go back and change these.

And let's say my essential package, I want to divide that over four months instead of over 12. I'm going to hit save and continue.

Go back to review.

You can now see that that essential package, my annual price hasn't changed. It's still what is calculated based on their answers to the questions. But now what they will see displayed on that package when I do my package reveal page, they're going to see an option that says four payments of $819.

And they, you could very well leave it that the other ones are still 12 payments. There's nothing to say that all of your packages have to be the same number of payments. Okay. So I'm just going to go back and change things back to the default that I've been using.

Okay, I see Kate has a question. If you set 6k as the minimum and Kate, we're going to talk about rounding in. In a, in actually, I think the next step, there's actually a couple of different rounding features. So we're going to talk about those in a minute. I'm going to pause your question. And when we look at those steps.

Which we're getting to one of them right now, there's, there's two. Step seven and step eight are both applicable to rounding. If I haven't answered your question, after we cover these next two steps, please just prompt me again in the chat. Okay, so as Kate just mentioned, she saw that in our pricing parameters screen again, there's a couple of options here that says rounding on and rounding amount.

The next thing again we've calculated we've got a price based on steps one through six so far. The next thing the software is going to do.

Is actually, sorry, the first rounding is on the expressing price page. And this is just whether, this is very basic rounding of whether you want it to round to whole dollars. Kate, the question you asked me is going to be step eight. This one is just very simple basic rounding of whether you want it to round to whole dollars. So by default it is set to hide.

So if I look over here.

I do not see any cents. It's not $355.40 or anything like that. If I go back in here and I say that I want to show decimal places.

And then go back here, you can now see that it will show the decimal places of the annual amount divided by 12. It does still round to the closest two decimal places. So we, we refer to this one as rounding to whole dollars.

And turn that back to off.

Okay, step eight is now applying the rounding that Kate was talking about in her question and that one is back in the pricing parameters section. So.

This is where you can choose if you want the rounding applied to your packages. Okay, so.

Let me jump back into my review screen.

And I'm going to be playing around with some numbers here quite a bit. So I want to just show you. You can see my annual prices essential ends in a seven.

Full ends in a zero and premium ends in a one. Right. So if I want to.

Round my.

Package prices.

I can go in here and I can turn rounding on and then we have these rounding amounts.

Now I'm just going to leave them at zero.

But if I go look at my annual prices now.

You can see that I don't have any sense in here still. But if I go back into my pricing parameters and now I want to use the rounding amount not That I would do this, but I'm going to just randomly throw some oddball numbers in here. So I don't think we had a four.

I don't think we had. Sorry, too many numbers in my head. I don't. I don't think we had an 8, and I don't know if we had a.

6. So just throwing some random numbers in there because I want to show you what that's going to do.

You can now see that. Come on, let's go upstairs.

Pardon me.

Did someone have a question?

Okay, I'm gonna move on. I. You can now see that my prices have rounded to this one. I entered that I want the price to end in a six. This one I said if I want it to end in an eight. And this one, I said I want it to end in a four. I obviously wouldn't use oddball numbers like that. But, Kate, to answer your question, if you do want to round all of your prices to end in fives.

You can do that, just change them all to five. And you would go in here. And you can now see that all of your prices are going to end in a five. So I hope that answers your question. When you're in here, once you've turned rounding on, this does become a mandatory field. So you do need to put some number in there.

How we do for time.

Okay, I'm going to come back and check and see if there's any more questions about that.

We are going to take a closer look at this as well in the troubleshooting session because this does create some problems for people sometimes. But for now, I'm just going to.

Turn it off.

If when you're looking at your review page and you are seeing some wonky things happening with your package review prices at the end, this is one of the first places that I would come back and check if you think your price is coming up too high or too low. It could be. Why? Before we move on to step nine. I know I've been kind of flipping through this page a lot. I just want to take a moment to actually share, show you what's happening on this review calculation page. Because as you've noticed, I'm toggling back and forth a lot. And this is exactly what it was like when I was setting up my model. I would go set up a question, set up the calculation for the question, or maybe I would do two or three questions at a time, and then I would come review it and calculate it, and I would make sure that my price is adding Adding, adding, adding. Yep, that makes sense. Yep, that makes sense. Oh, if they choose another field here, let's say lawyers click on calculate. Oh, I must have the same price for lawyers.

And the same price for construction. Let's say who's somebody that would be more. Okay, retail has a different price. You can see retail doesn't have the 20% increase. So my price is still the same. If they have two divisions and I answer that question and calculate.

I'm not sure how I have this test model set up. Okay.

This could be. I probably have that one set up as a units question. But if they're not registered for sales tax, if I change that to no and click calculate again, you can see the price did not change. It's still 600. So when you're on this review page, what you want to be looking for is that your price is either at a minimum, staying the same, depending on how they're answering the questions, or getting higher. If you ever see that at some point your running total has set back to zero and has started calculating again over from that point, whatever question it is that has set back to zero, there's a problem with your calculation in that question. So when you're setting up your models, it's not uncommon to do a lot of toggling back and forth to play around with things in here, change some answers, keep hitting the calculate button, keep seeing what it does to your questions. And then of course, this is the calculated. Whoops. This is the calculated price that we get at the end that I've referred to every time. And then this is just a summary at the end. None of this again is what the customer is actually going to see.

When I am doing this in front of a client, I will have, of course, done a diagnostic review ahead of time. I will have a lot of answers to questions ahead of time. I will already know.

How many bank accounts they have or how many credit cards they have or how many employees they have. And I will start my quote ahead of time before I start the meeting with them. And I will go and pre select some of the answers to those questions. And then when I start the meeting.

I will tell them that in order to save time and focus on some of the things that are very important to you, I did go ahead and pre select some of the answers that I would have normally asked you based on what I found when I did the review of your books. If you at any point, I'll review those answers with you. If at any point you feel that you want to change Anything, by all means, just let me know and we can change that right on the spot for you.

And it could be that I saw when I did their review that Maybe they average 50 sales invoices, but they might want me to change the answer to 100 sales invoices because they might know about.

You know, some new staff they're hiring, some new inventory that's coming in, something they may know about, something that's coming, coming down the line for their business that I wasn't able to see in their historical information, but they want me to quote a price based on the fact that it's coming.

When I get that model set up. And I've answered some preliminary questions. And also, remember, by this time, I've already done my fact find meeting with them. I've already spent, you know, probably a good hour to an hour and a half in meetings with this client. I've got a pretty good foundation of what they're looking for, what's important to them. I have a really good understanding at this point of how I think they're going to answer questions. And I will go through my model and I will answer all the questions, even ones based on value that isn't found in my diagnostic review, based on just how I assume that they're going to answer. And this is the other insurance policy that I use to make sure that I'm not going to wind up with some strange number when I display it to them at the end. So I go through, I set up a quote ahead of time. I put in their name and everything ahead of time so they don't need to see me do that part. And when I start my screen share meeting with them, I start directly on the questions page. But in doing that quote, I can go through and calculate if there's anything that's going to be unexpected during my meeting with them ahead of time. So we covered a couple sections about rounding. I'm going to go on to section nine. But before I do that.

Randall said, price psychology seems to say that five. Okay. I don't. I don't think that's a question. I think it's just a comment. Rochelle says, I think you said during our last session you've modified your review over time. When you are doing a review and you determine they need a cleanup, don't catch everything. How do you handle it after the cleanup has started.

You'Ve modified your review.

My diagnostic review, that I do.

Yes. Yes, absolutely. My diagnostic review has evolved over time. I. I spoke a lot about it, about how I Used to do it for free and then I started charging and they would get a, a refund back on their first bill if they became a client and then I would give them 50% back. It's definitely evolved over time. It started as literally, I want to say about a three or four page report that I would give them. And now depending on the complexity of their books, it can be up to a 30 or 40 page report that I give them. But now instead of giving it away for free or charging a small amount and refunding them, my diagnostic reviews are typically, I'll say about 1000 to $1200 average.

Could be as low as 750 or as high as 1500.

But you've missed something during the review and you find it after you've started the cleanup. So Rachelle, that's why I still have questions. Okay. Because if I've done a diagnostic review and I have questions in here that something has been missed, the customer can say, oh no, I have a line of credit that's not in my accounting records. And, and so we need to factor in for that. So yes, I, I do preliminary answer some questions as best as I can, but absolutely, it's not necessarily going to catch everything. That's why I have the questions to go through with the client still and where they can change any of the answers that I've selected. So I hope that helps. I know you're talking a lot about cleanup and we are going to look at a cleanup model later, but I feel like your question is specific to cleanup and not to setting up the prices behind the scene, which I really want to focus on for today because we've got three steps left and 15 minutes. So I'm going to. If you're attending all the sessions and we don't get to that when we look at cleanups or by all means again, tag me on Facebook. Like I've said to some other people, I'm always happy to, to answer questions on Facebook. Okay, so step nine in the software is to.

Modify any discounts. So to do that we're going to go to this rewards tab because of course we don't refer to them as discounts. We don't use that word in effective pricing. It's actually called behavior rewards. And the reason why is, well, a couple of reasons.

In the software. Imagine you have a button that says discount, right? The client is might be fine with the price that you quoted, but because they can see a button that says discounts, they're going to be like, hey, what is that discount button do? So instead, in the software, there's a button called br.

They don't know that that means behavior reward. So if you reveal your price and they're fine with your price right away, number one, I would question that I had left money on the table that I hadn't quoted enough. But if they agree to your price right away, no harm, no foul, you don't need to click on that behavior reward button to offer them a discount or a reward. But imagine if the situation is reversed where you have a. You've revealed the price and you have a client that's hesitating a little bit. Or perhaps they mentioned to you that it's a little bit higher than they thought. Our first step, of course, is going to be to go back to the questions and see if there's any questions that they want to change. Perhaps they chose weekly meetings when really they don't need weekly meetings. Monthly meetings would be enough. So you can go back and forth a couple of times with the questions. Once you've really exhausted all the options of being able to change questions to this is really what we need. This is really what we want. But the price is still just a little too high. We can then offer them. We can then click on that behavior reward and offer them a behavior reward. So to set up your rewards, you would go in here to this rewards section. There are some examples here. You can also add your own. I'll just say test. You can add a description if you wanted to. And then we have a couple different choices of how this will reduce the price. You can choose for it to subtract an absolute value. So a set amount. Where if they choose this, it's going to deduct $500. Or you can have it choose to subtract a percentage based on whatever the the price is. Okay, so if I look at a couple of the examples that are in here, you can see this one. If they agree to scan and that. And that's the other thing about behavior rewards. I don't think I mentioned this. It's never something we want to just get without getting something in return. It really does need to be a reward where we are rewarding them for doing something that makes our life easier. Okay. It can't. We're rewarding some sort of positive reinforcement behavior that we want to see. So if we want them to scan all of their receipts into dust, we can say, you know, if you agree to scan all of your purchased invoices or your receipts into deccs, then we can offer you a reward on that. They won't actually see in the display portion. They don't actually see that it's a 15% reward. Remember we're looking at our behind the scenes part here. But what they would see if they say oh yes, I agree to do that and you click on it, they would see that their price has gone down. We are going to go into Behavior Rewards in more detail in another session and, and I'll give you some examples of ones that I use. But get creative with these. I, I've heard some other effective pricing users that have some really great ones. Brian, I saw your question. The the workout book for today is really just a handout, more than a workbook. Sorry, just to clarify, but it is going to get uploaded. Gabby typically uploads it within within one to two days. She's pretty quick. It usually gets uploaded within a day or two with the recording you'll have both at the same time.

Okay, step 10. Almost done. Step 10 is enhancements, obviously the opposite of a behavior reward. So this is the next thing the software is going to look at. We may also refer to this as optional extras. Some people call them upsells. But again, when we're dealing with customers, the word enhancements I think sounds a little nicer, right? And, and this is what the customer will see. So again it's on our left hand menu. We will go to the enhancements section looks pretty similar to the Behavior Rewards page where we can add enhancements, we can edit an existing enhancement, we can delete an enhancement, so on and so forth.

This section gets set up very similar however to our questions. So whereas in Behavior Rewards we only had two options of how we could reduce an amount, the rewards section is very similar to our questions. So if I go to add an enhancement, you'll now see that I have the same four question types and the same calculation types that I had in related to questions. If I choose yes or no, I will get my values here and my default value sections. So how I typically use this section is really comes from being comfortable with my packages first of all and then also familiar with who my ideal client is. So let's say I have my packages. I know that there's 3ish. I don't recommend having more than.

3 or 4 type enhancements because you don't want to upsell, upsell, upsell over and over. I bought, oh my gosh, guys, I bought some software the other day and on my cash out page there were literally I, I didn't Start counting right away because I didn't realize there were going to be so many. But from the point that I did start counting, there were nine upsells. That was one screen after another after another before I finally got to the checkout screen. And I bet you there was at least four or five before that. So we're talking like I know 14 or 15 UPS cells that this software had. I canceled it. It was a 30 day subscription that I canceled. I don't want it to renew after that. I just don't want to deal with a company that does something like that. So you don't want to have too many enhancement type questions. So what I was saying about how I use this. Got about 5 minutes left. One step quickly how I use this. Being familiar with my ideal client, if I know there's two or three items that are part of my premium package that aren't offered in my full package, but I know that my ideal client usually wants those things, but maybe they just aren't quite ready to select the full package. I will have them in here as enhancements. So when they select the full package, when I go to the enhancement screen screen next, they can be like, oh, I can still get those options without picking the full package. Same thing with or without picking the premium package. Sorry, same thing with my full package. I'll have a couple of things that aren't available in my essential package that are available in my full. So that if somebody selects my essential package, the upsells that they get are things that are from my full package. I think I'm getting a little tongue tied here.

And again, we'll look at this in more detail. I'll give you some more examples that I use. Again, I encourage you to get creative with this. And then my premium package upsells really the sky's the limit because there is no other extra package above that of things that they haven't chosen. So I have some very high price ticket items in there. Step 11. Last step guys. And then I will check for questions. Again, the very last thing that the software is going to do is check if you charge sales tax. So we can add that to the price to arrive at the gross payment if you want. And one thing that I would mention is when you're playing around with this, you'll notice that even if you have. Sorry, let me go into it.

It's in expressing price down here in the standard text section.

You'Ll notice that if you have your set price to zero decimal places in that earlier step that I was showing you and you're showing the gross payment, it is now going to show two decimal places because it's going to show the exact amount including the tax. So remember, this is the last step that the accounting software is doing.

So if you choose to use this feature, it's going to override some of those potential rounding features that you are going to use. So basically what this will do, I want to be able to quickly show you. By default, it's going to be set to hide, which will be just like what we've been looking at before. However, if I click on show, you'll see that the sales tax text field becomes mandatory. You could type in something like +HST.

Or if you deal with different tax rates, you could just say plus tax. And that way it keeps it a little bit more generic. You can customize the wording that you want to show there.

So let's look at how that changes now. So I, I've turned it on to show.

And I'm just going to quickly go back to the review page.

And. Oh, I think I maybe have some rounding turned on still. So.

Let me. Oh, I'm watching the time, guys. I might go a little over time here. Sorry.

Thank you.

There we go. So if I, if I have rounding turned on, but I say that I want to show the sales tax, you'll see it's now showing a gross amount.

And it's not rounding anymore because it's showing the amount including the tax. So we are going to take a look at each one of these sections in more detail throughout the year as we go through the course. But this is just really to give you a glimpse at all 11 steps so that you get an understanding of how the software calculates the prices and in which order. And I know we're at the end of the hour, but I do see Christina had a question, so I'm going to answer that and then I will.

I'm going to keep my screen share on in case I need it for Christina's question. But then I will be turning off and Gabby will play out some exit music for everybody. While the exit music is playing, I'll hang around in the chat box still if there's any more questions. So Christina says, I registered for effective pricing software, but my screen doesn't look like yours. So, Christina, I'm not sure if you were here right at the beginning. I am going to stop sharing because I don't need to share for that and I will.

Turn my camera back on. So, Christina, I'm not sure if you were maybe a few minutes late joining. I did mention that right at the beginning. If your software doesn't look the same as mine, it could be that you have a different version. I have the full version, so if you're not seeing the same as what I'm seeing, please reach out to Sarah and Mark Sarah support team, the support email address and she will be able to troubleshoot that for you to help you get whichever is the best version that you need.