Paid in Full Feature + Estimates Fast Follows (w/ Mike Andes)

Hey, everyone, it's Mike candes, founder and CEO here at CoPilot CRM, and I just want to take a few moments to share what we've been working on over the past week at Copilot and what has been released into production for all of you as members. So we're going to talk about the paid in full feature as well as some estimate fast follows. So about a month ago, we released a whole new modernization of the estimates, and I want to share some things that we've done based upon your feedback to improve that feature as well. So first off, let's talk about the paid in full feature that's been released. So the problem for many home service businesses is that unpaid invoices kill your cash flow. I consistently see home service businesses having 50, 100, 150 plus thousand dollars in uncollected invoices. These are jobs that have been completed and they have not been paid for. And so we do several things inside Copilot to mitigate or prevent this from happening. First off, requiring a credit card on file, requiring ACH on file, making sure that before they even accept the estimate, this is done. Super helpful to be able to prevent overdue invoices. Having deposit thresholds where if a job is over a certain size, you're collecting 30, 50, 70% of the job before the job even gets started. You're collecting beforehand. And the reason this is so important, the reason it's important to collect money before the job is because, let's just say you have 50% down payment or deposit as a requirement. So you have a $5,000 job. That means you're going to collect $2,500 down as a deposit, but you're going to get paid the rest of the money after the job is finished. Now, what happens if we don't collect the money for the final payment for four weeks? What that means is the job, maybe they accept the day four weeks from now, we start the job and then four weeks after that they have finally paid the rest of the $5,000. So, but here's the problem. The 50% they paid you at the beginning, you were profitable. But then you have to pay for all the materials on the job site. Then you have to pay for the direct labor, all your employees and their wages, and all of a sudden you actually have a negative cash balance on that job, a negative profit. Because for the vast majority of home services, we have to pay for our labor and our materials and more than the 50% down that we collect at the beginning of the job and we want to prevent that as much as possible. That's how we have great cash flow. Because you have a profitable business that is growing very fast and still go bankrupt if you don't collect the money fast enough as you're growing. So we have card files ach requiring that so we don't have those overdue invoices having deposit thresholds so we collect more of the money before the job starts. We also have automated follow up. So if the customer is waiting a week, two weeks, three weeks after job and we don't have their card on file, that we can have text messages and emails and, and phone calls going to the customer, try to make sure that they actually do get their invoice paid. Now the solution, the per in the perfect world, we would get 100% of the of the job paid in full before the job even starts. Now this is in the perfect world and we all know that if you required that from all your customers, new and old customers, if you require everyone to pay the entire invoice, all $5,000 upfront, you might actually lose out on some jobs. Some because especially new customers, they don't know like and trust you. They haven't done work with you in the past. They might not be willing to give you the full $5,000 upfront and in turn might go to a different competitor that might even be more expensive. But they don't require deposit or they only require 50% down. So the, the perfect world is we get 100% of the of the job paid up front before the job even starts. So I can pay my employees, I can buy the materials and not go into negative profit. But what if, what if we could give our customers the option to pay in full and we get the best of both worlds, we able to have better cash flow. We don't lose any jobs because they don't have to pay in full. Also though, it gives them the option if they would like to pay in full, they can. It's less hassle for them. They don't have to get an invoice, they don't have to come back and pay at the end of the job. Now if you're like me and you might be thinking man, why in the world would anyone want to pay in full? Here's a couple reasons why. If someone's worked with your business for two, three, four, five years, you've done a lot of work for them in the past, they now get a one time job and they've done 10 jobs with you in the past. They know they're going to pay the final invoice. They know you're going to do a great job. It's annoying to them that they are going to have to come back into the estimate after the job is done and pay again. It's just another thing on their plate. And if they're a high net worth individual, maybe they have multiple homes, maybe they're busy, professional, they don't even want to have to deal with it, they just want to get it paid for. They know you're going to do a great job and get it off their to do list. The same thing is true for many people that just simply do not have the time and don't want to be bothered with you sending an invoice at the end of the job. They just want to pay for it in full and have you finish the job and be done with it. And this is going to be a smaller portion of people if we give it as an option. And it's not going to be every single person that pays in full. But Even if it's 20, 20%, 15% of people, if I can collect all that money up front and be profitable from day one and never go negative profit on that job, it'll help my cash flow tremendously. If I have a hundred thousand dollars, I was looking at business the other day, $100,000 in overdue invoices and based upon them having this painful, if just 15% of 20% of those people would have paid for their job in full, that would be an extra 15 or $20,000 in the bank account for that business owner. So that's what we've created at Copilot CRM introducing pay in full when you ask for a deposit. Anytime you have a deposit threshold that's being met next to that requirement for the minimum deposit, it's giving them an option to pay the entire estimate.

So if you're an existing member and you have enterprise level, just go to your settings and you can toggle this on and it will apply to all your feature estimates. Estimates. What's really cool is you can at the individual estimate setting, turn this off. So for example, if you're doing a 12 month contract or you're sending out some sort of specialized estimate to customers and you don't want them to pay in full, you don't even allow that option to be on there. You can toggle individual estimates off or just leave it off inside the estimates. The bottom line is this. There is almost no reason why you would not want to collect the Money sooner than later. You say, well, what if I accidentally spend it and then I get in a bad cash position because I'm spending money too quickly? Well, that's a pricing problem. Ultimately there is no reason, there is no reason in the world as to why I would not want the money sooner than later. There's going to be one off jobs or positions where you might have to change the estimate or change the invoice. You might not want to use pay in full, but the vast majority of time, if customers pay you before the job, you'd rather have the money then than afterwards.

Now I want to kind of go from the pay in full feature that we recently launched and talk more about some of the fast follows because one of our promise to our members is that we listen to your feedback and surveys, we take action and we iterate quickly. And I've been other CRMs and softwares where something is talked about or promised and it's years, years until it's done or years until it's even worked on or it's half baked. And I get the frustration there. And last year 2024 as we went through BUGH and we really upgraded the infrastructure and the team to increase the reliability and stability of copilot. Now as we begin to innovate, this is the type of stance and positioning that I have on this. And that is we create something but then we listen and we actually iterate on it quickly. We're not going to wait 10 years to try to redo or improve the features that we release. And so a month ago we created the brand new version of estimates inside the customer portal that was completely built from scratch, completely new code base. So many more additions were made to it, streamline the deposit thresholds and the workflow of putting a credit card on file. Much simpler. But I want to say a quick thank you because we made some really great fast follows and I'm going to be talking about several of them today and there's more to come. But I want to say a special thank you to the Customer Advisory Board, webinar attendees and survey respondents. Every single survey matters, every single response to every a request for feedback is listened to. We talk about it in our meetings internally inside of copilot and the Customer Advisory Board gives us direct information and they get that kind of early access to be able to see what's working, what's not and be able to give us that feedback. It is so valuable to us. I appreciate it tremendously. To all that fill out the surveys, we listen, we do not. We're not just taking that information and in part why I'm making this announcement today is that in the future, as we begin to release more things throughout May and into June 2025 and we have a lot on on the that's coming down. I'm really looking forward to sharing with you so much that we're working on. However, as we make those feature releases, when we ask for surveys, when we ask for feedback, trust me, every single one's being listened to, everyone is being read and everyone is being thoughtfully considered. So here's one of the fast fellows on the estimate monitors nation I want to talk about so we heard your feedback very clearly about redesigning the estimate header. We wanted to really make the price less prominent and instead make the name more prominent to make some more of a personalized email to the customer. This was feedback that we got on the surveys and we implemented highlighting that customer's name allows them to feel like this is theirs. And instead of highlighting the dollar amount which is for many customers a pain point, especially in a tight economy, several line line item improvements just making the mobile friendly version. So we you will notice that some people had very long titles for their line items. Just the positioning of that making that clear. The recommended tag making that clear a bolder larger the green highlighting it more something that was also given on feedback and has been implemented the descriptions allowing for bullet spacing and numbers as you type it. It's going to be seen the exact same way now even on the mobile mobile side of things. And just tightening up the tax display instead of having the tax for each line item, just wrapping that into the bottom is some of the feedback that we receive. We also made sure that PDF attachments, custom fields, as well as supporting all different currencies were added to this fast follow.

We didn't really see a lot of people using custom fields. However, once we released the estimate modernization, a lot of you responded back, hey, we'd like that ability to be able to kind of put whatever we want inside the estimate. And as you can see here in the picture that has also been added and there's a lot more to come. Even just on estimate modernization. There is this is I think nine or ten releases in the past couple of weeks that we've been adding to this based upon the feedback and we can't do everything. We're going to listen, we're going to. We have to synthesize where do we deploy resources, what's going to be the best use for all the members inside COPILOT So it's not to say that when you give feedback, we can do it every single time, but we absolutely are considering it. We're weighing it out and making sure that it is something that inside the product could be the most useful to the entire Copilot family. So this is the future of Copilot, in my opinion. And you can see this is our direction as we begin to make releases. We iterate and we innovate. Thank you for your support. I appreciate it and I look forward to sharing so much more that we were working on currently. You'll be seeing over the next couple months. Coming out from Copilot CRM.