How to Brand Your Bills
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Your brand says a lot about you and your business. Drew and Jarred will provide insights into how to create professional, customized invoices.
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How to Brand Your Bills
- 1. Clio Cloud Conference 2014 SEPTEMBER 22 – 23, 2014 · CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
- 2. Brands & Bills by Drew Goddyn & Jarred Bolen Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 3. Drew Goddyn Technical Escalations Agent Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 4. Jarred Bolen Customer Support Specialist Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 5. Clions: Passionate Clio Employees that love to help others understand and become efficient in Clio Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 6. Branding Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 7. Branding Logo Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 8. Why is a flexible billing tool needed? Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 9. Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 10. It costs 6 times more to attract a new customer! Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 11. Introducing: Bill Themes Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 12. Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 13. Template 1 Template 2 Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 14. Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 15. Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 16. Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 17. Where can we find Bill Themes in Clio? Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 18. Bill Themes: Interface Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 19. Quick Tip: Sample Invoice does not pull information from your account Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 20. 1 2 3 Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 21. Quick Tip: The shadow can help guide you to the category you want to edit Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 22. Using Bill Themes (Finally!) Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 23. Quick Tip: Test your changes on a real bill Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 24. Quick Tip: Visit the Smart Bar for a billing workflow refresher Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 25. Quick Tip: New bills use the default Bill Theme Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 26. Reminder: Bill Themes are found on the settings page Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 27. Page setup: • Margins • Typography Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 28. Matter: • Line Items • Orderings Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 29. Statement of Accounts: • Summary of Accounts • Detail of Accounts • Client Account Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 30. Lets go check out our Invoice! Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 31. Lets make a quick change! Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 32. Lets apply our new theme to our Invoice Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 33. That’s a wrap! Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 34. Questions? Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
Editor's Notes
- Anyways, moving on now that we’ve cleared that up, lets ask an important question, what is branding, and why is it so important for your business?
- When almost anyone thinks of branding, they think of a really well designed logo or graphic. We immediately think of the brands we recognize like Coca-cola , google, and even Clio. but the reality is, branding goes far beyond just a graphic or logo. When you think about branding, you really want to think about your entire customer experience, everything from your logo, your website, the way you answer phones, and most importantly, how easy it is to understand your invoices. In short, your brand is the way your customer perceives you, and while we won’t necessarily tell you how to run your practice, the goal of this presentation is to show what YOU can do in Clios to ensure your customers invoice experience doesn’t detract from your brand and instead improves it.
- As this presentation is primarily focused on your invoices in Clio, I’d also like to point out how important it is to have a flexible billing system that lets you easily be reactive with your brand. As we mentioned, your logo is just one aspect of your brand, and while it may be important to have a logo or graphic that doesn’t change over time so your customers recognize it, your overall brand should be able to quickly react and change to the environment.
- For example, you may be changing practice areas that requires a fundamental shift in the way you interact with your clients, as well as what information is now relevant or irrelevant to show on invoices. You may in future be forming or dissolving a partnership which should involve an updated and combined branding solution for the partners involved New rules may come into effect which require an immediate update to your invoices and therefore your brand. These are just a few examples of the catalysts that WILL force change upon your brand, and when that time comes, its important to be able to quickly implement changes in a simple and easy way which Clio can offer.
- Right above the sample invoice, is where the real action happens with bill themes. In order to make invoices simpler to navigate and edit, they’ve been broken down into many different sections which is what you’re seeing in this small table at the top of the screen. In this example, I clicked on the Page setup category, and was presented with three additional options, The margins, Typography, and format. When I select margins I am them given the option to customize the left , right , top and bottom margins of my invoices.
- Another great feature of this category table at the top of our bill themes is As I hover over the various sections in this table, you’ll notice a grey shadow appear over the sample invoice. This is to let you know where each of these sections can be found, and is a very useful tool if you’re unsure of the sections name that you wish to edit. For example, if I hover my mouse over ‘Firm information’ ,we see a shadow appear over the firm name and address details, when I move my mouse down one and hover it over the ‘Client Information’ category, I get a shadow that appears over the clients name and contact information Lets say you really want to make some changes to a section of your invoice. You know generally where it will appear on the bill, but aren’t quite sure of the exact name that Clio uses for that particular section. Simply hover your mouse over the sections as you move down the list until the grey box appears over the area you want to edit.
- And Finally it’s time to start building an actual theme. So far, we’ve discussed why customizing your bill themes is a great way to improve your brand, where you can find your bill themes in your settings, and how to generally navigate the nested category table while editing an individual theme. What were going to do next is dig down into some of the most common bill theme options that users like to use, and hopefully end up with the ‘expanded’ sample bill we showed earlier.
- Now, as I mentioned previously, the invoice we saw on the edit bill theme screen is only a sample invoice made up of random information. When you decide to begin customizing and tweaking your bill themes, it’s a great idea to have an actual invoice where you can see how the changes will be applied to a real invoice. The reason for this is that the sample invoice in your bill themes is displaying an invoice with sections enabled that may not be relevant to your billing workflow. For example, the sample invoice shows what your bill will look like if you were to bill for two matters on one invoice. As you will likely bill for a single matter on an invoice under normal circumstances, you would want to get an idea of how your invoice would look with that extra space freed up.
- We’re going to be coming back to the bill themes page quite often, so rather than leave this page to go generate a bill we can use for testing, I’m gonna have jarred use a little browser trick to open the “bills” window in a new tab of his browser. To do this, all he has to do is hold Control down on his keyboard and then click the page he wants. There we go, we now can switch between our two pages easily and won’t have to navigate through the settings page to get back to our bill themes. Now that we have the bills tab open, we happen to already have a contact with an associated matter that has time and expenses that are ready to be billed so we can quickly just go straight to the ‘billable clients’ screen here and generate the invoice we would like to work with. If you’re unsure on how to get to this point, I would recommend checking out the support article called “how do I create bill” or quickly swinging in to our smart bar and any Clion would be happy to give you a quick refresher on how to generate invoices.
- And we have jarred open the invoice we just created by finding it in the drafts and clicking the view button we can see what it looks like. Right off the bat, most of you might recognize that this invoice looks quite a bit different than the examples we showed earlier, and some of you may guess correctly that this newly generated invoice uses the default theme that hasn’t been customized yet in our bill themes page. If you’re curious about the Draft watermark, that is only being displayed because we haven’t finalized and approved out invoice, so its not quite ready to send to our clients.
- Now that we have an invoice where we can check back to see any changes we make, lets head back to our bill themes page by navigating to our settings, then billing, and finally bill themes. Once here, lets begin editing our default theme by clicking on the image of it. Now unfortunately or Fortunately, depending on how you look at it, because there are so many options available in Bill themes, we won’t be able to talk about every category, but I wanted to quickly just touch on some of the most widely used options that also happened to be turned on when we looked at the expanded red invoice earlier.
- The first category we’ll talk about also happens to be the first in the list: The page setup is used to set some of the default settings for the whole bill theme. While you can tweak the spacing or padding between different categories, the margins sub category allows you to set the invoices overall margin widths. While were in here, lets go ahead and reduce the margins slightly, I prefer to have a half inch margin instead of the default 1 inch to help use a bit more of the white space Next, the typography sub category lets you set the default typeface, size and color that your bills will use. While were here lets go select to use the Times new roman font, and increase its size slightly to make our bill easier to read.
- The next section we’ll jump straight to is the matter category. As you can see, this category has quite a few subcategories, but as you can see by the grey shadow we talked about earlier, it is used to customize the matter content that is shown such as the line items. Speaking of line items, lets go into that sub category. Here were going to select one of the widely used options in Bill themes, and that is to Split the time, expenses and products. IF we quickly glance down at the example line items on our bills before selecting this option, we can see that our services and reimbursable expenses are all mingled together based on the date order. After we select this option, and let our invoice quickly update we see that our services and expenses are neatly organized into their own sections. This can be quite useful for improving the readablility of your invoices for your clients.
- The final Bill theme section we’re going to play around with before going and seeing our changes in our real invoice is the Statement of Accounts section. In this category we’re presented with three options: the summary of accounts, detail of accounts, and client accounts, and there are few useful options we’ll look at in each of them. The summary of accounts is disabled by default, and by turning it on by selecting ‘above or below’ line items we immediately see the change applied to our invoice. This gives your clients a quick and easy way to see the total amount owing on their outstanding invoices, taking into account any partial payments that were already made. Unlike the summary of accounts, the detaile of accounts will be enabled already by default, and if we scroll down a bit on our sample invoice here we’ll get to the corresponding section. What the detailed statement shows is a listing of any and all outstanding invoices for this client including the current invoice, it can be a useful reminder to the client that they also have additional outstanding invoices that need to be paid. In my case, I typically bill one invoice at a time for my clients, and therefore want to hide this section as it is somewhat redundant to show just the current invoice here so lets go ahead and hide it. The last section were going to talk about is pretty much mandatory for firms that handle client trust money and that is the client account. This section is also disabled by default as not all firms deal with trust money, but enabling it by selecting either account summary or account details will let clients know exactly what is remaining of their deposited trust money. The difference between summary and details is the level of granularity that we want to show our clients. Account summary will simply let them know the remaining balance, while details will actually include a full trust ledger to allow them to scrutinize when and how exactly trust money was deposited or withdrawn.