Clients & Profits Featurecast

Clients can be billed for anything you do -- whether you’re billing an estimate, an advance, a retainer, a service charge, or a job’s final costs. A/R invoices are seamlessly integrated with jobs and costs, so billing is particularly quick and easy -- and can be mostly automatic. Every kind of client invoice -- including deposits, retainers, advances, credits, and discounts -- are added into Accounts Receivable. Clients & Profits can even invoice clients for things you may have forgotten to bill. Like finding money under your couch cushions, the best surprises are those that put money into your pocket. And no agency management software can do that like Clients & Profits.

The painful process of tracking and calculating sales commissions for AEs is completely automated in Clients & Profits. Sales commissions are based on job billings for clients, jobs, and job tasks that are marked as commissionable. Commissions are calculated for either account executives and business development (bizdev) executives, or both. Commission rates are set by job type and can be a percentage or flat-rate spiff. Individual job tasks and invoice line items can be made commissionable, which Clients & Profits uses to calculate commission amounts on reports.

Last week, I walked you through the process of preparing to close your agency's fiscal year. This week, we'll actually do it. The Clients & Profits Close Year utility is very easy to use and does all of the work of resetting the General Ledger for you. As long as you've checked your balance sheets, reconciled your checkbook, and backed everything up, we're ready close the books on another fiscal year.

This week, I'll walk you through the process of preparing to close your year, how to put together a game plan with your CPA, and explain what C&P actually does behind the scenes to make this task as painless for you as possible. We'll print the necessary financials, get your numbers balanced, reconcile your checkbook, back up your database, then prepare to actually run the Clients & Profits Close Year utility next week.

Mike Ferguson from the C&P Helpdesk joins us this week to discuss how Clients & Profits can be used to determine if your agency is a victim of internal fraud. You can rely on the usual suspects like accounting anomalies, an employee living beyond their means, failing to look you in the eye, coming in early, staying late, or never taking a vacation, but that won’t give you the truth or the bottom line. That’s where Clients & Profits comes in.

Clients & Profits automates a typically time-consuming and error-prone annual ritual -- printing year-end 1099 reports and tax forms for vendor payments. You'll find step-by-step instructions for tracking and reporting vendor 1099 payments in the Job Costing chapter in your Clients & Profits user guide. You'll find answers to commonly-asked questions about 1099s below.

Closing the year in Clients & Profits is extremely important and should be done sometime after the end of your fiscal year. Clients & Profits X Pro supports two simultaneous fiscal years (for a total of 24 accounting periods, compared to Clients & Profits Classic, which supports only 15), so there’s no real sense of urgency about year-end closing. The year can be closed well into the next fiscal year. Throughout that time you can enter data into both the current year and last year, then print financial statements for any accounting period.

Phil explains how easy it is to import your agency logo into Clients & Profits and share it between both Macs and PCs, so your agency logo appears nice and crisp on reports such as invoices, estimates, purchase orders, etc.

The Collection Manager is a terrific tool for improving how you get paid. It’s like a Daily Job Status report for your unpaid invoices, listing everything owed to you by your clients. When the Collection Manager window is opened, it lists every posted, unpaid invoice from Accounts Receivable. Every invoice for every account executive or account team is included. Receivables are color-coded by age, highlighting the problem invoices so that they can get the top priority by the billing department.

David Drucker, Vice President and Manager of Agency Services at Strata, joins Cindy Westen to talk about how well Clients & Profits works with Strata to import media buys into the program. Drucker is responsible for STRATA’s Agency Division and leads a team to develop new products, meet demanding revenue targets, develop strategic alliances, and creates a stable business environment. During his tenure at STRATA, Drucker has been an integral part, helping to define the business model as well as attracting clients to these growing organizations.

The creative brief explains to the client the agency’s creative process for a particular job. It's a worksheet that creatives and account service can use to define the job’s creative, production, and strategic goals. It provides focus and direction for those managing and working on the job. It can be used to document the strategic, creative steps the agency will perform to design and produce the work.

Proposals are mini-estimates that provide a preview of a job for a client. It lets you provide a clear, concise proposal of the work you are offering without opening an actual job ticket. They are a starting place to organize important details before the client starts the work. Proposals can be added when pitching an idea to a client (or prospective client, too). Once your bid is accepted, they can be easily converted into job tickets. With a creative brief, cost, and start and due dates, you can pinpoint exactly what resources are needed to get the job done.

The My Jobs window lets you see all of the jobs on which you’re one of the traffic assignments (e.g., creative director, project manager, copywriter, etc.) or the job's AE. It also includes jobs for which you are the account executive (i.e., the AE/Team field). Compared to the lookup list, the My Jobs windows only shows your jobs. It works like the jobs Lookup List, except that it filters out jobs that you're not a part of.

The C&P Media Link is a fast, easy-to-use interface between popular media buying systems and your Clients & Profits database. It imports broadcast orders exported from Strata, SmartPlus, and Tapscan. These station orders are imported directly into Clients & Profits, just as if you'd typed them in yourself. No rekeying is necessary.

The built-in Clients & Profits X Customize Reports window lets users modify every existing report in Clients & Profits X. Changing report templates using the Customize Reports option permanently changes the report's parameters in your copy of Clients & Profits X. The report templates that you change will only affect your copy of Clients & Profits X. If other users of the program wish to use these customized reports, these same changes will need to be made to each copy of Clients & Profits X that needs it.

Today we're discussing how shops with in-house output, duplication, and production equipment can set up a price list for every kind of internal charge they’d bill to a client. The Internal Charge Items table keeps a detailed listing of items and their prices, which are then used for expense tracking. Charges for internal items can be charged to any job and task, including quantities, which then appear on job cost reports -- and eventually on the client invoice.

The Expense Reports lets you find and review daily expense reports entered by the company’s employees. The window lets you see your own expense reports as well as those entered by other staff members. For each daily expense report you’ll see its expense entries, including category, job, task, cost amount, and description.

Any bank account can be quickly reconciled with your monthly bank statement using the Reconciliation function. Clients & Profits X reconciles bank accounts separately, so you’ll enter one account’s balance at a time.

There are several calendars available in Clients & Profits. Whether you're using the personal calendar to stay up to date with your To Do List, or the media calendar to current on spot buys and materials due, there's a calendar in Clients & Profits that's right for you.

Donna Lynn Johnson from Crystal Brook Consulting joins Clients & Profits trainer Cindy Westen to continue their discussion on the importance of the billing process. They suggest users set up different ways of billing, and other tips that help you smooth out your billing processes.

Donna Lynn Johnson from Crystal Brook Consulting joins Clients & Profits trainer Cindy Westen to discuss the importance of the billing process. They suggest users set up different ways of billing, and other tips that help you smooth out your billing processes.

Donna Lynn Johnson from Crystal Brook Consulting continues her discussion with Clients & Profits trainer Cindy Westen to discuss her favorite reports, and reports that agencies should be aware of that help you achieve your goals.

Donna Lynn Johnson from Crystal Brook Consulting joins Clients & Profits trainer Cindy Westen to discuss her favorite reports, and reports that agencies should be aware of that help you achieve your goals.

Donna Lynn Johnson from Crystal Brook Consulting joins Clients & Profits trainer Cindy Westen to talk about how to set up and account for freelancers working for your agency.

How do you, as an agency, move your billing through the agency from start to finish? Cindy explains how billing trafficking efficiently using billing workflow titles, as well as printing the client summaries or billing vs estimate reports.

Heidi and Andrew join us in studio to talk to us about common agency issues with print jobs, new printing innovations, the importance of bringing your printer into jobs as early as creative meetings, and more.

Cindy explains how agency principles can learn how to access, print, and understand their financials in Clients & Profits. Fraud is prevalent in many agencies, so it is important that agency owners know how to get this information themselves, so they are not dependent on others.

Dirk Williams from L&L Printers returns to talk to us about common agency issues with print jobs, the environmental impact of printing, and how L&L Printers has stepped up to be more environmentally conscious.

Dirk Williams from L&L Printers stops by the studio to talk to us about common agency issues with print jobs, the environmental impact of printing, and how L&L Printers has stepped up to be more environmentally conscious.

Spec sheets contain standard information about a particular type of job.

Cindy explains the four different ways Clients & Profits allows you to manage traffic at your agency. Which is the best for you? Listen and find out.

When it's time to clean up that massive Work To Do list that has been piling for some time, Clients & Profits makes it easy. A one-click Mark as Finished button in the Work To Do window allows you to select a number of completed tasks and mark them all as DONE with one click, making your Job Schedule reports a thing of beauty.

When a batch of checks misprints, the Renumber tool really comes in handy. The Renumber tool voids a batch of checks (or a single check) then reenters exact copies with brand-new check numbers. A complete audit trail is posted to the General Ledger.

One-Click purchase orders are integrated with the printing specifications/RFQs that are built into Clients & Profits. You can automatically create a purchase order with one-click from the printing specifications window.

Labels use the information you’ve already entered saving hours of typing. They show the agency name, job number, job name/title, and the job’s start and due dates. You can print labels for any range of jobs, and in any quantity. These labels can be affixed to job jackets, mechanicals, or anything else that needs to be identified by a job number.

The Auto-pay function writes checks for selected payables, paying off the invoices automatically. Invoices selected for payment show their balance due, but usually don’t include a payment amount. This option calculates the payment amount as the balance due. It’s faster than entering the payment amounts manually, but only if you intend to pay all of your invoices at once.

Estimates can be revised and reprinted as many times as needed. Printing an estimate doesn’t affect its production or billing status. Estimates print on letterhead, and have several customizable options.

Client, Budget, and Job Status Alerts are customizable, on-line warnings that appear when you add jobs, billings, or payments for a client. They're optional, and can be changed anytime.

Today we're talking about how the Media and Production departments can better communicate with one another so that last minute rushes to complete jobs become a thing of the past.

The many diaries available in Clients & Profits provide a recorded history of your shop’s relationship with it’s clients, jobs you're working on, and more. You’ll always have a record of who said what, and why, so there’s no need to try to remember (or worse, guess) about what happened the last time you worked together.

The Approval Manager simplifies and automates the entire job approval process for proposals, creative briefs, content, estimates, schedules, and change orders.

When a job involves printing, the process of defining its printing specifications and getting quotes from vendors can be completely automated by Clients & Profits X.

The Creative Dashboard combines a staff member's daily time card, job hot sheet, and Work To Do into a single window. Inspired by the popular Clients & Profits ASAP (a web-based studio manager) home page, the Creative Dashboard lets creatives, production staff, and free-lancers see all of their important day-to-day information at one time.

A work order can be used as internal creative brief. Like creative briefs, a work order can have up to 15 topics/subjects that an account exec can use to describe the work being requested. The work order's topics can be pre-defined as part of the job type/spec sheet, so that all jobs of the same type have the same work order topics.

The Weekly Task Planner window lists your unfinished job tasks for the current week. It is a personal scheduler that shows your unfinished jobs and tasks. Tasks are grouped by day, giving you a clear look at your week’s deadlines. For each deadline you’ll see its job number and task, the hours left on the task from the estimate, and when the task is due.

Learn how Clients & Profits helps you interact with your clients. Whether through the Sales Maker tool, the Call Scripts, campaigns, or sales letters, C&P has you covered. Most methods fail because implementation is limited to software installation, without providing the context, support and understanding for employees to learn. Clients & Profits makes it simple, and efficient.

The Clients & Profits X asset manager helps your creatives, production staff, and AEs better organize a job's digital elements -- graphic files, word processing documents, page layouts, web pages, Shockwave files, fonts, and more. With all of a job’s assets in one place, there’s no more searching for disks or roaming the servers looking for a certain file. Each asset includes a thumbnail and description plus the ability to open the file with a single mouse click.

The new and improved C&P User Guide now features comments on every page. If you have questions that each User Guide page perhaps didn't answer, you can leave comments for us, and we'll make updates and answer questions. Perhaps you have special tips or techniques that you've found help you use a particular feature better. You can share your thoughts with other users in the Clients & Profits community.

The Time Card is essentially a form for creating time sheets. They can be used together, but usually aren't. Time cards are used by people who run C&P X all day, and want C&P X to track their hours while they work. Time sheets are used by people who track their hours on paper, then enter them into C&P X at the end of the day or the week.

The In/Out Board saves you time by letting you know who's in the agency and who's not, so you aren't running around looking for someone who may not be there. The list is updated the first time the lookup window is opened, getting the information it needs from the server. You can change your status by clicking on the User Name link. All staff members, even those that are inactive, are shown on the In/Out Board.

In our very first featurecast, we're featuring the Client Projects window, which helps you keep your job tracking more consistent by establishing a standard list of projects for each client. We also answer some questions from users of the program.