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.