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Introduction
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We cover all of the elements and options from the Invoices tab below.Note: you
You cannot activate your project if:
You have not assigned any production or disbursement costs
You have not assigned any production jobs — this can be either pre-production, a a shoot or a video delivery.
There is a lot of project information that is included in the confirmation email. Producers are advised to spend some time setting up their projects as best as they can before confirming. Time spent setting up a quality project saves time down the line, and ensures that nothing is missed - leading to a much better experience for both the client and our team.More
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For more information on this, you should have a look at the VisDom Production Team’s Project Confirmation Checklist. |
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When you are ready to confirm and activate your project, simply click on the button and send the confirmation email.
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You have total flexibility for how you determine and/or break down the price of your project. However, the project confirmation email will only present the total price figure (+ GST) alongside any production credit deductions. Prices in the VMS should always be added ex GST - GST is automatically calculated in the confirmation email and subsequent invoices.
If this project has been created from a sale through Hubspot, then you should find that your project starts with a single price value, with possibly one additional disbursements value. You can leave these values untouched, or you can replace them with a more specific breakdown of production and disbursement costs, or adjust them if the scope of the project changes after the project has been handed over to you — how you choose to handle this is entirely between you and your client’s requirements.
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Caution: Be careful when adding new production or disbursement costs to your projects. Always ensure that any additional costs will be understood by the client. While the clients cannot see your price breakdown, if they are an Admin or Accounts user they can see the current total project price from the Client Hub. |
Add a Production Cost
A production cost is the price we have charged for any Visual Domain services rendered. For example: editing (2 hours), a storyboard, and a 3-hour shoot with one DoP and a Director.
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These are easily edited or deleted by clicking on their pencil edit icon. However, if it has been invoiced only the accounts team can make further adjustments and you must contact them.
Note: You must round your values to the nearest dollar when adding costs.
Add a Disbursement
A disbursement covers any agreed costs incurred from a third-party in the course of delivering the project.
We have ten recognised disbursement types. When you add a disbursement to the project, you must choose one of these categories:
Model/Talent
Studio
Drone
Voice-over
Travel
Venue Hire
Gear Hire
Music/Stock Purchase
CAD/TVC Delivery
Props
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To add a new disbursement to your project:
Go to the blue plus.
Choose “Add Disbursement Cost”
Give your disbursement a good, clear name
Select the disbursement type
Add the value and hit “save”.
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Your chosen disbursement type will be clearly flagged in the total project price summary. There is no need to include this within the disbursement name. You would be better served to provide the supplier and any short product specifics. |
Do I have to provide a detailed breakdown of all production costs?
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You will always know upfront when a client has production credit to use. Whether or not the credit is used for your project is between you and the client, but you can now confidently lead with the suggestion prior to the invoice being sent.Note: This is a significant improvement from the previous VMS, where credit packs were listed elsewhere and it was often up to the client to suggest that their credit be utilisedthe suggestion prior to the invoice being sent.
Credit details
For each credit package, you will know the following details:
Credit ID — relevant to our Accounts team
Package name
Owner — can be owned by either the office or the individual contact associated with the project.
Expiry date — the final date by which the client needs to use this credit.
Available credit
Credit used — a number field, ready to be updated with any credit value applied to this project.
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Credit packs will only show themselves in contexts where your project’s Contact(s) have the appropriate permission to use those credits — either they are the owner or they are from the appropriate office.
Applying credit
To apply production credit to your project, just type the value of the credit into the Credit Used field. You can type any value into a package’s credit used field and the project’s Total amount left to be paiddirectly beneath will immediately recalculate.
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However, after an invoice has been issued, you will not be able to subsequently change the amount of credit used for this invoice. To update this figure requires some backendfancy accounting footwork and you will need to contact the Accounts rteam. or VMSX Tech Support. This should be avoided, as it means your client has been sent an unexpected invoice and is probably not very happy about it.
If additional project costs require a new invoice to be generated, then more credit can be drawn from a credit package, but credit cannot be returned.
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If credit is used to settle 100% of the Total project price, an invoice will not be sent. Should the client still require a copy of this invoice, you can download a copy from the Invoices summary view and share it. The client can also download it from the project’s invoice information on the Client Hub, if they have Admin |
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or Accounts permissions. |
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As soon as you save any value of credit used, you will no longer be able to choose the “50/50” invoice term. |
Permissions
Not everyone from your client’s company can access the company’s credit packages.
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There is no credit pack setting that can make it available across the client’s whole company. This is designed to support larger companies, where each office or department will have their own budgets. Tip:
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Smaller companies that wish for a company-wide pack can be managed by ensuring all of their contacts are assigned to the same “office”. Most of the time, this will be true without extra effort on our part. |
You can only apply credit from packs that are already showing within the project. Their appearance in your project indicates that your contact(s) have the appropriate permission to use that credit.
The clients can track their own credit packs, but they are displayed independently of the projects. Client contacts with Admin or Accounting permissions can apply credit pack value to the project for themselves.
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Invoice term | What does it do? | When is this available? |
100% on order submission | Sends the invoice immediately on project confirmation. In reality, this may take up to 2 days, by the time it completes the invoice processing cycle. | Always. |
After key deliverable | Sends the invoice after your project has sent its first key deliverable. (See note below for the definition of “key deliverable”.) | Always. This is selected by default, unless the client has a preferred option in their company profile. |
50% upfront 50% completion | Sends an invoice immediately on project confirmation for 50% of the invoiceable invoice-able amount. The remaining amount will be invoiced on completion of the first key deliverable. | This option is not available if production credit has been used. |
FortnighlyFortnightly | Sends the latest invoiceable invoice-able amount, once every fortnight. Useful only for ongoing projects. | This is only available if the client’s Office profile has an accountant contact and they have chosen “Fortnightly” invoices in the Office preferences. |
Key deliverables — For the purposes of triggering an invoice, the first “key deliverable” is considered to be the first video delivered. If no video deliverables have been added to the project, then the invoice will be sent on the date of the first filming shoot. If there is no shoot scheduled and no video deliverables, then the VMSX will trigger the invoice on delivery of the first pre-production job.
Note: It is not possible to confirm and activate a Project without either a Pre-production item or a video deliverable. There will always be a key deliverable trigger event for the invoice.
Invoice recipient
The default contact for our invoices is the client’s registered Accountant.
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If you leave the “client” option selected, the accountant contact will receive the invoice. You can optionally add one more CC secondary contact to receive this invoice. To do this, use the Invoice Contact search field to find and select from any of the client’s registered contacts in the VMSX database.
Note: You can change this secondary contact at any time, but you cannot change the Accountant contact form within the project.
Sending to a third party
If you need to send the invoice to a third-party accounts person, you can select this and provide the requisite information here. You will need their:
Entity name
Entity contact name
Entity contact email address
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If you change, add, or edit any of your Invoice recipient details, you must remember to hit the blue “save” button |
Invoices tab
The summary of Invoices presents and monitors the admin of every invoice that has been triggered by this project.
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What does the client see?
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Watch this brief video walkthrough of how the client can use the Client Hub to manage their own invoices and payments. |
The Client Hub presents an Invoices tab for each of the client’s projects. A small red dot will appear on the Invoice tab when a new invoice has been delivered or an invoice is overdue.Note: the
The Invoices tab is only visible to client contact with Admin or Accounts permissions.
The client has a few different views of their invoice information:
The Overview shows the current Total project price. Whenever we add or remove Production and Disbursement costs, the updated project price is immediately reflected here for the client.
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We are currently considering providing the client with the option here to see your Production and Disbursement costs breakdown. Do you think this is a good idea? Tell us what you think. |
The Unpaid Invoicesoffers a view similar to the VMSX invoices summary, with the additional options to Pay Now or Use Credits.
Paid With Creditis only visible to the client when production credit has already been applied to their project. This view shows when the credit was applied, how much was used, and which pack it came from.
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The Production Packs menu can always be accessed from the settings menu on the top-right of the Client Hub page. Select “Credits”.
From here, the client can:
assess the status and remaining credit for any “officecompany-wide” or individual credit packs they personally have access to.
assess any expired credit packs.
Submit an order to purchase new credit packs for themselves. Their Relationship Manager will confirm and process the order for them as soon as possible.
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Info: To read more about processing new credit package orders, see the Creating new projects page. |