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• summarise the production costs and disbursements

• manage our client’s production credit

• set the invoice details;

• confirm and activate the project; and

• monitor all invoices generated and sent to the client

As discussed on the Introduction to VMSX & Starting New Projects page, you will need to consider and confirm many of the details here when you are first setting up a new project. 

Confirming and activating your project

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After creating your project and setting up some details, you will need to send and activate your project before you can start delivering any pre-production or videos. This ensures that we have formally confirmed the client’s budget and scope before commencing work on the project.  

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Overview

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.

When you are ready to confirm and activate your project, simply click on the button and send the confirmation email. 

Who receives the confirmation email?

The confirmation email will automatically choose all of the project contacts to receive the confirmation email. You can deselect any of these, though you must keep at least one of them. You will also be able to add any additional emails to the Cc and/or Bcc fields.

Additionally, the project’s producer and relationship manager will be automatically included, alongside an administrative email address that exists to catch and keep a record of all confirmation emails sent.

What else can I change in the confirmation email?

You can edit the email Title, should the need arise. 

You can also edit (and style) the small personal message that will be included in the body of the email. 

Both the title and personal message come with default content, so editing these is completely optional and down to your personal professional choices.

What information does the confirmation email share?

The confirmation email presents a significant compilation of details that have been prepared across the project.

• The project Relationship Manager

• The project Producer

• The total number of videos deliveries (if there are any) 

  • plus the allowance of change requests

• The total number of shoots (if there are any)

• The totals of some of the pre-production deliverables (if included)

  • Script

  • Storyboard

• A summary of the total project price, including:

  • How much of their production credit has been used

  • GST

  • The total amount that will be invoiced

• Invoice conditions:

  • When the invoice will be sent

  • The length of the payment terms

  • Who will receive the invoice 

• A link to project on Client Hub — takes them directly to their project on the Client Hub

• A link to pay the invoice immediately — takes them directly to the invoice tab within the project on Client Hub. This will only work if the user is an Admin or Accounts contact for the client. 

Overview

The Invoices space is divided into two main views: the Overview and Invoices summary. You can toggle between them using the left-hand menu column.

The Overview manages all of the project elements that lead to the invoice:

• A breakdown of the project price

• Any credit applied, thereby reducing the price

• The invoice recipient and terms

The summary of Invoices presents and monitors the admin of every invoice that has been triggered by this project.

Total project price

This is the only place where you can manage the project price. Irrespective of the delivery details provided elsewhere within the project, each separate price element here can be individually added, labelled, edited, or removed. 

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.

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. 

To add a new production cost to your project: 

1. Go to the blue plus. 

2. Choose “Add Production Cost”

3. Give your production cost a good, clear name

4. Add the value and hit “save”.

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.

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

To add a new disbursement to your project: 

1. Go to the blue plus. 

2. Choose “Add Disbursement Cost”

3. Give your disbursement a good, clear name

4. Select the disbursement type

5. Add the value and hit “save”.

Do I have to provide a detailed breakdown of all production costs? 

No, you don’t. 

However, your goal must always be to deliver within the project’s budget and you may find this feature useful for better managing your team’s time and resources.

Even though clients do not normally have visibility of the cost breakdown, this information should be valuable to your own understanding of the project’s scope, where you should be spending your time, and may hopefully lead to more accurate quotes in the long run.

From the system’s perspective, the data harvested from accurate production costs will prove valuable when trying to appreciate where we can better focus our production resources and investments.

Do I have to include all disbursement costs?

Yes, you do. We want to be able to match-up all of our own invoiced expenses to project deliveries, when accounting goes to pay third party invoices they refer to these disbursement entries for confirmation. Without these entries a question will be raised. 

The data harvested from accurate disbursement costs will prove valuable when trying to appreciate where we can better focus our production resources and investments.

What if I don’t know all of my disbursement costs?

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The Invoices space is divided into two main views: the Overview and Invoices summary. You can toggle between them using the left-hand menu column.

The Overview manages all of the project elements that lead to the invoice:

• A breakdown of the project price

• Any credit applied, thereby reducing the price

• The invoice recipient and terms

The summary of Invoices presents and monitors the admin of every invoice that has been triggered by this project.

Total project price

...

This is the only place where you can manage the project price. Irrespective of the delivery details provided elsewhere within the project, each separate price element here can be individually added, labelled, edited, or removed. 

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.

If this project has been created from a closed deal through HubSpot, then you should find that your project starts with a single price value, with possibly one additional disbursements value.

• You can leave the price value 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 the price is entirely between you and your client’s requirements.

If there are any disbursements, you must provide an accurate breakdown of these costs. This assists our Accounts team to match-up your project expenses with their own records.

Adding a Production Cost

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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. 

To add a new production cost to your project: 

1. Go to the blue plus. 

2. Choose “Add Production Cost”

3. Give your production cost a good, clear name

4. Add the value and hit “save”.

After creating them, these are easily edited or deleted by clicking on their pencil edit icon.

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Adding a Disbursement

A disbursement covers any agreed costs incurred from a third-party in the course of delivering the project. 

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We have plenty of recognised disbursement types.

• Model/Talent

• Drone

• Voice-over

• Travel

• Venue Hire

• Gear Hire

• Music/Stock Purchase

• CAD/TVC Delivery

• Props

• Other

• Studio

• Transcription

• Freelance Crew Hire

• Captions

• Hair & Makeup

• Accommodation

• Catering

When you add a disbursement to the project, you must choose one of these categories.

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To add a new disbursement to your project: 

1. Go to the blue plus. 

2. Choose “Add Disbursement Cost”

3. Give your disbursement a good, clear name

4. Select the disbursement type

5. Add the value and hit “save”.

Do I have to provide a detailed breakdown of all production costs? 

No, you don’t. 

However, your goal must always be to deliver within the project’s budget and you may find this feature useful for better managing your team’s time and resources.

Even though clients do not normally have visibility of the cost breakdown, this information should be valuable to your own understanding of the project’s scope, where you should be spending your time, and may hopefully lead to more accurate quotes in the long run.

From the system’s perspective, the data harvested from accurate production costs will prove valuable when trying to appreciate where we can better focus our production resources and investments.

Do I have to include all disbursement costs?

Yes, you do.

We want to be able to match-up all of our own invoiced expenses to project deliveries. When VisDom Accounts pays third-party invoices, they refer to these disbursement entries for confirmation. Without these entries, a question will be raised. 

The data harvested from accurate disbursement costs will prove valuable when trying to appreciate where we can better focus our production resources and investments.

What if I don’t know all of my disbursement costs?
What if I don’t know what my project breakdown will be?

Disbursement and production costs can be added at any time during the Project’s delivery. Especially if the invoice has not yet been sent.

If it can be achieved, it is certainly in the client's (and the Project Manager's) best interest to have all the costs understood upfront. This helps with budgeting and helps to avoid nasty surprises when costs may not have been properly communicated to the client and a potential follow-up invoice may be on the way.

Paid with credits

This value represents how much of the project will be paid for by the client’s pre-purchased production credits. The figure is drawn from the information supplied in the Credits Available section lower down on the Invoices page.

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The “Amount remaining to be invoiced” will factor in all previous invoices already sent for this project.

Credits available

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In the Credits Available section, you will see a list of all prepaid credit packages that your client owns, if there is any credit remaining.  

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Applying credit

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Applying credit

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The Client Hub allows our clients to settle their own invoices using their production credit packs. If your contact has Admin or Account permissions, then they will be able to access and use the same credit packs that you can see.

If you find that you are being asked to sort this out for them, you can also apply production credit to your project, just . Just type the value of the credit into the Credit Used field. You can type any value into a package’s credit used Credit Used field and the project’s Total amount left to be paiddirectly beneath will immediately recalculate. 

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You can experiment with any combination of credit across all of the available packages. Once you are ready, click the blue “Save” button. At this point, each credit package will update its Available credit value, and the project itself will recalculate its Amount remaining to be invoiced.

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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 back-end accounting footwork and you will need to contact the Accounts rteam. or VMSX Tech Support. team.

If additional project costs require lead to a new invoice to be being generated, then more credit can be drawn from a credit package, but credit cannot be returnedyou will not be able to apply any more production credit without the assistance of the Accounts team.

Alternatively, using the Client Hub your clients can settle any of their invoices themselves with their remaining production credit balances.

Permissions

Not everyone from your client’s company can access the company’s credit packages.

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• 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.

Invoice Details

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The invoice details dictate when the invoice will be sent, and to whom — most of the time, this will be a contact from their own Accounts team. Ensure you check with the client who they need the invoice needs to be sent to in order to prevent any . This will prevent delays in payment.

Payment terms. 

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Invoice recipient

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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 databasecontacts in the VMSX database.

If there is no registered accountant contact, you will need to add a primary contact to receive this invoice.

Sending to a third party

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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:

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Summary of Invoices

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The summary of Invoices presents invoices tab on the left of Invoice page shows and monitors the admin of for every invoice that has been triggered by this project. 

If any costs are added to the project after the first invoice has been sent, then these will accumulate towards the next invoice.Follow-up invoices are covered by the 50/50 and fortnightly invoice terms, but you can also manually request a follow-up invoice from the Accounts teama new invoice.  In most cases, this next invoice will be sent during the very next invoice run from our Accounts team. The only exception to this rule is when a project is already on a fortnightly invoice cycle.

Invoice details breakdown

• Invoice ID — our Accounts team’s reference number

• Scheduled date — when the invoice will be sent to the client

• Due date — when the client is due to settle the invoice

• Price (excl. GST) — corresponds to the “amount to be invoiced” in the Overview. 

• Status — reflects one of the the following:

  • To Be Invoiced

  • Invoiced

  • Paid

  • Overdue

• PO # — Purchase order number, for the client’s reference. You can add the client’s PO number to the invoice here. The client can also do this for themselves using Client Hub. 

• Actions — After the invoice has been generated, you will be able to download a copy of it here for sharing with the client, should this be needed.

The client has a couple of other options

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under their own invoice Actions:

• Pay Now — client can use Xero to pay their invoices with credit card or direct debit.

• Use Credits — client can self-apply any of their available product credit to settle the invoiced account.

What does the client see?

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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.

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when a new invoice has been delivered.

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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Production Packs

The client can separately purchase and manage their pre-purchased credit packages from the Client Hub, outside of their projects.

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• alongside any balance already paid with credit and the Total left to pay. Whenever we add or remove Production and Disbursement costs, the updated project price is immediately reflected here for the client.

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• The Unpaid Invoicesoffers a view similar to the VMSX invoices summary, with the additional options to Pay Now or Use Credits.

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• 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.

Production Credit

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The client can purchase, manage, and use their pre-purchased credit packages from the Client Hub.

Using production credits

If a Client Hub user has Admin or Account permissions, their special access to the project’s Invoice tab allows them to settle the invoice using any production credits that project has access to.

The client can only draw from one single credit pack to do this. Unlike our options in the VMSX, the Client Hub does not allow the client to use multiple credit packs for one invoice.

Production Packs menu

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Outside of the projects, the Production Packs menu can always be accessed from the settings menu on the top-right of the Client Hub page. Select “Credits”.

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• assess the status and remaining credit for any “officecompany“office-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.