How to Add an Invoice Linked to Cost Spreadsheet - (2024)

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In this video we're going to show you how to add an invoice and have it linked into the same Excel spreadsheet as your Cost Summary when using the Proposal Kit Professional edition with the Expert Edition of the Wizard software. Now this will work for any kind of business, any kind of proposal, using linked spreadsheets and the templates. Now we're going to illustrate this using the Electrical #4 design theme with the idea being this is an electrical contractor Cost Summary and Invoice.

So we have the Electrical #4 design theme selected. Whatever visual design theme you've purchased or customized will be what the visual design of the templates will look like. So we just go to the Document Projects button and we'll Add a New Project.

Every time we're going to create a new proposal we're going to add a new project. Now if you're setting up a system for creating multiple proposals you'll probably hand edit a number of the commonly used templates like the About Us, Company History. Your product and service lists, your cover letters and so on.

So we're going to leave the default selections checked. We've turned on the Excel Dynamic Links and we're going to select some chapters for this proposal. We'll just do a basic Cover Letter, Title Page, Estimate, Back Page and Services Provided.

You can see the order that the chapters will be created in. Now if we're going to fill in this for an actual company which is filling the Company Data and Client Data. You can see this is just information about our company.

This will be whatever information you've entered and your client data is going to be whatever you're entering for your customer. We've set up the data, we've selected our templates. We just saved the project and the Wizard will build the initial document for the proposal with the estimates and the starting spreadsheet.

Okay, now it's generated the document. I'll go into the edit screen. Now we're going to edit the Estimate Calculator and put in some line items.

Okay, now that we've entered some items here for a couple electrical products, the setup and install, a maintenance contract, permit and so on. It's calculated out the subtotals, tax, grand total and so on. We save our spreadsheets and now we're going to open the linked Word document.

Now we can see the document has our initial Cover Letter. The Electrical #4 design theme you see here and anything we would have entered into the Client Data screen which we did not fill in in this example. That would have been merged in right here.

You can see the Estimate has been updated with the actual line items. Now this you can see if you just click these. That highlights the entire line.

These are actually links to the actual spreadsheet. So once we had entered our data in the spreadsheet and saved it then we opened the Word document the Word document auto–updates with the actual information. So we can actually go and make changes to the spreadsheet and see them updated here.

Just for an example we'll go change one of the values so we're going to close the Word document. One reason for this is it's just faster and more efficient to make edits to the calculator spreadsheet, save those, then open the Word document and let it auto update. We can also have them both open at the same time.

We're going to actually show that here. So we've got the spreadsheet. You always want to open the spreadsheet first, otherwise it will open the spreadsheet up in a read–only mode if you open the Word document first.

So now that we have both open we're going to show you the Word document on this side and we are going change the permit from $395 to $595. You'll see it here at the amount $427 will change. Now that now the permit cost has gone up to $643 and you see $643 has auto–updated the Word document without us having to do anything.

Now older versions of Word might not auto–update that fast. You might have to click the link and right click and then click Update Link. So that's why opening the Word document after you've made and saved changes to the spreadsheet is sometimes a little faster but you'll see in this case with the current version of Word it updated immediately.

So now say you've submitted the completed proposal to your client and they've accepted it but you need to send an invoice later. This is a feature of the Expert Edition. We can go back into the Edit Current Document for this client.

Our original proposal is here and our original spreadsheet is here. Now let's add an invoice. All you do is click the Add Invoice button.

Now the Wizard is designed so it will see that you already have a Cost Summary or Estimate calculator spreadsheet so it will link the invoice to that spreadsheet. Okay, now we've added the invoice. So open up the spreadsheet and we will also open up this invoice.

You'll see that the same prices, totals and everything show up here in the invoice. So this will also let you make changes to the invoice if something changed between the original estimate and the invoice. All you do is to make changes to Excel spreadsheet and it will update the invoice.

That is all there is to adding the invoice and having it linked into the same exact Excel spreadsheet as your proposal using the Expert Edition. Now there are a lot of other customizations you can make to this such as you can make your own custom versions of the invoice, your own custom spreadsheets. You can define the line items however you need.

You can change the calculations and so on. This example is just a stock out–of–the–box template and spreadsheet.