The Most Important Tool For My Business

i've been freelancing for over four years and if you ask me today what are the three most important parts of running a successful freelance operation i would tell you landing clients getting paid by those clients and not getting sued by crazy clients hello bonsai is a tool that i've used for the past three years and it is something that's helped me accomplish all three of these things and has made my life way easier so today i'm going to break down this tool and show you how it can help you as a freelancer [Music] all right welcome to hello bonsai now bonsai has been part of my business for years now this is a tool that i have used every single day to do a number of different things in my agency it's helped me automate a lot of my processes and most importantly it's helped me make sure that legally speaking i'm in a good spot and i'm not liable to get sued by my clients now this is something that we don't think about a lot of times as a freelancer whether you're a designer a marketer doesn't matter what you're doing we need to make sure that we have ourselves covered because as a solo freelancer nobody else is going to check these things for us and so i'm going to show you how bonsai has helped keep me safe and also help me be more efficient in my business now i do want to mention beforehand that i am an affiliate for bonsai but with that said this is something that i don't do often on my channel but this is a tool that i swear by it's something that i've used for years now and i wouldn't recommend this unless i truly felt like it was going to be a game changer for your business so a brief overview of bonsai essentially what bonsai does is it's your all-in-one hub for all things that you might need as far as proposals contracts invoices it works as a client crm you can track your time and your tasks you can use it for automations your accounting literally and anything that you can think of it's basically like having all of it in one single dashboard so without wasting any more time i'm going to dive right into my dashboard here and i just want to walk you through how it looks how i'm using and how my agency is using this to scale our business and to get paid and i also want to break down a couple of my favorite parts that i think are going to be total game changers for you and your business so the first thing that you're going to see when we pull up our bonsai dashboard is our project timeline and this is one of my favorite features because it gives me a very brief overview of what to expect in the past and coming weeks and so you can see here it's going to give me a list of all of my ongoing projects now one thing that i've noticed is it has a limit to these projects so it's not showing all of them right here but i love to set my recurring projects or my monthly ones and so i can see who has already paid me this month who still needs to pay me or has an outstanding invoice or contract and then it also shows me upcoming invoices and how much those are worth it's going to give you a really good overview of everything that's going on in the month and this is a great way just to kind of check in on your projects and make sure that nothing is being forgotten now as i scroll down the next thing that you're going to notice is our income and expenses overview now i love this you're able to set the date range to basically anything that you want and this is going to give you an overview of what's paid in pending what is outstanding and then it gives you the opportunity to track also your overdue invoices or bills and then other income where you can actually input manually other income that you have and so you can put everything all into one place now for me i only use bonsai for my agency so all of our web design and seo projects all of my other sources of income whether that's my course income or affiliate stuff that is not done through bonsai kind of keep all of those separate but what you're seeing here is all of my ongoing projects all of my clients and again i love to get this brief overview this is something that i'll try to log into at at least once every day or every two days just to make sure that i'm not forgetting anything now as we scroll down a little bit more you've got a place to track your tasks and your time as well these are both features that i don't use as much because i'm not working on an hourly base we're typically working more like on a per project basis or on monthly retainers but these are awesome tools that i would recommend you look into especially if you're a designer that's tracking by the hour you're able to track your time and then put that data into the specific project that you're working on and it's just a great reference for you so moving on the next thing that i want to cover is over here on the right side you've got your activity bar now without sharing too much information on my clients or the activity of my clients the thing that i love about this bar is it's going to show you basically everything that's going on like that day and in the previous days and so it's going to show you when you have sent out a proposal or an agreement it's going to show you if they've opened that and it's also going to notify you when they've signed it this is also a great place to track your reminders you can have bonsai auto remind people about invoices that are unpaid and it's a great way to kind of get again a brief overview right here from the dashboard on everything that's going on in the month your overall income and expenses and then your activity that you can check and make sure that everything is up to speed and that you're not forgetting anything so next what i want to do is cover briefly our clients tab here now the clients tab is really awesome because this is where kind of your crm comes into play what you're able to do is create a client right here and it's going to ask you for name contact name and email and as you get into these clients which i'm going to use a sample client here that i put together earlier today it's going to show you everything that you need to know to manage the projects and the invoices of the specific client so you're going to see that it has all the contact information here and then you've got a place here to add a project so what you can do is you can just create let's just say a test project and within that project you are going to be able to track everything from your invoices any documents which include proposals contracts forms all of your time tracking your expenses any notes on this project and these projects are the things that are going to show up on your dashboard and so i love having everything in one single place it makes it really easy when i know i'm working on a specific project that day i'm going to open this up and i've got everything all in one place so i can record things keep things organized and i can let my team in on this and so they can also have access to all the information that they might need to manage a project so getting more specifically into proposals contracts and invoices because these are obviously very important and essential parts of being a freelancer right we need to make sure that that we can land clients that we can sign clients to a contract or an agreement and then we get paid by them and so when we are in our proposals here you can see when you click new proposal it's going to give you a bunch of different proposal templates and one of the the best parts about these and let's just click on one of these generic templates for now one of the best parts about these is their interactive proposals and so they give people the ability to click and select which different services they approve of and so you can see here as i scroll down we've got your fee structure which is single option packages or multi-select i'm going to go ahead and click multi-select and you can see here that you're going to be able to add let's type in maybe service number one and then you can add a different option which is going to include service number two and you can give these titles and then what that's going to do is when you send this proposal to your client they're going to be able to click and select and highlight the one that they want and then they're going to be able to click and approve of that proposal and so it's a really great way to give different options know exactly what it is that your client wants to move forward on and then basically everything else within this proposal is fully editable and so you can add your overview and goals your timeline um they've got a couple other sections that are they just come with the template which are additional services and why us and then you can design the the style and the background images of these as well and so a really powerful proposal tool one of my favorite parts that comes with all of these whether it's proposals contracts or invoices is you can track the opens and so if a client receives it and doesn't open the proposal you're going to be notified of that in your activity bar on the home page or on the dashboard and you're going to be able to follow up and say hey i noticed that you didn't yet open the proposal and so this is a great way just to stay on top of all of your client interactions and make sure that nothing gets left behind or falls through the cracks so going back to our dashboard we're going to go to contracts now oh and actually one thing i will mention with both proposals and contracts is you can reuse like you can create and then reuse templates and this is going to be really really beneficial within our contract section and so you're going to see i'm going to click new contracts and you can choose your template they've got one that's custom and completely editable and then you also are going to be able to select here at the top any agreements that you've already created and saved as templates and so we've got our official website agreement and then our seo agreement let's just click website agreement and we're going to select our client sweetums and then it pulls up our project which we already created which is our test project and i'm going to click create contract now the nice part about these contracts that i have created is these were based off of the original bonsai templates that they provided and then i've just slowly customized them and improved them over time and so you can see that we're outlining work and payment we're outlining you know any non-solicitation representations a lot of legal jargon that we may not necessarily understand but bonsai is going to throw this in there just as a default to make sure that we are covered legally and we're not liable to lawsuits now the most important part about these contracts or this contract feature is you can send these via email and they can be e-signed right there in the email so a client can type in their name and that makes them legally binding and so you're going to have a list of all of your contracts that have been signed here in bonsai and so if you have to reference those or for whatever reason you need to go back and and use those if a client is claiming that either you didn't deliver something that was promised or whatever it might be you've got yourself covered because you have a stockpile of all of your signed agreements and everything that they agreed to before they signed it now moving on to invoices invoices obviously are going to be a really important part of your business because if you don't send invoices you're not going to get paid and so i'm going to click new invoice here we're going to select our client again and one thing that i love about invoices is you have a couple different options you can send one-time invoices you can send recurring invoices which means that those are automatically going to get sent every month but your client has to manually pay those and then the third option is recurring auto payment which means that your client puts in their form of payment whether that's a credit card paypal bank ach whatever it is and then it's going to auto charge them or auto bill them every single month on the same day and so this is most of the time what i like to use especially with our seo campaigns so i don't have to worry about checking in every month and manually sending or updating one-time agreements and i want to make sure that our clients are just getting auto built so i don't have to wait for them to pay manually so this recurring auto payment is a great way to go and so you can select if you want this to um auto bill every two weeks every week every month every year and then it says invoice until either a specific date or i manually stop it you're going to create your invoice and that is going to then give you the ability to create a name it's already got all of your client information in there and then you're just going to have to basically type in the item or the service name the units and the rate which in this case let's just say is a 500 rate and item number one and just like that it is going to add you know any discount or tax that you want to specify you're going to be able to add in any expenses that your client needs to cover as well and then you can specify the late fee any notes attachments and then you can go ahead and send this out and again once they put in their payment information for this specific type of invoice it's going to auto bill them at that same time every single month one other note that i like to make on invoices is bonsai gives your clients a ton of different ways to log in and pay whether that's credit or debit paypal um they connect can connect their bank they can do a lot of different things it also gives them or gives you the ability to add notes where they can pay you via venmo or they can also write you a check and so i love that it gives you a lot of different options to collect payment and if people send you a check or do vemma you can just manually select that this invoice has been paid and then that's going to show up on your dashboard and it will take note of that all right so going back to our dashboard there are just a few more things that i want to talk about we're going to skip time tracking and tasks because those are fairly straightforward but the one other thing that i really enjoy is the accounting section which this is something that bonsai is constantly updating and improving but this is a more detailed overview of your earnings your expenses your profit other income and you can see here below this it gives you the ability to type in expenses or income and expenses is something that just recently we are utilizing within bonsai where we can track all of our expenses what we're paying our contractors any other like software fees that are recurring every month we can create those and so it auto you know it auto generates those every single month so we can track those ongoing expenses and then in our overview or our accounting overview it's going to show us both uh what what is paid than our expenses and then our profit after that and so this is a really great way to kind of track things and just get a better overview this is also going to be super useful for us come tax season because we've got a really good accounting of everything that went out everything that came in and on that note bonsai does have an upgrade that you can pay for that they are going to give you all of your tax forms this is not something that i've done because i pay for my own accountant but as far as i know bonsai does a pretty good job at organizing and delivering everything that you need for your taxes so at the end of the day um bonsai has been such a huge game changer for our agency i love being able to track everything all in one place even since i started bonsai there have been so many massive updates made that have solved pain points that i had before and so without a doubt i would highly recommend using hello bonsai for all things proposals contracts and invoices as far as pricing i'm pretty sure the first plan starts at about 20 bucks a month and while that might seem like a lot for some of you to have all of these tools in one suite like this for 20 bucks a month it's absolutely a no-brainer and so i would highly recommend clicking the link below and diving into a free trial you can start playing around with things see if it's going to be a good fit for your business but if you're anything like me you're going to find that the time and the money that it saves you in the long run is going to be well worth that small monthly fee and i can promise you that just like it's done for me it's going to help you streamline things it's going to help you scale your business and it's going to become such a huge asset for you and i hope that one day you can look back and say hey i'm grateful for that video that peyton posted because bonsai has become an asset for our business as well so that's it for this video thanks so much for watching and we will catch you in the next one

Channel: Payton Clark Smith

Views: 2,717

Keywords: hello bonsai review, hello bonsai tutorial, hello bonsai contracts, hello bonsai payments, freelance tools, freelance contract template, freelancer proposal sample, freelancer proposal, web design proposal, how to create a web design proposal, freelance web design, web design tools, web design tools 2021, time tracking software, freelance crm software, design tools 2021, The Most Important Tool For My Business

Id: rk3G_Zem2Fg

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021