A lot of agencies deal with prepaid VPA, and often find themselves in a situation where funding must be requested and received before advertising can be booked. If that sounds like you, you’ve probably been doing one of the following:
· Sending a quick email or phoning the client advise them to pay a certain amount into your trust account. This makes it hard to give sufficient detail on what you plan on spending the money on – especially when pre-planned marketing packages are involved. This means there’s no clear record on whether or not funds have been requested, nor which are outstanding.
· Sending a VPA schedule with the amount you’d like the client to pay on it. Again, this can make it hard to keep track of what you’ve requested and what the client has paid.
· Issuing a VPA invoice, then transferring funds from your general account into trust when receipted – and then paying back out to the general account (or suppliers) once you’ve actually spent the money. Just looking at that mouthful, you can imagine this is hardly ideal. Not only does this force your administration or accounting staff to waste years of their lives shuffling money around like some Thimblerig street magician, but there’s the added issues with timing and accounts and tax and so on and so forth.
· Some convoluted combination of some or all of the above.
The thing is, trust requests aren’t like normal invoices. In fact, they’re very, very different. Trust only has two modes of transaction: ‘money in’, and ‘money out’. There’s no profit, no tax – it’s the digital equivalent of leaving some money in your neighbour’s piggybank for the weekend.
And therein lies the problem. Requesting trust funds to be paid via invoice incurs those nasty little ‘+GST’ brackets that don’t belong (as no service has yet been rendered) – and money needs to be shifted back and forth from your general account to your trust account.
Rex’s trust funds requests system allows you to:
· Create professional-looking trust funds requests for clients with clearly itemised VPA or other products (and automatically direct clients to pay them into the right bank account).
· Easily identify which VPA items you’ve requested for money for.
· Request other money into trust (e.g. sales deposits) using the same simple workflow as you would for VPA items.
· Efficiently follow up trust fund requests with confidence using our new system lists and reports.
· Raise invoices and pay them out of trust immediately as they actually fall due, saving you time on your normal invoice-chasing workflows, and making them much clearer.
· If your agency runs multiple trust or interest bearing deposit accounts, it’s easier than ever to point clients to the appropriate one to deposit payables into – which in turn, thanks to a little code magic, also makes accurate tracking a breeze.
A simpler way to request VPA pre-payments
So how does the new functionality work? Let's break it down into a few basic steps:
· Step 1: Meet with the owner to discuss the campaign, (as per usual).
· Step 2: Once you‘ve decided on a VPA campaign, construct it in Rex, (as per usual).
· Step 3: Create and send a trust funds request to the owner. Follow them up if late and record payments against the relevant requests as the money comes in.
· Step 4: Now that you have all the funds, issue invoices and apply payments from trust as payables fall due for particular VPA items.
And that’s it – you’re done.