If you'd like to use Liquid to pay a Vendor, we recommend you start by inviting your Vendors or, if you have an invoice in hand, adding the Invoice and inviting the Vendor.
If you are on a Growth or Premium plan and intend to use advanced settings, you'll want to follow these steps to set up your Liquid account.
- Complete Financial Setup
- Invite your users
- Work on your custom onboarding processes
- Determine and set your approval policies
- Set up your Work Order templates
- Decide whether to turn on Contract Reminders
- Decide whether to turn on Countersigning
- Invite your Vendors
- Set Payment Terms
- Set Vendor Payout Currency Preference
- Pay your First Invoice
- Learn to Use Liquid
Complete Financial Setup
Add your bank account to your account so that you are able to pay invoices.
Invite your users
Compile a list of who at your company needs to use Liquid. Most larger companies have invited many users, though some only invite the COO and CFO both to the Admin role.
Here are some tips for which roles to use for the various people in your company.
When you add someone to your company in Liquid, you will want to teach them about what Liquid is. You can use this template email to introduce your Hiring Managers to Liquid.
Work on your custom onboarding processes
In Liquid, you can use our standard onboarding processes or add your own customized onboarding processes with your own custom documents. Your documents must in Microsoft Word document format and it can take some time to format them for use in Liquid.
To create your custom onboarding processes, we recommend that you find an existing process that looks similar in structure to your custom process, and clone that process. Edit the cloned process to add your custom contract and custom steps. When adding your custom contract, make sure that your additional data fields are added to the appropriate step in Liquid and formatted properly in Microsoft Word.
Decide whether to use Work Orders in Liquid
If your custom contract has information about the scope of work and fees in it, you'll need to decide whether to keep that information in your contract (and not use Liquid's Work Order system) or remove that from your contract and set the scope and fees with Work Orders in Liquid (and be able to take advantage of Liquid's Work Order - Invoice matching system).
Determine and set your approval policies
If you would like to use our automated approval system, you'll go to Settings --> Approvals to turn on Invoice Approvals. Then, you'll be able to turn on automatic routing to Hiring Managers. Finally, you'll add financial approval policies. Financial approval policies are policies that can be added to automatically route invoices to specified users of your business in Liquid based on the amount of the Invoice.
For example, if your CEO wants to approve every invoice that comes through the system, you can set a financial approval policy of $0.00. If your COO wants to approve every invoice above $5,000, you can set a financial approval policy of $5000.00. Please note that you can only have one approver at each dollar amount. So if you wanted both the CEO and COO to approve all invoices, you would set one policy at $0.00 and the other at $0.01.
Set up your Work Order templates
If you plan to use Work Orders in Liquid, it can be helpful to set up templates in Liquid for your team to use. If you have a standard set of Work Orders that you generally would like your team to use, you can make a draft Work Orders as a template for business, then have your team clone those Work Orders for customization with each Vendor. Generally, we recommend that you add "TEMPLATE - " as a prefix in the name of those Work Orders so that your team can find those Work Orders easily when sorting by Work Order name.
Decide whether to turn on Contract Reminders
We recommend turning on Contract Reminders to notify you when contracts will be expiring soon. You can choose to be reminded 7 days, 14 days, 21 days, 30 days, or 60 days before your Master Contracts expire.
Decide whether to turn on Countersigning
Most businesses don't require countersigning but if you'd prefer to send out contracts to your Vendors without your signature, you can turn on our countersigning feature. This gives your business more control over your contracts, as your Client business signs documents only after your Vendors have signed them.
Invite your Vendors
If you would like to invite Vendors to Liquid, you can easily invite one or more Vendors to Liquid in under 1 minute.
This training video shows you how to invite one Vendor.
If you would like to bulk invite Vendors to Liquid, you can do that directly in Liquid or by uploading a spreadsheet.
This article shows you how to bulk invite several Vendors at once.
Before inviting your Vendors to Liquid, you may want to let them know via email or slack or other communication forms to expect an invitation from Liquid.
Set Payment Terms
In Liquid, the default payment terms are set to Net 30. If your general payment terms are different, you'll want to change this in Settings --> Payment Methods. These payment terms will automatically be set on all of your Invoices. In addition, you can customize payment terms for each Vendor by pulling up the detailed Vendor view from Vendors.
Set Vendor Payout Currency Preference
You can work with your Vendors in their local currency where possible. For example, if your Vendor is in the UK, you can agree to work orders and receive invoices in GBP. You can set your global preference here, as well as change your preference at the Vendor level.
In Liquid, the default setting is for Work Orders and Invoices to be set in USD. If you would prefer that the default currency for Work Orders and Invoices be set to the Vendor's local currency when possible, you'll want to change this in Settings --> Payment Methods. This change will only affect Vendors invited after the change was made.
This will automatically set each new Vendor's Work Order and Invoice currency to their local currency, if it is supported for payment in Liquid. If you want to change the Vendor invoice currency later, you can do that by pulling up the detailed Vendor view from Vendors.
Pay your First Invoice
Paying Invoices sent by your Vendors
Once your Vendors have sent you your first Invoice in Liquid, you can easily pay the invoice or schedule your payment for a later date.Uploading Invoices for your Vendors
If you prefer to create invoices for your Vendors, you can easily do that in Liquid.
Watch this video to learn how to create invoices for your Vendors.
Bulk Creating Invoices for your Vendors
In Liquid, you can also quickly bulk create invoices in Liquid.Adding an Invoice for a new Vendor
If you have an invoice in hand, you can create that invoice in Liquid to invite and pay your Vendor — all at once.
This training video shows you how.
And if you already have the ACH bank info for the vendor, you can add that upfront to ensure quicker payment!
Learn to use Liquid
We provide many ways for you to learn how to use Liquid, from our training videos to our documentation, from our live webinars to contacting support, you can get more info about learning to use Liquid here.