5 Tips For Professional Invoice Templates

By: Bullet Online Accounting & Payroll

5 Tips For Professional Invoice Templates

Creating invoices can be a real pain; we all love receiving payment but generating invoices or building

invoice templates can be a drag. However, you really need to carefully and wisely manage you invoices as

they're cash-flow to your business, and every digital agency or web development company needs to keep

an eye on cash-flow.

Choosing the right invoicing software, putting in the right polices and charging method and having strict

payment terms is crucial. So learn from these tips and you're build a much more successful client

business, even if your freelancing or building a digital agency.

1. Using Good Invoicing Software and InvoicingTemplates

Ok, so we're going to be a bit biased here about what's the best invoicing software and best software forinvoicing templates. But Bullet's Online Invoicing tool is world class; never mind that it calculates yoursales tax, tracks who's opened the invoices and has a full accounting and payroll system hanging off it.But there are other good tools out there just for invoicing like freshbooks and blinksale.

The key thing is make sure it's an online invoicing tool. It will help you track who opened the emails and

when, which gives you a good upper hand.

2. Setup Some Policies

Everybody wants to get paid on time, right? But, in the real world some people just don't want to pay. Asa freelancer designer or digital agency, you'll hit stubborn clients. You also need to protect the relationshipwith the client as you might want to get some more work out of them. Building new clients is hard,re-billing old clients is easier.

Here are some questions you should be asking yourself.

What payment mode will you use – cash, cheques or credit cards?

How much should the client pay as a down payment?

Will you begin the work without any payments?

How many days you will wait before the client pays?

Are you going to impose penalties for late payments?

When will the client receive the final work – before or after making payments?

Remember, these aren't written in stone but they'll make life easier for you.

3. Stick To Your Policies

Clients don't like surprises and they can also use it against you: 'But you never said, we didn't agreethat', etc. The key thing to do is have the policies clearly outlined in your invoices. Just simple bulletpoints will do.

4. Think About Your Pricing

Never ever undercharge on a job. It's super important to keep your pricing point up; you'll just start toattract the wrong kind of customers who undervalue your work and will try and ride it out.

If you think you've won a job by cutting your price then you've lost already. If you find yourself attracting

low ball clients, take a step back and ask yourself: what am I doing wrong, ask clients who didn't go with

you why they didn't. I think you'll find it's nothing about your service it's how you're presenting it. You only

have 8 hours a day to bill, so bill as much as you can.

5. Include Services & Charges

Don't go too detailed on your invoice break down, with a lot of freelancer work whether that be design orweb development, everything is interconnected. So if you give too much of a break down you'll get clientssaying 'Oh but that didn't go ahead in the end - so I'm not paying for it', but the truth is you'd already builtit for them to scrap the design after they changed their mind.

Conclusion

Be smart with how you invoice it sets the tone for the rest of the relationship.