Simplify Bill Making in Excel for the Travel Industry

Bill making in excel for Travel Industry

hey this is colton with custom excel spreadsheets and today we're going to look at how you can create an invoice template in excel for your business once you've finished your template you can export it to pdf and get something that looks like this so let's get started the first thing you want to do is open up a blank excel spreadsheet and go ahead and click save so that you don't lose any of your work and then we're just going to start building out what this would look like and we're not really worried about formatting or anything at this point so i'm just going to start typing in some general information uh here's your business name and i'll copy some information over just for the sake of time but you would just type in each of these cells your address phone number fax website email and so on and then maybe you want to have a bill 2 section that would be your client's information and i'm going to put some brackets that would represent blank information to be added later this information of course wouldn't change this is your business but each time you use this template you would enter the new client's information there so now i've got some basic information maybe over here we want to go ahead and set up a block for invoice where we can put some details like the invoice number and the invoice date and amount due and then we'll do terms as well and of course you can add anything to this that's specific to your business i'm going to put some example information here they show you how it could work i'm going to open up this column here so we get get it a little bit wider you can see the invoice number there and then we can drop down and start building out the the main part of the invoice which is going to start out with maybe a product id again this would be specific to your business but most people are going to have a product id your name then some sort of description followed by over here we'll skip some space there to give us room for the description we'll do a unit price quantity and total so now that we've got that laid out i'm going to go ahead and apply some borders just so we can get it get a feel for the span over which this table will be created and you can see we've got a whole bunch of borders in here we won't want the description field is generally one that you're going to add a lot of information to so i'm going to go ahead and use excel's merge and center so to select all of these you can just click and drag and it will go up to the top here to merge and center and use merge across now you've got enough room where you can type in some descriptions there typically those can get long so i'm going to select that and also change it to wrap text that way if i get wordy in my descriptions it will wrap around and be visible when it's printed now open up these borders a little bit as well to leave room for these columns and let's do some simple formatting getting these centered up generally your unit price and quantity will be centered i'd like to center the totals as well and then we'll apply for the total since that's going to be money we'll use the currency which is an excel built-in formatting so i'll go up here click the drop down arrow and apply currency to that one and we'll go ahead and drop in some information here just so you can see what it would look like all right and now here's where we need to get to some formulas so you don't always want to have to do this manually you'd rather just type in a unit price and a quantity and have it automatically populate so i'm going to type in equals which is what you use in excel to start a formula and then i'm going to select the first cell i want to use in my formula which is the unit price i'm going to use the asterisk to for a multiplier symbol and then i'll do the quantity and hit enter and now you can see it's automatically calculating that total there so i can now click in the bottom right part of this cell you see how my crosshairs change to a smaller view there and then i'll drag that down and that's just going to copy that formula down alternatively you can do a ctrl c to copy it then select the cells you want to paste and do a control v to paste it in there so now we've got our formulas set up and of course at the bottom of the invoice you're going to want to have some totals so let's get that set up as well typically that would look something like maybe a subtotal which will use the sum formula for this so again i'm going to click equals to start my formula then type in the letters s u n doesn't matter if you do all caps or not excel will still recognize it i'm going to do a parenthesis to let it know i'm about to select a range and now i want to select that whole range close my parentheses and then click enter so now i'm getting a subtotal so if we filled in some more unit prices here you can see that that subtotal will automatically update the next thing i want to do is taxes so if we're going to apply taxes and this is where you would type in your specific rate maybe you've got an eight percent tax so i'm going to do equals 0.08 asterisk to do my multiplier and then select the subtotal and that'll give me my tax and then the total for the invoice would just be the sum of those two items and so if you wanted to add any kind of discount so let's say we we wanted a discount above the tax line you could add in discount here and maybe you're going to apply a 10 discount and so you could have your subtotal and i should put that as a minus since it's a discount now your subtotal is going to go ahead and take that discount out for or your total rather we'll go ahead and remove that discount from the total price so in just a couple minutes we've already gotten laid out the basics of what we want our invoice to look like now i'm going to click in the bottom right part of excel there's this page layout button that's going to help me see if it's all fitting on one page or will it print nicely and you can see that this this isn't quite making it so i've got some columns that are too wide so one thing i can do is shrink in this column right here that didn't need to be quite that wide then i'm going to take column a over here and shrink that down as well we didn't have anything in that column so we can always move that a little bit these inner columns as well we can manipulate those as much we need to get this on the same page so i'm going to shrink these down a little bit it's just a manual way of doing it now you can see everything's fitting on the same page and looking good however we do have a lot of room at the bottom so we might say well let's go ahead and expand this we have plenty of room for however many items we might need so i'm going to select just left clicking and dragging select several rows over here then i'll just right click in this green space on one of the road numbers and select insert that's going to insert several columns for us and or rows rather so now we have we're filling up the page a little bit better but notice our formulas are missing here so we need to copy one of those formulas use the shift key or you can click and drag to come down here and then do ctrl v to paste and i'm also going to copy these cells and paste them as well so we get all the same formatting and everything those rows we just inserted now we've got an invoice that if we went to a print preview is going to print nicely on one page a quick tip if you don't want to see all of these zeros there's a few ways around that but a quick fix if you don't know much about excel is just to hide those so let's say you finished your invoice you only had two items and you don't want your client to see all these empty or these zeros yeah you can just select all of those and type on your keyboard hit the alt button then type o r h and that'll hide those alternatively you can select over here by clicking and dragging and then right click on any of those numbers and click hide and so that would be a way to to get that cleaned up or your client or your customer isn't seeing all the blank rows for when you print so now we've got the sheet built you can apply whatever formatting you want maybe you have some particular colors that you'd like to apply to it to get close to something like what we had here and that's really easy just using excel's shades up here for the fill in each cell for example but let's say you wanted to take it to the next level i want to show you what's possible in excel so here's what you could do either if you have the expertise or if you'd like to to get a template that does this so here's the invoice in excel format that we looked at earlier notice with this and this one i've got a drop down menu for my product number so i can just select a product number it's automatically going to fill in the description based off of what i selected there go ahead and pull over unit price that's all being fed from a pricing table here so as i get new products or pricing changes i just update it in this one place then when i go to create my invoices it's really simple i'm just selecting product numbers or product ids and it automatically is going to fill in the product description and unit price for me then all i have to do is type in what my quantity is and notice those totals are summing automatically if i wanted to discount a particular item i could apply a percentage discount on that and all of that will be factored in at the bottom this particular template also has this check box under this e column which is where you can apply whether or not it's tax exempt so if this item was tax exempt meaning taxes didn't apply to it i could click that and that will automatically be taken into account down here where the taxes are calculated so that's just a quick overview of what you can get in excel on this particular template as well you can change the invoice color so if i wanted to go with a blue color i can select that and it automatically updates everything if you'd like a copy of this template just click the link in the description below which will take you to customexcelspreadsheets.com and you can send us a message and let us know you're interested in the invoice template we also provide custom excel design services so if you'd prefer to have us design an invoice specific to your business we can start one from scratch that is made for your types of products and your clients that has your data sets in it as well as your branding and formatting or if you'd like to take this template and have us make some modifications uh to it for you just send us a message and we'd love to talk to you about it