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Commission invoice format for Production

how's it going everyone today I'm going to show you how I create an invoice now this is a really important part of being a musician is having professional looking invoices knowing how to keep track of your invoices and I want to show you some tips and tricks to making sure that you get paid on time because we all know working in the music industry no one likes to pay you to begin with at all and the amount of late payments I've had in the last 10 years is absolutely absurd so I'm going to share with you a couple things that are important and how to go about creating sexy looking invoices so if you're looking for a free option there are a lot of paid options such as QuickBooks is what I usually use just because it helps you keep track of everything a little cleaner but I've used this Google Drive template here if you just go to Google Drive and then click on sheets and click template it will bring you to this page right here and you see one of the options right up front is invoice so let's open this up and take a look at what the Google creates us right here now we look it's actually pretty clean right up front right and a couple things that I want to do first you know I want to put my company I'll just call it you know donut dock that's great I have my address here this is so that if somebody is going to mail you a check they know where to mail the check to so I put my address here I also will put my phone number down so that anyone from the financial department can contact me with any questions they might have now this is really important right here it says submitted on bum bum bum year 2000 that's a very long time ago something that I recommend adding here is what I would call Net 15 or net 30. now when you put something like this net 15 that basically means they have 15 days to pay you this is something that you might want to work out with your employer beforehand they maybe say cool we'll do net 45 in that case I usually go I usually do net 15 so if we could do net 15 or net 30 that would be great just make sure you agree on it first it basically just says you're going to get paid within 15 days or net 30 you're going to get paid within 30 days or not 45 you're going to get paid within 45 days so to make sure that you always get paid on time something that I always do is I go to the notes section and I add this little blurp here that says unless otherwise specified in writing invoice is not paid by the invoice date will accrue an interest at five percent per day and what this does is this gives you a little bit of insurance that they're going to do their due diligence to pay you on time so if they sign off on this invoice and they owe you a hundred bucks and they're a hundred days late paying you you now are going to get a whole bunch more money because you're getting five percent on top of that every day that it is late so I have never really had to enforce this maybe once my whole life but it has helped me get paid on time once I start attacking this on and having them sign off on it I don't get paid late anymore which is really great because when you're doing a lot of different gigs and stuff it gets hard to keep track of where your money's coming from how many who has paid you who hasn't paid you um which is why I would recommend using a paid service such as QuickBooks because it allows you to get paid right through that application so it makes a little bit easier but again the free option here is also amazing so here we go invoice four you know let's say you're working for um cable company or Pedal company so we did a pedal demo for the Pedal company Pedal company so we're doing a Pedal company we're gonna have their name their address all of that stuff the project maybe we say we did a demo shoot right and the due date here again is something that we'll agree on so maybe I say I submitted the invoice on the first and I said net 15 so it is going to be due on the 15th boom now that gives them all the information they need that we got to pay him by the 15th great now description here you know maybe we flew out to do this gig so they paid us of per diem so you know well first let's put the demo shoot and then let's say you know it was I was gone for three days so per diem you know for three days and then maybe I had to um check a bag at the airport so I'll say you know um reimbursements whatever I'll say you know baggage and then I'll go cool I only had you know one bag oh actually let's say we had two bags and they each cost you know fifty dollars to check um let's say the demo shoot I charged you know five hundred dollars for and the per diem let's say was aha 50 bucks and it was for three days so I'll update my quantity to three not 23 that would be great though and then here we have um the nice thing about the Google sheet here is that it literally calculates everything for you so you don't really have to add anything up because it has all those formulas built in subtotal boom you know adjustments I rarely ever use adjustments like unless they've overpaid me in the past or if maybe they you know a flight got canceled and the the airline reimbursed me by accident something like that um otherwise I usually just get rid of adjustments altogether that just keeps it more clean um and so really you know here's basically our whole layout of our invoice now right so when they go to look at it we have okay cool donut doctor is invoicing me here's his information maybe I have a question I can reach him at the phone number okay says let's see the invoice was submitted today at the first um we agreed on net 15 okay cool that means I have yep right there 15 days to pay him um here's my business information and you know as the the person paying you you could just get all this information from them just be like hey send me all the information I need uh to invoice you for this project thank you so much and then boom we get our descriptions down we get everything set uh all the rates there make sure you double check your math if you do have any reimbursements this is very important make sure you keep all of your receipts and attach them to your email or to your invoice um now when it comes to getting paid again this is something I tack this on to every invoice whether or not they have agreed to it um just because what's the worst that happens is they don't want to fight you on it and you get an extra five percent a day for a couple days they were late paying you but uh this really just I've found makes people take you a little more seriously and they're like cool I'm not gonna with this guy he is clearly has a together because he's putting this whole disclaimer on it that I'm gonna own five percent per day so boom let's just get him paid and let's you know I respect it let's let's work with him um now when it comes to getting paid a lot of employers will ask you for a W-9 or a tax form to submit to them so they can tax you on that money which is totally fine just have those signed and ready to go I usually just have a signed one um literally I think I keep it on my desktop actually right here yep there we go uh there's my signed one so um when it comes to getting paid you know they'll either shoot you a form to fill out a direct deposit sheet with all of your bank information on it so that they can just wire you the money that is you know the best case scenario because you get it the fastest sometimes they send you a check make sure you have a good mailing address that you can rely on getting mail at because chasing down a missing check it's horrible if they sent you a check and they're like oh yeah it went out two weeks ago you know cool I need to get a new one they have to void that check has to go through their whole you know financial department they have to issue you a new check and then it's it's a whole thing so um ideally you know you can get paid with direct deposit if you are getting paid with something like PayPal if they ever just decide to pay you with PayPal or something make sure you account for transfer fees sometimes you know if you've been uh if you PayPal me a thousand dollars I only get like you know 915 of those dollars or something like with the transfer fees so make sure you account for that be like hey if we're using PayPal you know make sure you cover the fees so I get my full rate um very important because we want to get you paid and we want you to get paid in full now one thing to also think about when you're invoicing uh to keep track of these I would recommend making a spreadsheet that has all of your invoices it could literally be as simple as you know a blank spreadsheet you know something where you have two rows and you have um something I actually forgot to mention is I will do invoice and then I'll put number one number two number three number four number five every new invoice that goes out will have a number on it and the reason this is important is because we can go back to our spreadsheet and we can now create a system that basically will show us what has been paid and what hasn't right so for example you know I could just go to drive I could create a new sheet and I could go cool um you know here is uh here's my invoice number and then here is paid and here is outstanding um right and then I'll say cool here's invoice number one two three four five Etc you know maybe while everything is outstanding I'll say cool I'm gonna have the ones in red that are outstanding and then oh when something gets paid you know I'll make it green so that I go cool I don't have to worry about this one yet or you could make it even more simple and you could simply just have a paid column and then you know make everything red that means it hasn't been paid when something has been paid cool invoice is number one and two were deposited to my account today I'll make those green this will help you so much because when you're doing a ton of little crazy side drops here and there and demos and gigs and recording sessions and you're sending out 10 invoices a week you're gonna forget who you sent who paid you so this is a really quick and easy way to keep track of that you know anytime I see a direct deposit into my account I look at it and I say oh cool it says you know the memo was invoice number three goal great I'm gonna Mark that as paid and now I know I've been all paid up this step is very important because I know so many musicians who lose track of their invoices and then basically just don't end up getting paid on their fault like the company was late paying them the company forgot to pay them and they forgot to remind them right so again this is just a really simple easy way to create an invoice um again I'm using Google Sheets here from a template you can obviously make your own there's plenty of other great Services again I usually use QuickBooks just because it helps synchronize everything and it also helps Keep On Track expenses for for taxes and everything at the end of the year and yeah I hope this was helpful I know when I first started out no one had ever taught me how to do this and I really wish there was someone who could have shown me this so I hope this is helpful and let me know if you have any questions below catch y'all later also if you would like and subscribe that would mean the world it really helps me out I also have a website called the donutdoctormusic.com that has all of my master classes all my guitar lessons so much more including an entire music business section that has videos just like this to help you get started I'll see you there