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Consulting invoice template word for small businesses

[Music] hey everybody what's good what's going on jb here with another cyber insight live stream it's friday and uh we're gonna do something a little bit different uh this evening i wasn't actually planning on going live uh tonight but uh i've had some people ask recently about uh trying to get a grasp on some different types of formatting for documents related to them starting up their own tech services companies or consulting gigs or you know sole proprietorship type of things and uh yeah i wanted to throw this video together to kind of walk through one of the primary things that uh is going to come up first when it comes to that and that is how do you tell your client uh what it is that they need to pay you so we're going to talk a little bit about how to create some uh or how to create a basic uh invoice uh this is coming from the perspective of me being a business owner and having a tech consulting company so the things that we're going to walk through on the sample invoice are kind of related to that but really this would be applicable to any type of general invoice that you would be uh sending out to a client whenever you do any type of work really so um i'm going to try and hit a few of the things that i think are important that are going to make things easier for your client to understand what it is that you're providing to them uh to be able to get prompt payment and then vice versa making sure that the things that you have on these invoices are useful to you if you have to go back and do any type of auditing or uh correlation different types of data so um as always um i appreciate it if you smash the like button subscribe to the channel share the video with your friends all that good stuff and if you have any questions as we're kind of going through this then you can throw those in the chat and i will try to answer those um as best as i can as we move through this so uh yeah let's just uh jump into this and we'll kind of see how this goes uh this is definitely going to be uh for me i don't normally make very many business videos um as i kind of mentioned i do have my own company uh so i guess a quick shout out if you or your organization needs any help from an i.t perspective architecture design cybersecurity grc hit me up um definitely glad to talk to folks to see if there's any things that my company might be able to help fill in some gaps for you but that was a small plug let's hop into this um so this is a sample invoice i kind of have gone through and redacted a lot of information just to make it a little bit more general use here and not throw anything out there that i shouldn't be full disclosure i use quickbooks for all of my business accounting things i highly recommend that uh for other people it just makes things uh so much easier as far as tracking things you can sync up all of your bank accounts to that i actually do my invoicing through quickbooks and so this is kind of what a generic invoice uh that would come out of quickbooks would look like there's a few things that you can kind of tweak to change some of the different fields there but generally speaking this is going to be you know enough to get you going in the direction that you need to go so uh high level right up at the top left hand corner you're going to want to have your information so your your business information your address phone email ways for folks to contact you especially if you're doing a lot of business folks will be contacting you because eventually there will be some things um that do arise um you know where they need to double check some things so making sure that they have good contact information there is important if you want to be fancy and look somewhat professional you can also throw your company logo or whatever over on the right hand side um the bill to section is kind of important in a few different ways right so when you start working for larger organizations uh let's say that you have a contract with a really big company or let's say you have multiple contracts with a really big company um a lot of times they manage different organizations within that company differently and you might have different types of purchase orders with those different organizations so your invoice might not actually be going to the same person in that company so having a customer poc specific to your purchase order that you have with that organization is very important and then obviously customer name and addresses are good to have on there as well although really in most cases everything here is uh digital so uh that's a little bit more of a formality in my case since i use quickbooks that automatically sends out um an email uh to the uh pocs for the company that i have listed um there's email addresses that kind of get attached within quickbooks to the invoice to who it's going to and they get sent a uh a url that pretty much allows them to go and look at this invoice um the nice thing for me from a tracking perspective is it allows me to see uh when they've looked at it how often they've looked at it so that way you're not kind of left in the dark um you know if you were to actually physically mail a letter into a company uh you wouldn't necessarily know that they even received it or even from an email perspective things can get lost and you might not really know what the status is of the invoices that you've sent in i see some folks dropping in here with some some comments and stuff like that so we'll just throw these up real quick and then keep moving through here hey what's going on appreciate folks dropping in [Music] from chuck and his glow cool cool what's up davin i see you in here that's awesome thanks for thanks for joining this is probably would be pretty beneficial to you as well although i'm sure your wife could uh share a lot of information on what she does for invoicing and stuff like that since she's uh has those case cakes and cupcakes which i'm still waiting for by the way if only you know you happen to be up in the area sometime soon that might no i'm just playing uh let's see what else uh all right i also use quickbooks have you ever tried uh dubsado or workflow operational automation i have not i haven't really had to do haven't really had to do that outside quickbooks just works perfect for me i use some other time tracking software um and we'll get to how that kind of plays into here in in just a moment but that's pretty much it that i need to use for my workflow as far as um figuring out what is actually going into the invoices okay um so the next the next area of that if we go down a little bit further it's going to be the invoice number now this is kind of um useful for a few different reasons um first off it's useful to just have a standard uh nomenclature that you're using uh when referencing billing with your customer or your client um so as i you know i guess i'm going to keep pumping this up i should really be getting some type of cut from quickbooks on this but they automatically generate your different invoice numbers um and that makes it super easy uh when either referencing a specific bill with your customer or if you need to go back and look uh something up within your system having uniform invoice numbers that are sequential makes it a lot easier to go back and search for that type of stuff the next field being the date field i that's going to be more so the date that the invoice is actually sent there's a few different date fields on here and they all kind of have a few different uh meanings behind them and and uh why we'll get into why you need each of those all right so total do is actually going to be a combination of all of the different line items that you have on your invoice and you might have multiple line items depending upon a few different types of scenarios so in this case and normally the way that it works with a lot of my clients it's either going to be a flat fee or an hourly rate and that's going to be tied back to an individual purchase order so purchase order is going to be like a specific contract that you have with them so my main line that i normally would bill out to clients is going to be for a individual purchase order for a certain period of time so maybe you bill every 30 days maybe you bill every week maybe you bill every 15 days whatever it is um that would be kind of you know the primary line from my perspective as far as my hours worked for that particular client and that would go on one line as we just have here there are different circumstances where you might have multiple lines um within an invoice some things that i can think of kind of off the top of my head is maybe if you have to do some travel for your client and that is reimbursable and a reimbursable expense obviously that would be something that would need to be negotiated in whatever the contract is that you have between yourself and your client um in most cases travel should be reimbursable so that might be a separate line item on this invoice another thing that could be negotiated is say if you have to buy some type of software hardware that might be another reimbursable expense and you could put this under that one thing that i do like to point out again going back to a scenario of working for a large organization and maybe having or multiple contracts with them uh normally large companies like to um or require actually having separate invoices for separate purchase orders just because of the way that they do their billing within their internal systems even if you were to have let's say five contracts with um one company you wouldn't necessarily stack all of the different line items that would be going on different invoices from different purchase orders into one invoice that probably will confuse their system quite a bit so uh in my experience it's always been unique purchase orders end up having their own unique invoices that does make it a little bit more work on the back end once it comes time to sending out your invoices so you might end up you know sending out multiple invoices to the same client but uh yeah it's just kind of the the way the game is and uh realistically keeping everything kind of separated makes things a little bit easier from an accounting perspective um so yeah kind of just is what it is um so we talked about the total do being a combination of all of the line items that you have below due date is going to be derived from whatever the terms are that you have negotiated on your contract if you are a small company or a sole proprietor you want those terms to be as low as you can possibly get here we have it listed as net 30 so that means 30 days from whenever i submit the invoice i am expecting to have payment a lot of times companies will take that full 30 days although that doesn't mean that they have to wait the 30 days it just means they have up to 30 days to remit payment to you a lot of places might try to push that they might try to go 60 days or 90 days and if it's you know a very large company working with another large company it's a lot easier to float that type of stuff if you're a sole proprietor or small business and you know you're having to pay a small group of folks salaries um the sooner that you get that money in uh you know the the more important that actually is to the success of your company a lot of smaller companies don't necessarily have you know a large bank role to be able to float uh you know three months of expected income coming in from invoices so definitely try to fight for that uh when you're negotiating contracts try to get to as low as you can get net 30 i think is is pretty reasonable and if the client that you're working with you know has an understanding that you are an individual or small company um if they are a good client they will definitely want to help facilitate you getting payment as soon as possible this enclosed section here i don't have anything in here but there's a few different scenarios where i think that could come into play where i was talking about possibly needing to have line items for like let's say travel right you have reimbursable expenses for travel maybe your client had negotiated with you that when you submit travel they actually want to have some type of uh itemized report for all of the things that build up to that so like let's say you had a line item for fifteen hundred dollars for travel here in this invoice you obviously wouldn't need to break out all of those individual things that added up to the 1500 on the line items but maybe they would require an excel spreadsheet that does have all of the things to add up to that you could you know hypothetically in the enclosed section uh leave a note saying that you know travel expenses are found in the attached pdf or the attach excel spreadsheet or something like that um let's see if we move down to the next line then the we have a different date i normally uh put the date here as in the date that the work started that's covered in this particular line item so for instance like i was saying if you um if you submit your invoices and you build monthly then i would select the first date of the month that you started to do that work and that is what i would put there in that particular date section uh the po line number that's going to be kind of something that's a little bit descriptive of whatever the particular work is so in this case in this sample invoice we're talking about if i were to be doing a certain amount of work for um a client um and that contract was based off of hours worked so it was a time and materials contract um in that po line number there i would just write something like you know hours or particular project hours or something like that if you have a flat fee uh type of thing uh then maybe you would just call whatever a line item for whatever the deliverable is so if you were doing some type of architecture plan or you're doing a pen test or you were doing you know whatever it is that you were charging a flat fee for you could put that in there and then in the field to the right of that the description i normally go a little bit more in depth into that so i would put whatever the project name is as i mentioned that most organizations uh will have purchase orders for whatever your contract is i make sure to put the purchase order number in there as well again a lot of those larger organizations end up using some type of uh billing software that they track all this stuff and it normally is automatically looking for po codes within uh your invoices so it can kind of automatically go where it needs to go so um many times i've been requested to ensure that the purchase order number is included not only in my invoice but then also in the automated email that gets sent out from quickbooks when the invoice is created another thing that i like to put in there uh is the date range as well for that so i gave the scenario of it being you know a month-long period for the work or uh sometimes i like to bill in two week chunks then i would just put you know whatever the dates were for those two weeks there that has us moving over to the next part for hours again this is going to depend upon whether or not you are just billing a flat rate for whatever the work is or if you actually are billing hourly if you're billing hourly then obviously you're going to put in the hours there um if you're not billing hourly you could either change that header to something else or you could just put uh you know n a uh next to that is the rate um obviously again with hours uh you'd be multiplying that and the rate and that would give you your amount for that particular line item if it's just a flat fee then you just put the flat fee in there and then that would end up being the same as the amount and then if we had multiple line items and that would all kind of calculate out to whatever the total balance is at the bottom there um and again that would also be the same thing as what falls into the total do field let's see if there's anything else kind of down here uh within quickbooks it allows you to put a memo section in there so whatever you want to put in as maybe some additional information or something like that that might make sense for the client then that's something that you could do um as well and then yeah i mean that's that's pretty much it invoicing is pretty straightforward but if you didn't really have an idea of the different things that go into that to kind of make that up um you could definitely get kind of lost with that i do know that if you aren't going to go down the route of getting quickbooks or something like that i think microsoft word has a bunch of standard like invoicing templates should look very similar to this uh should have you know uh most of the same types of fields and stuff like that i think the the main things to be sure that you're doing is have your your dates lined up get your invoices sent in as soon as you can you don't want to wait on those because the clock doesn't normally start as far as the payment terms go until they actually receive the invoice unless your client is super super nice and they'll allow backdated invoices or something like that um i have run into that before and that's a great thing um but that's not always the case um the other important things yeah your invoice your invoice numbers being as descriptive as you can um and that's more so for your sake as well as your client's sake so that if you're rummaging through a whole bunch of different invoices you have a good idea of what specifically this one was for um and the time periods that it was for and you can bounce it off of you know whatever whatever other um data or resources that you have if you needed to re-verify some information so yeah that's uh that's invoices 101 in a nutshell um does anybody have any questions on any of that i'm going to grab a sip of water and if anybody has anything they can throw that in there got some other comments coming in good info thanks yeah appreciate it appreciate you dropping in checking this out hopefully uh hopefully it's useful all right well if nobody has um any other questions or comments on that um appreciate it you can always reach out to me hit me up ask me any other additional questions and uh yeah if you're if you're going down the righteous path of starting your own company and uh doing your own tech stuff i wish you the best and hopefully it is super lucrative and you get a lot of freedom out of it so all right everybody have a great weekend we will chat soon alright take care bye [Music]