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Content creator invoice template for Procurement

i know you you're a creative professional you've done all the hard work you've created the finest emote you've put the finishing touches on that panel design or you've rendered the last frame of the video and now it's time for the fun part getting paid sounds easy enough right maybe not i'm commander mitchcraft and this is streamer inc where we talk about the behind the scenes of being a content creator and today it's time to talk about invoicing and why knowing how to send a proper invoice and what to do with the money afterward is important to every creative business owner let's get down to business shall we now if you're not in a full-time business setting all of the time like i am some of these concepts may seem a bit foreign to you and that's okay let me walk you through what they all mean but first and foremost an invoice is a document that serves as the proof that a good or a service has been rendered to a client an invoice contains some combination of a couple of different things uh the list of who's buying the product and who's selling it contact information for both parties names phone numbers email addresses that sort of thing usually there's some sort of unique number like an invoice number to let you know which order or product was sold the date so you know exactly which when something was sold the amount to be paid and usually an itemized list of all of the services provided and the rate or cost of each service but mitch you say can't i just trust that someone is going to pay me well let me let me let you in on a little something here i'm going to let you know a little secret sometimes getting paid is even harder than actually doing the work that you're going to be paid for i know it's kind of a it's kind of a bummer um but sometimes it involves chasing people down through direct messages emails and phone calls and sometimes even after doing all of those things people are still going to refuse to pay you now hopefully you've taken the appropriate steps to keep this from happening and we'll go over those steps in a future video where we talk about contracts and all that good stuff but unfortunately there's really not much around it that's the risk you take for doing business so then why bother with an invoice well let's start from the top it shows first and foremost that you are a legitimate business person all right coming to a customer or a client with an official invoice shows that you take yourself seriously and that you want them to take you just as seriously now you could just send someone an email that says hey man you owe me a hundred bucks for these emotes but having an official document stating all of the different pieces of the transaction will get you as the business owner options and protections if something happens and worse comes to worst now as you start to do more and more work as a creative professional you're going to want a way to look through your invoices that way you can spot trends and see which of your goods or services are bringing in the most money a true invoicing system and we'll talk about those in just a little bit will allow you to see monthly and yearly trends in sales which is useful if you want to forecast what kind of money you might be making at any given point in time and it also gives you an opportunity to see all of your invoices at a glance both ones that are paid and ones that have yet to be paid and that way you can know what's going on with your business at any given moment finally if you do even a moderate amount of work you're going to have to start looking into paying taxes and i know we talked about that last week in our last video but everybody's got to have their share of your success your local governments are not exempted from that and a good invoicing software will allow you to prepare all of those tax documents that i told you about in the last video link in the description below now knowing you want to keep records of the work completed and knowing that you want to add legitimacy to your work it makes sense that you want to start keeping track of your invoices probably not by hand though now the good news is there's a lot of services out there that'll do this for you some that are paid and a lot that are actually free and very useful uh before we get into that let's talk about step zero we talked a little bit about this last week in the tax video as well you want to make sure that you have a business specific bank account it may be very very tempting to start throwing money into your personal account once you're making it but having a separate business only account will make accounting a lot easier for you you don't have to go in and separate your business purchases from your personal purchases even if that account is just a pass-through for your business funds you have a record that that money did indeed pass through there there are three different options that you can choose from as far as a business specific bank account chances are if you have a bank account already you probably bank with a local bank and they're a great place to get a secondary account walk into a branch or call or chat somebody you know since quarantine thing what's going on tell them you want to open a business account they'll let you know any documents you need and usually you need some sort of seed money for the account probably about 50 to 100 and the good news is you can redirect that money back at any point in time but it's good to have something in there just in case you need it whether you love it or you hate it paypal is a very easy way to get paid and not only does it double as both the account and the invoicing software it is free to be able to use all of those features and i i will say it's more like free because you do have fees that are connected every time somebody pays you that's not a family member sending you money and paypal's fees are some of the most expensive in the industry but there are no upfront costs and there's no cost to having the account unlike some business accounts which do charge you just for the presence of having an account there now i personally use a service online called novo there aren't any branches everything is all done online and there are other banking systems very similar to novo i have a debit card i can pay myself out of that whenever i want and i can even use it to make business purchases for my account if you don't have a local bank account and you're a little iffy on paypal and i know some people are it's a very good third option and and honestly the one that i recommend personally in fact if you want more information i will also leave a link to that in the description as well once you've got a desi once you have a dedicated place to send your business revenue it's time to choose your invoicing software we talked about a lot of features earlier and based on those here are my top three recommendations for invoicing services number one paypal we mentioned it earlier but it does have a built-in invoicing system and if you already have a paypal account it's worth looking into to see if it will meet your needs now i will say it's worth it more to open a second paypal account just so you don't have that intermingling of your business and your personal money and if you just need it for basic invoicing needs paypal does have you covered and they do everything that you need to as far as a business bank account goes but some people don't like paypal and they will actually refuse to use paypal paypal will take credit card payments as well so you're not you're not restricted to someone just using paypal if all they have to pay with is a credit card second on my list is one called wave apps it's my invoicing software of choice right now and it's absolutely free other than taking some transactional payments when you are paid and most services do that one account will let you run multiple businesses you can create and send your invoices you can have your analytics at what kind of money you're making in cash flow and out cash flow and you can also generate any of the tax documents that you need on the fly this is the only non-free item on my list but i have to include a personal loving shout out to freshbooks so a long time ago i was doing a lot more freelance web developer business than i do now and i had them as a paying client i paid about 40 a month for the needs that i have they have some cheaper plans but i i had to switch from it and downsize just because i didn't need all of the the the functionality that it gave me anymore but even now as a former customer they still check in on me from time to time and send me messages on twitter and make sure that everything is doing okay in fact when my mom passed away a couple of months ago uh the ceo of freshbooks sent me a beautiful flower arrangement now i'm not going to say that everybody gets the white glove service like that but it was nice to be remembered and quite honestly if i had need for them now i probably would use fresh freshbooks again just because i really like their product not just because of all of the other stuff either they they do have a really really good product and as you start to move into more advanced invoicing needs definitely give freshbooks a look because it does all of the stuff that some of these other services do but you then get the customer support and customer service that really make fresh books shine there are a lot of other options uh each have their own pros and cons but those are the three that i have worked with and vouch for and hey if you have one that you've worked with uh leave me a comment down below i'd like to hear about it and uh while you're there make sure to hit the like button and subscribe to the channel and hey ring the bell that way you can see all of the different videos that we have here because we're going to start having them more week to week to week so you don't want to miss it now as you create your first invoice you need to make sure that you are including some sort of the following and granted if you're using an invoicing software this will all be done for you in some form or fashion number one you want to include the work that's being done make a short description of the work that you're doing creating an emote set doing web design editing a video make sure that all parties know exactly what work is being covered by the invoice you want to make sure that you have an hourly or a per project cost for the work done if you're including an hourly budget make sure you include the full budget as well as a cost breakdown per hour so that people know exactly what your hourly rate is and there are no surprises later and then include a subtotal of all of the hours worked times the hourly rate and make sure you have all of those numbers visible and clearly marked so that people don't get confused most of the other things your invoice numbers dates all of that stuff are going to be handled by the invoicing software select your client from the list of available clients most people will let you create several so that you can have repeating customers in your database and then make sure you've updated and included all of the relevant contact information that way if you need to you can refer to it later here's where it starts to get a little tricky and here's where it starts to get more businessy okay different people and different types of businesses have what's called payment terms it's the time period in which you can pay an invoice or where you can get a discount for paying the invoice early there's a lot of terminology that's going to be included but for the most part here are some of the basics the first one is net x and that means that the customer is required to pay the invoice as soon as it's received up to a certain date or they can be charged a late fee now typically the late fee is something like 30 days or 14 days but you can set this for as long or as short as you like so if you send someone an invoice on january 1st they are expected to pay the invoice usually by the 14th or 15th or by the 30th otherwise you can charge them a late fee for delinquency in paying your account if you want to give people a discount for quick payment you can do what's called a discount if paid early it means that it's due with an x number of days uh but that two percent discount will be applied if it's paid within a certain amount of time so if you wanted that to be written down it would be two over 10 net x so that means you could say x is 30 and they would have to pay the invoice in 30 days but if you pay it in 10 days you get a 2 discount and you would be surprised what companies will do for a small small discount now if you're working with larger projects it can be useful to garner buy-in from the client and that'll make sure that they don't try to skip out on you once work has been done charge them a partial invoice as a deposit usually it's either half or a third of the final asking price before the work is begun as a non-refundable deposit and then either when the goods or services are ready to go or if you hit some sort of milestone they can pay more money and work can be completed as needed typically what i do for my web design clients is i do a third as a deposit a third down once the artwork is done and then a third before i turn over the website to the client and that just ensures that as we are continuing down the process they are buying into the project and i am still able to pay my bills just in case a project goes long finally make sure you always add a personal note to your invoices it's always nice to see a personal touch put on an invoice you're a human you're working with humans and everything's happening between two people even if there are businesses involved double check everything make sure the information is correct as it can be and hit the send button now the good news is once you've hit the send button most invoicing software will send out reminders to your clients automatically either on a predetermined schedule or you can customize it to your specifications and hey if there's that one client that you really feel like you need to ping usually the software will let you do that as well and that'll help you not have to worry about chasing down your clients at least for a little while some invoicing software will even add the late fee on automatically after your predetermined payment time i know all of this seems like a lot of hassle just to say hey you owe me money right but a legitimate invoice once again adds validity to the work that you do it allows you to see trends forecast your profits and sales it allows you to track at a glance who owes you money who's paid you money which projects are going on and it also allows you to chase down the clients who are less enthusiastic about paying you and unfortunately that does happen ultimately and this is probably the most important really of the whole thing this allows you to focus on doing what you do best making goods and making services if you like this video and you want to see more like it once again click the like button subscribe to the channel and make sure you hit the notification bell so you know when all of these videos go live and hey if you're curious about all of the business stuff going on make sure you jump into my twitch channel i stream every tuesday thursday and saturday a lot of times it's game streaming but if you want to talk business i am down to talk business once again my name is commander mitchcraft and this has been streamer inc where we look into the day-to-day business of being a content creator i hope you take all of this knowledge with you and go and do what you do best so please go and be creative till next time oh no oh no oh no oh no oh oh no oh no oh no