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Contractor invoicing software for small businesses

I've got a question for you how do you do your invoicing now me personally I have tried everything back in the day I can remember I hand wrote invoices using an invoice pad at one point and then I moved to the computer and I would create invoices in Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word I've tried different invoicing services I even tried Evernote for a short an unhappy period of time but they've all of those systems have left me either looking unprofessional or are not in control of my receivables or just plain confused then I discovered wave oh my goodness stick around Steve dotto here how the heck you doing this fine day at dottotech we make technology easy so you can do more and if there is one technology that I believe needs to be easy or it's accounting I whatever side of the brain is your side that's wired for accounting in those processes mine seems to be a bit faulty it's just never been my strength it's always filled me with all sorts of insecurities and frustration and one of the things I'm best at in the world of accounting is basically procrastinating putting things off I needed to find an accounting package that worked for me and made sense and none of the accounting software out there really did as far as I was concerned anyways I always got confused with each and every one and I will take more responsibility for this than placing blame on the accounting software however having said all of that I started to use a tool called wave wave apps it's a Canadian company and although their accounting systems work for internationally for everybody as far as I can tell at least but everything changed for me when I started to use wave and let me tell you how I got started in wave because I bet it's something that might you might find advantage in I was looking for just produce some invoices I was still using an accountant and I still do use an accountant but I was using an accountant for doing all of my books but I just needed better control of my invoicing my accountant told me that I needed to do a better job of my invoicing actually they insisted on it rather sternly so I was looking for accounting software being cheap I was looking for free accounting software that could create with invoices and that's all I want to do is create invoices and there's lots of different tools out there and lots of different methods some of which you mentioned at the top you can create your own in Microsoft Word now there are invoicing services some software services online services that you can use to create invoices and they all work pretty well and they track your invoices for you and they manage all of your taxes etc and create reports but then I found wave and wave advertised that their account that their invoicing services were free and I thought that sounds fantastic full invoicing free that I can do put out invoices with my logo and that looked professional and I can track them I'm gonna give it a shot and I did and I'm glad I did because I'm gonna show it to you right now you can go to wave apps and sign up for free to use their services and when you sign up they're gonna ask you a few basic questions about the type of business you in just so they can structure things now one thing about wave is they really have a lot of hand-holding they've got online help as soon as you sign up and you go in there's gonna be a little chat bot that's gonna appear in the bottom corner and they're gonna welcome you and you're gonna feel nice and warm and fuzzy from them and they offer you this look what they do they said check out our webinar page the webinar page that they offer gives you some free tutorials and training now if you're thinking about doing more than just invoicing I would definitely take advantage of this because they can go through all of the different services then teach you how to do them properly as you're setting things up this is well worthwhile getting started on the right foot but if you just want to start with the lowest impact and you just want free invoicing stick around I'll show you what you need to do here right now if we take a look at our dashboard here within wave we can see all of the different services they've got I believe it's free until you start using their payroll services so all of your basic balancing your books your invoicing your purchases all of that is available for free we are gonna take a look at getting paid for work basically sending unlimited invoices and estimates I'm gonna take you into the module and show you just the basic setup so you can chew a template you can add your logo you can pick color this is just about branding and making your invoices look professional what's really important is the mechanisms in the background but you can make your invoices look as good as you choose include corporate your logo etc so once you've basically set up those parameters let's take a look all of the main fields you just go through these fields fill them in and the invoice is pretty much ready to go so you can add customers you put in the customer information now it will save all of your customer information in here so you put in the customer name you put in their email address phone number contact names should you need it and this will act as a little bit of a database - for when you return next time and you build that customer again and you've also then got a customer record that you're going to need for other accounting and CRM type purposes it will automatically number your invoices you can put in purchase order numbers it'll create the date and the payment due that's all pretty much as you would expect here's where you really begin customizing things where you start adding items and at this point here if you've taken the tutorial you'll understand how you've got different revenue accounts etc but if you don't you can just start to enter an item and I'm gonna say that this is going to be a mini course I'm selling a mini course let's say to somebody so I create an item and I item description a youtube course we're gonna say we're selling them a youtube course this is for our purposes and for their purposes YouTube course course there we go of course well of course is a course of course of course there we go YouTube's done make it capital good Lord Otto you think this is bad you just seen it when I had to make my own from scratch oh good lord okay quantity imp race okay we're gonna say $99 all right now it's where it gets interesting one of the things you want your invoicing tool to do is to track your taxes so here you can set up all of your different taxes in Canada we have something called st the goods and services tax which is at 5% I think so you set that up and this is a recoverable tax meaning that I can deduct tax that you've paid from this tax that you've collected so this is the beginning of the entire accounting process so when I'm buying things it's gonna track my GST when I'm selling we're gonna track my GST so I can just submit to the government the difference between what I'm purchasing and what I'm selling it works pretty well whether it's or not it's a compound tax and we're ready to go so you can have multiple taxes for instance in some Kant Canadian provinces where provincial sales tax you can layer that on for certain things but you can see it's calculated it right here oh wait a minute what about the currency what currency are we in look down here at the bottom I mean Canadian dollars but you can choose any currency so if I want to bill in US dollars it builds in US Dollars and this is something that I appreciate hugely in Canada is it does the conversion based on the date of the invoice or the receivable so it's then so I can accurately translate into Canadian dollars my US dollar billing which quite often I built my product out in for anybody that does cross-border work this is a golden tool added again for free once you've created all these different elements you can then save the invoice and you can continue I better put a customer just give me a second I'll put a customer in ok I've created me as a customer because I want you to see the invoice how it's sent all right so I've created this invoice for a mini-course it's my very first ever invoice it's in u.s. dollars we will make it in US dollars there we go and I save and continue' now it's set to go and it creates a kind of an audit trail or a draft process where you created it as a draft if you say have somebody that's doing invoicing and somebody else has to approve on your team you can now go in and I can go in and I can check this and I can approve it you can see what its gonna look like right down here this is what the invoice looks like no I didn't do any adding of logos etc but you can see it's a professional-looking invoice which is great I'm gonna prove it you are approved and watch this I love this you can send the invoice directly out of wave accounting not only can you send the invoice they will send it using their mail server or you can use your own email to send the invoice so I can send this from my own personal or my own business gmail address should I choose to send it but let's instead send it from wave you can send a copy to yourself as well so I'll send a copy to myself and you can attach the invoice as a PDF or have it embedded in the email I'm going to say attaches it a PDF because most people like to have that they like to be able to have a downloadable that they can then save or print off for their accounting it's been sent so are some other features that are built in here is you've got the ability to send reminders or remind yourself of the invoice as it becomes due or past due and of course then it's all gonna be tracked here let's just go over in your dashboard if we go to our dashboard we should see we have one invoices there we go this gives you a graphical snapshot and a summary of everything that's happening in your business there I've got one invoice coming to you and of course I don't have any other data in here now wave is a full online full-featured accounting package so I could sync all of the accounts with my bank account it can be synced with with my bank account with my credit card with other financial services and you could also set up a variety of different payment options in it which I'm not going to get into right now because this demo will just get too long but it's got all of those services that are included and once you sign up they will of course be letting you know about the services that they offer once this is all said and done let's go take a look at the invoice and here it is dottotech sent to an invoice I can view it online or I can download the PDF here's the PDF let's open the PDF so you can view it here just in the window it's exactly as we expected it to look there we go I could also view it online in the browser so those are the two options you have for delivery of the invoices and there it is in the browser and if you've enabled any payment option you will be able to at this point here be able to just click here and receive a payment of a credit card payment or other online payment right from within this window we've just scratched the surface of what wave apps will do as I say it's a full-featured accounting package what I love about this is you can start with something like just doing your invoicing which we all need to do very early on in our business career and then you can grow with this app as you need more and more services you can set it up for receivables you can set it up for payables you can set it up for doing all of your bank balances and doing all of your basic accounting and eventually as you grow you can set it up and you can do payroll services you can collect money all of that is built in to wave accounting it's a tool that you can start small for free with look professional be more organized and then it will grow and lets you your business reaches a point that it needs far more sophisticated capabilities wave is still a tool that's gonna work terrifically for you I'm a big fan well I hope you found this video today to be useful I look forward to your comments and suggestions in the YouTube comments below I promise you one thing I read each and every comment even if I don't have time to reply to them all and if you'd be so kind I'd love it if you'd share this video especially with friends of yours who may need to set up invoicing for themselves and while you're at it you click Subscribe and make sure you hit that notification bell so you'll be notified when we upload new videos here at dottotech till next time I'm Steve dotto we have fun storming the castle [Music]